A couple of years ago I had a dream. In my dream I was sent an invitation. The invitation reminded me of a very colorful wedding invitation. It had multicolored flowers on it with gold trim. The words on it said, “You are invited to be a maid’ and signed from God. It was an invitation to work for God. The invitation also said I would have Sundays for a day off.
When I woke up, I was so amazed by my dream. The invitation looked expensive and very pretty. In all my life, I have never seen such a beautiful invitation. It makes sense though because God is my treasure. I long for His peace and presence in my life, and when I don’t feel it, God feels far away.
I was depressed before the dream because I don’t work anymore and felt like I had no purpose because of it. I felt like I wasn’t having any positive effect on anyone because I rarely drive anymore or go places because of anxiety and chronic pain. I didn’t used to be quite this anxious until I got hurt during the pandemic. I couldn’t drive for six months because of pain I was feeling. During that time, I had a protestant Christian counselor that didn’t help me at all. In fact, I think he did more harm than good. But writing is therapeutic for me, and I feel better after I write down my feelings. It is a way I can heal my soul and mind from the damage that counselor did.
I decided to write a blog as my way of serving God and share God’s love. All of my poetry is about God. Thanks for reading.
I don't deserve Him, with the sins I carry, When I feel hate and anger, I hate the way I feel. It's a sin, and when I feel hate, to Jesus I must appeal, to be forgiven from the same old sins. Why can't I change? I ask myself over, and over again. Jesus said hate, is just like murder how will I ever make it, to myself I wonder. So much hate, such a senseless war. So many injustices in this cruel, cruel world. All the cruelty and insults, will they ever end? This isn't God's will, this isn't God's plan.
He radiates power, And when His presence enters a room, worry is something you just can't do. His presence brings peace, His presence brings love, His presence is tranquility. I want to feel His presence again, it's better than seeing a long, lost friend. When I feel His presence, I just want to praise. He is power, He is love, He is peace. That is my God, That is my Savior, That is my Prince of Peace.
I have dealt with physical pain since I was a teenager. I started getting terrible pain in my stomach when I was fifteen years old. I did not know what was causing it. I had a test done at the hospital that consisted of drinking a white, chalky, terrible tasting liquid and getting an x-ray of my stomach. The doctor didn’t find anything wrong with me. Years later, I heard about irritable bowel syndrome, known as IBS, which is what I have.
Years later in my forties, I developed excruciating pain in my thumbs, near my wrist from work. For years the doctors told me I had tendonitis but never did an x-ray. After dealing with that pain for 4 years, I was adamant about getting an x-ray. and it showed arthritis. Then my shoulder started hurting and I had a good doctor then, and she ordered an x-ray. I had arthritis in my shoulder.
I fell down the stairs in 2021 and as a result of that I ended up with a sprained right ankle and a terrible case of sciatica on the left side of my lower back, hip, and leg. It was the worst pain I think I ever had. I had to walk on my sprained ankle because I couldn’t use crutches because I couldn’t put weight on my left leg. I was miserable.
I tried everything; physical therapy, chiropractor, and drugs, but nothing took the pain away completely. I did a lot of praying for healing, but I still deal with pain. I am not mad about it now, but after five months of having really bad sciatica pain I did get mad at God and yelled at him when the pain was so bad. Then I asked to be forgiven because I felt bad. There I was yelling at God, and I don’t even deserve Jesus.
Now I know better than to get mad at God and yell at Him. I take comfort in the fact Jesus understands our pain. When He was whipped and beaten and nailed to the cross it was very painful for Him. He has experienced extreme pain, and He understands how we feel.
Jesus went through everything we have gone through in our lives. Some people have experienced worse things than others. He was homeless for three years. He experienced pain, hunger, depression, stress, anxiety just like everybody else. There is a medical condition that is extremely rare, that people go through when they are under extreme fear or stress where their body sweats blood called, hematidrosis. Jesus sweat blood the night before He was crucified because he was so anxious and felt so much stress.
I watched a video about the Shroud of Turin. It is authentic according to scientists and it is from the year 1 A.D. and the kind of cloth that was made during that time period. It was considered expensive back then and it is a single piece of woven material.
In the video they showed a cap of thorns, not a crown. The cap of thorns was more similar to what a crown looked like back then. It wasn’t just like a ring put on top of the head, the crowns of old covered the entire scalp of a king’s head.
I had a dream about Jesus when I was in my early twenties. In my dream I saw Jesus standing in a place with hewn rock walls with a narrow opening to walk through and torches on the wall. He was standing in the opening, and I heard him moan then blood started running down his head until it covered his entire face and soaked his clothing. The room in my dream reminded me of an underground prison and it also reminded me of when he sweat blood in the Garden of Gethsemane the night he was arrested. Jesus could have bled all over when the soldiers put the cap of thorns on His head, or from extreme stress while he was custody of the Romans.
Jesus was whipped from head to toe on both sides of his body. When He was whipped it tore his flesh right off his body, because the whip had sharp objects attached to the end it. He suffered immensely for us. He sacrificed himself willingly. This should make us all pause and take stock of our own lives.
One of my evangelical friends who lives in a different state had an MRI in August to see if she would be a candidate for back surgery. She has terrible pain in her back and chronic sciatica, along with fibromyalgia. I feel so bad for her because she suffers so much.
After the MRI, the doctor called her and said the MRI showed something. One of the ducts on her pancreas was enlarged so he told her he could not do surgery on her S1 Joint. She was upset. Then she saw her regular doctor who told her she needed to get a CAT scan and to make an appointment with a specialist right away.
She went in for her CAT scan, and that showed multiple very small tumors on her liver and a 14mm tumor on the outer wall of her bladder. When she went in to see the specialist, he said the tumors on her liver were harmless, but he wanted to do surgery right away on her bladder and do a biopsy to test for cancer. She was scared it might be cancer.
The Monday before her surgery on Wednesday I fasted and prayed for her to be healed of her tumor. I had fasted during lent by giving up meat, but I had never done a serious fast for an answer to prayer. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be at first. I think the key to fasting is eating protein for each small meal. I didn’t eat any meat or fish. I had a chik’n veggie burger for breakfast for my big meal, for lunch I had raw almonds and almond milk, then for supper I had pretzels and almond milk which was a big mistake. I think there might be 1 gram of protein in pretzels which isn’t enough to stay with you. By the end of the night, I was extremely tired and felt kind of weak, so I went to bed early.
I prayed the week before her surgery and the week of her surgery. I asked Jesus to heal my friend and make the tumor disappear.
My friend didn’t tell many people about her tumor because she didn’t want to talk about it. She told one person from her church a couple days before her surgery, and they put her on the prayer chain. To my knowledge, I am the only one that fasted. Her husband who is a retired pastor did even fast.
Her surgery on Wednesday was at noon, and I knew they were going use some type of anesthesia for her outpatient surgery. I texted her about 4pm to ask if she was awake and if she was in a lot of pain and I didn’t hear anything back, so I assumed she was sleeping. Then around 5pm she called me and said she had texted me, but I never got the text. She told me the surgeon couldn’t find anything. The tumor had disappeared! It was a miracle!
When I was fifteen years old, I was a rebel. I hung out with the kids who liked to party a lot, and the other kids called us freaks. I was smoking cigarettes, drinking, and doing drugs. I hated school because none of the teachers were nice to me except one, my English teacher. She was the only one who cared about me. This teacher inspired me to write after she introduced the class to poetry. I loved her class, but all my classmate’s made fun of her behind her back. I didn’t like that at all.
I had been overweight as a child, and I was very self-conscious about it. All my family was thin and had dark hair, and then there was me: blonde and overweight. My brother used to tease me and say your adopted because you are fat and blonde. I would run to my mom and ask if I was adopted, and the answer was always no. I am sure my brother got into trouble for saying it.
Fast forward to the summer when I was fifteen, and I decided to go on a diet. I watched how much I ate and rode my bike and exercised. I lost weight, grew my hair longer and got contact lenses.
When I went back to school in the fall, people weren’t sure who I was. Some guessed, and some didn’t know me. I looked different, but I didn’t feel different. I still felt overweight. It was hard to be on a diet all the time, so one day I became bulimic. The reason why is because of an article I had read in a magazine about food. There was an interview with a restaurant critic, and they asked how he could review so many restaurants each day. His answer was if I eat too much I just simply purge. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s when you make yourself throw up after eating, and it is an eating disorder.
At first, I thought being bulimic was great. I thought I could eat whatever I wanted to and wouldn’t gain weight. But it wasn’t the case. That was because I would skip breakfast and lunch. I would starve myself all day at school then eat when I got home.
Being bulimic was like an addiction. I would eat, then throw up meals at home. I never did it when I was away from home. It was a vicious cycle, and I couldn’t stop. At first, I didn’t even try to stop but later on in my eating disorder I really wished it would end. After I started praying to God at age seventeen, I asked Him to heal me of bulimia. I begged and pleaded, and I didn’t stop praying. I felt so guilty because there were people starving to death in other countries and I was wasting food by eating and making myself throw up. I didn’t even know I had been healed in 1984 when I saw a vision.
During the time of my vision, I had been going to a technical college for cooking. The reason I chose cooking is because I love to cook. Another reason I chose it was because I thought I would always have a job because everyone needs to eat.
My vision happened as I was walking through a shopping mall. I glanced at a guy who worked at a photo shop who was behind the counter looking out the window and my eyes met his. All of the sudden I couldn’t see him anymore. All I could see was blue and a pair of eyes. I kept walking and didn’t really think about it at the time. The vision reminded me of a dream I had
When I was eighteen, I had a dream about being at a what reminded me of a high school or grade school office with yellow walls. There was a man there who I thought was a famous rock musician but couldn’t see his face. Suddenly in the dream he said to me, “you don’t like my music!” Then he shot me in the head, and everything turned black, then I everything turned gold and I saw a pair of golden eyes. In my dream I died, and I saw what I believe were God’s eyes while I was dreaming. The eyes I saw in my vision looked just like my dream, but the color was blue.
It took me a while to realize I didn’t have bulimia anymore. One day about a week later I realized I wasn’t making myself throw up after I ate. I was also eating three meals a day and not snacking, and I stayed the same weight for years. Once I was older in my late fifties, I did put on some weight. I have had no desire to become bulimic again and never have since I was healed.
At the time I had been healed I had been working at a shopping mall at a frozen yogurt shop while going to cooking school and had noticed the man at the photo shop. I had noticed him before because I thought he was really handsome. I found out his name was Matthew. The name Matthew means gift of God. God had given me a gift because He healed me of bulimia.
When I was a little kid, my family went to the catholic church every Saturday night. We always sat in the front of the church three rows back on the left side. That was our spot. I didn’t like sitting up front because I was very shy. I must have been about four years old when the priest got mad in church. I never forgot it either, still to this day I can see the look of rage on his face. Some kid was making noise in church, and the priest came down and was standing in front of us, and suddenly yelled, “Children are to be seen and not heard!” It scared to me to death, and I was afraid of him after that happened. Thank God my parents didn’t make a big deal about my first communion.
Maybe the reason why I ignored God throughout my younger years had something to do with that priest. I had no concept of God, and I am not sure why. I never prayed or talked to God. My mom told me when I was in first or second grade, I was asked to say grace before a meal I started out with “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America” then everyone laughed.
Learning to pray has been a process for me. I remember being in catechism with the nuns during church summer school for a week we had to memorize the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary and the Glory Be prayers. I didn’t know what I was saying, I was just repeating the words without any meaning behind them. They never explained why we had to pray or what they meant. we just had to memorize the prayers. I really wish someone would have explained what the prayers meant.
One good thing about summer school with the nuns was I learned about heaven. I think that is the only thing I learned. One of my classmates asked one of the nicer nuns if she could see Elvis in heaven and the nun said, yes and you can see anyone in heaven. I thought heaven sounded nice. As a teenager I started reading books about near-death experiences. In high school I remember reading Raymond Moody’s Life After Life book, and I found it fascinating. One book called My Glimpse of Eternity written by Betty Maltz who was clinically dead for 30 minutes was a good one. In the book she described heaven like the book of Revelation describes heaven.
There is life after death, and we all make the choice if we are going to heaven or hell. If you accept Jesus as your savior, ask to be forgiven you are on your way to heaven. Like God told Moses and the Israelites, “I put before you a choice between life and death, between a blessing and a curse, chose life.” And Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
MKR Prodigal Daughter Christian Perspectives from a Prodigal 