Give Yourself Permission

Sakura Blossoms
Doi Ang Khang, Thailand
January 10, 2010

In returning and rest you shall be saved;
In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.

- Isaiah 30:15

Give yourself permission.

This is one of the important keys to healing and transformation that we have been dealing with at the Elijah House School of Prayer Ministry.

As we entered into the second week of the video school, I sensed a gentle stirring in my heart. The topics touch on the deeper issues of the spirit, issues not often openly or willingly talked about.

Teachers trained in their respective areas of expertise and experience taught about about pre-natal issues, captive spirit, sexual and emotional abuse, shame, generational sins, care and feeding of the spirit, and grieving losses.

Other topics covered these past two days were on depression, burnout, overcoming fears, and the resurrection side of healing.

The rest of this week the school will teach on homosexuality, sexual addictions, false refuges, spiritual adultery, healthy or unhealthy soul ties, corporate living in the Body of Christ, and rightly bearing spiritual burdens.

This school really is a major turning point in my life.

I know I'm coming out of my season of grief, but the lessons helped open up my understanding about what I went through.

Death comes in many forms, not only when a loved one passes away.

The pain of loss is also real in the death of our hopes, dreams, and expectations... what could have been, what should have been.

We need to give ourselves permission to mourn the loss of opportunities, shattered innocence, broken trust, a betrayal, a failed friendship.

Give yourself permission to grieve by embracing the fireball of the loss.

When a painful event strikes it is possible to stay stuck in denial, to stuff the emotions deep within... or abort the healing process by moving out of the mourning stage too soon...

One can also overstay, prolonging grief even when the time has come to move on.

A wrong response to loss hardens the heart, builds a protective wall around it, and stunts growth, hindering us from relating to God and others in a healthy and meaningful way.


God is always calling us to go up higher...but there are no pat and easy answers.


We just need to be willing to go through the process. Giving ourselves the freedom to be vulnerable, to be honest, to admit the pain of loss. When we do that the heart is cleansed and prepared for the next level where God wants to take us.

Grieving becomes a redemptive and creative experience, not something to be dreaded or avoided.

The day comes when the sorrow turns to joy, and the mourning turns to dancing...because we are never alone in our grief. Our God comes alongside us to comfort and strengthen us in our pain.


Gloria Roberts' teaching on the dark night of the soul was an eye opener.

St. John of the Cross describes this as a time of spiritual dryness where God seems distant, an experience that God allows to wean us from relying on the religious experiences that we've been so used to.

We need to be brought into a place of deeper understanding of who God really is...the unsearchable, unfathomable things of His heart.

God is so much greater than our experiences!

His goal is to grow the mature fruit in us... but we can't bear fruit unless we abide in the resurrection life of Jesus.

The resurrection side of healing is the other part of salvation. The cross is only one side of it... the rising up to new life is an essential part of our healing as well.

Jesus died on the cross and was buried... but He did not remain there. He rose victorious from the grave. He conquered death that we may live forevermore.

And so God seeks to mentor us into embracing new thought patterns, that we may know that when we put off the rags of our slavery, it doesn't end there... we are to put on the robes of sonship.

The spirit of despair is to be replaced by the garment of praise...

a crown of beauty instead of ashes...

take off the victim mentality, and become a victor!


These days of gaining new insights are extremely important to me. I know God's equipping me for the next stage of this sacred journey I'm on.

Let the mind be a servant of the heart, Mark Sandford exhorts.

Many in the world today are dying because culture and learning institutions have trained us to separate our hearts from our minds.

But God never designed us that way. His intention is for the mind to listen to the heart, because the heart was created to be the wellspring of life!

These are indeed the days of Elijah... and incredible things are happening. All over the world there is a hunger among God's people to recover and call forth to life the intuitive function of our spirits, the God given ability to think with the heart.

For too long, God our Father has been grieved by people living out of their souls and a dwarfed sense of destiny... but now the time has come for our spirits to rise up and take the lead.

There are those who will find this hard to understand... they may even be inclined to laugh at it.

But these days at Elijah House I am seriously asking God to renew my mind and to rebuild the broken places of my life. May He feed and energize my spirit, for spiritual things can only be spiritually discerned.

The carnal mind can never understand.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,

and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
... [and] God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise;
God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

- 1 Corinthians 1:25

Do you sense the urgency of the times?

Be encouraged... our pains and our sorrows are not in vain. Everything has happened for a purpose, that what was broken may be made whole.

We need not stay stuck in our woundedness. The provisions have been made for our healing.

Tears welled up in my eyes during one teaching session when I realized that God allows brokenness in our lives to restore to us a sense of worth, and cleanse our hearts of pride and self-sufficiency.

On the other hand, Satan, the enemy, takes delight in stealing from us, killing our hopes, destroying what is precious to us... he wants to break us with the aim of crushing us completely.

We need to break agreement with the lies of the enemy! Let us move out of the camp of lies and walk into the camp of truth where there is true freedom!

This is a new season! God is pouring His spirit, and equipping His endtime army with new strategies, new weapons...

for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal
but mighty in God for pulling strongholds....

- 2 Corinthians 10:4

We are called to invest our lives in the eternal kingdom that can never be shaken!

Precious resources of time, money and effort are never invested in vain when kingdom seeds are being planted in the willing hearts of men and women.

There will surely be a harvest of kingdom fruit in the days to come.

Today, when you hear His voice, harden not your hearts....