You don't even know how long it took me to find on my computer... ugh.
I wrote this to get into SEEP, which I didn't, but it wasn't because this wasn't a really well written compelling testimony.
Your testimony is the story of your journey into being a follower of Christ, as far as I've always understood, and all the moment that have shaped the overall outcome. The cool part about being a follower of Christ is that every year, every month, even every daythat you choose to say 'yes' again to His adds to your story; a physical healing, an emotional turmoil obliterated by the knowledge of being loved by God, or just continuing the pursuit of knowing Him when life is boring and we don't htink we're feeling anothing, it all becomes part of your story. And we all love good stories. It would be pretty hard to have any kid of relationship with anyone if knowing and being a part of each other's stories wasn't a part. We love when people care about out stories and it turns out that the creator of the ENTIRETY of absolutely EVERYTHING loves our story. That fact alone makes me want to know God, and His story.
It was less than a year ago that I was writing my testimony out for my first application to FSM; it's so interesting and wonderful that I'm in that place again, even though, unexpected; and that this time it's completely different at the end.
My mom was saved late one night through the 700 Club in 1986, and began a journey I envy still of wholeheartedly seaching out the knowledge of the Father's heart. My parents met at a spirit-filled Catholic prayer group that my mom and my grandmother (my dad's mom) were both part of. My parents got married in 1987 and my story starts when I was born to these two recently born again Catholic kids in early 1989.
The whole of my childhood, if I can say anything at all about my parents, is that no matter whether is was the right decision or not in the long run, they wanted to do what was right in God's eyes in reguards to raising their children; and they wanted us kids to know that God would always be the center of our family. My personal walk with the Lord starts probably when I was around six years old; my brother and I, reading Hinds Feet On High Places with my mom before bed. My mom asked me if I wanted to change like Much-Afraid, and ask the Kind King (Jesus) into my heart. I still remember the moment, and knowing that I really did.
We attended a Vineyard church in Norther Kentucky from the time I was almost two years old until I was twelve. During that time of my life I learned so much about have a heart for serving, through watching my parents' involvement at the Vineyard and just the overall servant's heart that was displayed throughout the body. Also, even though I was very young, I know that (even though it was immature at the time) my heart was beginning to be molded into a heart for worship, just by the way that the Vineyard approaches worship and touching the father's heart.
I was homeschooled thoughout my elementary school years, and like many good homeschooled kids, I lived in a bubble, that both helped and hurt my overall view of the world. I was a quirky [/homeschool] kid that loved nineteenth centurey literature I didn't understand, wore clothes that my neighbors told me were dorky, and had no concept that things like pokemon cards and the Spice Girls existed. While I had no idea, I would've had a hard time fitting into an average fifth grade class in any given public elementary school. And even though, sometimes, kids like this merely become products of their environments until they get to be old enough to realize they have a choice and rebel (Or, they become the Duggars off 16 kids and counting,) I have confidence in that during that time my heart was being prepared to learn to yearn for the Lord.
When I was twelve, my family left our church, and we were in that place of church limbo for a year and a half or so. That shift probably changed more in my heart than even I realized for years. It was around this same time that I began attending school at a very small Christian school for the 7th & 8th grades. The school was part of a church called Heritage Fellowship, which (at the time) was an Assembly of God church, also where my family ended up becoming a part of by the time I was in the 8th grade.The church, and therefore most of the chapel services we went to during school, were fairly charismatic, spirit-filled, and operating in the prophetic. A few times in those chapel services I can definitely point to as major 'moments' in my spiritual life. And just being exposed to it during that point in my life has produced fruit that I'm just beginning to really understand just now in this season of my life.
Specifically, one chapel service late in my eighth grade year made a major impact. It was a week that Brian Gibb, the youth pastor of the church, was supposed to be teaching. I remember the day so well becuase of the fact that this weird thing happened and he decided that he was feeling too much of the spirit to actually ever give his talk, and really just wanted to pray for us. Turns out, that really isn't that "weird"; especially after being a part of FSM, and having teachers like Allen Hood and Corey Russell, and even that one class on November 11th with Wes Hall (but that's another subject for later on), sometimes things loike that just happen. Brian prayed for me, for what seemed like a very long time, in tongues. I remember just thinking how I hoped that no one was behind me if I went to down, when Brian finally spoke words to me in english: he told me that the Lord was saying He was setting me apart, and that I would spend my life working in the ministry, and that somehow I would use my life experiences to help people.
I was 14, so I had very little life experiences at the time. But I always have been a list-making life planner and decided that the word MUST mean that I was supposed to be a youth pastor, and that became my life goal.
When August of 2003 rolled around I was excited to go back and start high school. I had done a bible study over the summer with a really intense kid from my class over the summer and we had plans to change the whole school and get everyone fired up for the Lord (side note: that boy has done 3 YWAM dts's, helped start a prayer room on our college campus, and now is involved in IWT and the Call 2 All movement; he's still pretty intense) He and I were going to change the school. That is until I came to school, into a class of 14 kids, none of the girls I'd been friends with came back for ninth grade, and on the first day of my amazing high school career of change the world I sat and ate my lunch alone in the corner of a small cafeteria where I knew everyone.
In the next two weeks, the only two girls in my class other than myselfmade it very clear they were not going to be my friends. They made fun of my hair and clothes any chance they got, and mocked how I talked or even how I didn't talk. I left school early almost every one of those ten days with anxiety induced migraines. My parents decided that it wasn't worth it, and made me switch to the public school near my house. I went from a class of 14 kids to 525 in a matter of a day.
It's really hard to explain what happened next without going into a million little details. I closed up, I quit talking to almost everyone, including God. I put on an "I'm doing okay" face with I went to youth group, even though I wasn't. I got angry for awhile, until the anger hurt enough to just turn into sadness. And I was sad for probably the next six years. I had very few good friends, or any friends at all over the course of high school, and being isolated and alone became the norm. Even though I never consciously said it, I was done with a personal relationship with God. Those kinds of people weren't worth my time. All through high school I adopted a spirit of intellectualism, and thrived in being an elitist. I was guarded and protective of who I talk to, and more often then not people thought I was much meaner than I actually was. But that was fine with me, because I was too afraid of being made fun of, that if I had to be mean to not be vunerable then so be it. During this time was when I really started experiences sign of severe depression and anxiety issues; depression though, for high school students, isn't exactly an abnormal thing, so I didn't really think it was worth bothering anyone about. I thought that eveyrone was like how I was, and even if they weren't, I was being dramatic and selfish if I tried to act like I was worse off than anyone else. But then my grades began suffering, I would tune out, going through the motions of the school day, but not turning in work or putting forth effort for weeks at a time. Teachers usually just got angry with me, which made me worse, and my nervous tendicies of shutting down more intense. Generally they gave up on me, and thought I was lazy. It got to be the worst when I was a senior in high school, and although I was in AP and honors' classes, I barely even graduated.
My parents, and a few teachers who hadn't lost all hope in me, kept telling me that college would be better. I was suited for college. I mean, after all, I loved learning, I was a gifted writer and thrived in more intellectually stimulating environments. The only problem was that my grades in high school were disappointing at best, and my idea had been to go through an internship at a local church and become a youth pastor so I slacked off any type of college prep. My only choice was to go to the state school that was about 20 minutes from where I lived. Everything, though, seemed to be working out though. I was happy to start school; I enjoyed my first semester classes, I got to see my friends everyday, I liked my job that I had just started at a coffee shop and realized that I was pretty good at being a barista. Things seems to be going my way for the first time in a long time. Even though I still dealt with poor sleeping habits, minor anxiety attacks if I was alone too long, the tendincy of binge eating, and digestive issues because of my eating habits, I considered myself on the right track; at least my grades were better and I was having fun.
Second semester of my freshman year at NKU started off okay, until my anxiety attacks started to become more and more frequent, and I started feeling overwhelmed in school. I maintained decent grades in a few of my classes, but started to suffer immensely in others. After failing two classes that spring, I worked three jobs over the summer, mainly to distract myself at something I was good at: working.
I worked a coffee shop during the week, shelved books a library a few nights a week, and a fast food restaurant on weekend mornings. I liked working, people I worked with liked working with me, and generally it was easier to deal with coworkers and customers than it was to deal with friends and family members. When I was at work, even if I wasn't really friends with my coworkers, they talked to me and were nice to me, which wasn't something I could say about my friends. Though I told everyone I was doing fine, I knew deep down that I was actually worse off than I had been senior year of high school, which was when I had counselors at school constantly checking up on me to see if I wanted to kill myself. By the time I started my third sememster in the fall I was in terrible shape emotionally. I went to only two or three classes before I felt overwhelmed and quit going all together.
The only thing was about quitting school was that I didn't want anyone to know. I hid it from even my closest friends, and during the hours that I was supposed to be at school I would just take drives and contemplate the point of living at all. I listened to sad music and told no one about what I was going through. I came home and slept, I went to work and yelled at my coworkers at nothing. I had three major anxiety attacks at the coffee shop that rendered me useless and sent home in tears over literally nothing. I had pulled off the charade of pretending to go to school for a month, when the school caught on and sent my parents back a check for $2500 for a partial refund of my tuition. Luckily (or so I thought) I was the one who got the mail the day that it came. I hid it in a box in my room; everything had gotten more out of hand than I intended it ever to. The guilt started getting to me and couldn't even sleep at night. By mid October my mom called the school to ask a question about something, I can't even remember what, when they delivered the news of "Hannah isn't a student at Northern Kentucky University anymore". My parents sat me down and told me they knew I wasn't going to school, and they weren't even angry, they knew what I struggled with and feared what keeping the secret was doing to me. I fell on the ground weeping, and this is when it was decided that maybe I should go see a psycologist about the thoughts I was having and what I was doing to myself.
I started seeing a physician and a counselor at a local church that my mom worked in their day care, who both agreed after counseling sessions and several blood tests that I had moderate to severe depression, caused my family history and a seretonin imbalance, and minor anxiety and OCD. I started taking medication and decided that I would take the next six months or so off of school and get back on some sort of track. Four or five months later I decided I wanted to try to take some classes at a community college to make up for the ones that I had failed or not taken the previous sememsters to get me back on track and go back to school. This seemed like the most logical next step, but deep down I knew that I didn't want to go back school. I knew myself, I knew that I hated it, and I knew that no amount of talking about why I was sad or medicine that just made me feel numb would make me want to be living the life I was living. This is when I thought this thought that I know now wasn't just me daydreaming, but the Lord speaking into my life, that maybe I should go back to that word that Brian Gibb gave me when I was 14 and seek the Lord. Maybe I was supposed to be taking time to seek the Lord. When I told my parents that, they agreed that if I wanted to take a season to go to a ministry school or do some sort of internship at a church they would pay for it.
A few years before my friend Jane had moved to Kansas City, not to be a part of IHOP, just to school here; though, her decision to come was heavily influenced by the fact that her parents helped start the Cincinnati House of Prayer and she wanted to be close to IHOP. I had visited her a few times, and even thought briefly about doing the One Thing internship when I was first graduating high school, but I didn't really want to give up that much freedom. But the fact that Jane was here, and that IHOP had a bible school that wouldn't involve quite as much sacrifice of my personal life as an internship would seemed inviting.
I decided to attend FSM last fall, and moved to Kansas City in August 2009 to do so.
I thought that I was doing what the Lord was saying for me to do, I thought I'd prayed about it, and I thought I had gotten a clear answer about what I was doing. I knew that I was supposed to be at IHOP, but that was all I knew. My mom had told me over and over that I would come out here and never want to come home, I would just fall in love with the Lord and the movement and just never want to leave. After about a month of living in Kansas City, I thought I'd be lucky if I came back in the spring.
It wasn't that I didn't like it, I did, or I wanted to be liking it more than I actually was. But the truth of the matter was, I was getting migraines worse than I had for years, leaving me in bed for days at a time, causing me to fall behind in school. The prayer room made me nervous and I skipped out on my prayer room hours early as often as I could. I spent more time alone than I had in years, and old symptoms were appearing that I hadn't dealt with for a year. Even though I was no longer on my medication, I thought about how maybe I needed to be all the time.
I knew I needed joy. I craved it, and I just wasn't finding it. I mentioned this want for joy to a fellow classmate one day, and she just said maybe I needed just to pray that God would show me how to be alone and not be sad. Now that makes a lot more sense, but at the time it just made me angry. And I just kept praying for something to help me feel some joy. I just kept asking for joy; one night I was just completely unable to sleep, so I drove up to the prayer room, during maybe Clay Edwards' set I don't remember, but there was just something about the singers on the team that just made me happy, one person in particular. The way they sang just brought joy to my heart. I took this as a little sign that God was going to be taking care of me.
Though, meanwhile, things weren't getting better, if anything they were getting worse. I had several melt-downs and anxiety attacks that I didn't tell anyone about, October just became a very long month. In the beginning of Novenber I wasn't feeling good about anything, I was frustrated with myself and with God. I was in the prayer room one night, it was about one thirty am, I couldn't sleep. I was trying to sort through things when suddenly a thought came into my head: "Maybe I should do FIre in the Night"
This was weird, I was pretty much adamently against doing an internship, I had been from the beginning. I was confused even within myself. The next night, before I had even gotten a chance to tell her I was thinking about it, Renae and I were getting coffee and she looked at me and very apprehensively said "I know your don't want to, but I just feel like God wants you to an internship."
What she didn't know was that I'd just asked my advisor about what I should do about trasfering in January earlier that day.
The day before I had gone to the November student chapel, where Mai shared her testimony of being set free of self-hatred and depression; she talked about how she had even had health problems that were caused by an eating disorder that were directly connected to her depression issues, and how all of it had been healed with this realization of the Fathers' love for her. I mean, I thought that was wonderful, and I got prayer, but, I wasn't really feeling anything strong in that area, especially because I had so many other things in my mind. When I look back I think that if I had really understood what was happening, maybe I would've felt differently, but at the same time, I know that God had a plan for me.
A week or so later when November 11th came along, and the spirit fell during Wes's class that famous morning, I wasn't feeling well. I came to class, and while I wasn't offended by the manifesting or anything, I'd seen things like that before just not at IHOP, I was grouchy and really just annoyed by it all. I ended up leaving and going home to take a nap by ten thirty or eleven in the morning. Little did I know until the next day all that happened and the fact that my classmates remained at FSM for upwards of ten or eleven hours. I was getting emails left and right from people at home that I was half heartedly responding to, trying to sound eager and excited about whatever it was that was going on, but the honest thing was, I didn't feel well and really wasn't around to really know.
By this point I was (even though I wouldn't have called it that at the time) pretty angry with God. Here I was, with a history of what every else seemed to be getting healed of, going up to every alter call, coming to the awakening services five or six days a week, and I was feeling nothing. Sure one day I got the giggles, another day a little bit of head jerking, a few tears maybe, but nothing that really made me feel like my life had changed. No memories were gone, and the feelings were still there.
I went home to CIncinnati in the middle of December, as soon as school was officially let out for the semester. Nothing about had really changed that much from the last time I'd been home, no one noticed any great difference in me. A few people were impressed that I was willing to change my schedule to the nightwatch for a time, but most people didn't seem to even remember what I was doing out here. They all just knew I was in Kansas City, and they didn't really understand whatever else I was doing, oh some bible school. I know that there should've been more change. But at the time, I was just happy that I made it through, and that no one really knew how much I'd fallen into issues everyone thought were corrected.
When it was time to come back at the first of the year, I was more nervous than I'd ever been for anything in my life. Suddenly the realization that I was turning my life over to the internship was a lot more real than it had ever been. But, I just kept telling myself, I have a car, I know my way around Kansas City; even if I don't have anyone I get to close with in the internship, at least I'll have that little bit of freedom to go and hang out with the friends I have in the area, and just the ability to escape a little. The sad thing about that being my only means of comfort was because of what happened the night before I moved in. I was running some of my things back and forth from my friends house to mine, and my car, which had sat in the 8 inches of snow that had fallen in the weeks since I'd left, was sounding a little rough. I don't know what happened, I don't know much about cars, but either way at one in the morning the day that FITN started, there I was, crying in the passenger seat of my roommate's car on the side of the road on some shady exit of north 71, waiting for the tow truck to arrive. My only means of escape was dead at the side of the road, an oil leak or something, and a burned up engine.
The next few days were a blur, a mostly wet blur. My belongings were in a million different boxes and suitcases, poorly packed (considering I had planned on using my car as a means of storage) and thrown together. I had a bad cough, the weather was bad, and here I was in this internship, with no way of getting out (literally, even when I had free time). The first few weeks were like that, I was frustrated and anxious. But my roommates were nice, and soon enough I became decent friends with my roommate Sarah particularly. We had a few things in common that made us quick friends, but in general were terribly different. It was nice though, because I was comfortable around her, and even in the beginning of FITN I knew that even if I got nothing else out of the internship, at least I got a good friend.
It was in the beginning of February that I realized why I did the internship at all. It was one night at dinner, a Thursday night, that has become fairly famous as least in the circle of the interns and core leaders who got to experience it. I don't really know how it all started, but there was a complete outpouring of the holy spirit in the cafeteria at 11:30pm right before our burn team meeting for the night. People were laughing and shaking, rolling around on the floor, really just praising the Lord. I wasn't one of the people who got hit in the cafeteria, I was busy doing something on my laptop and was really just was amazed at what was happening, little did I know how much of what was happening was for me. When we went into burn team everyone was still "shakin' and bakin'" and one of the leaders who was leading the meeting for the night decided that we should lay hands on people and pray for people who needed healing, and Sarah had a blockage in her ear that had been bothering her for the past few weeks. A few of us laid hands on her, none of us were really laughing or anything, and then something just came on us. It's one of those things that I can't really ever figure out how to explain, but what I can say is that I felt like a wind came that could've knocked me over that wasn't even there, and I just started laughing and praying in the spirit. After a few minutes of this Sarah started jumping up and down, cheering that her ear opened up, and it felt fine.
We went into the prayer room right after this, and I have to say, I've never seen anything like it in the prayer room. It was like an awakening meeting for literally six hours straight, people getting healed of physical burndens, and really just a lot of people on the floor laughing their hearts out because they suddenly knew that the Lord loved them. The point of the night that I remember the best, and can pretty much pin point as my moment of delieverance was when no one was even praying for me, I was just sitting on the floor, laughing so hard I was crying and all of a sudden a voice rose up within me that just simply said "You are loved, and you don't have to worry about anything ever again. You don't have to be nervous ever again. You will be loved forever and you don't have to worry about anything." It was in such a loud voice in my heart that it just came out of my mouth: "I don't have to worry about anything, I'll be loved forever, I never have to be anxious ever again!" Someone heard me say this and came over and just prophesied over me, everything that I needed to hear at the moment, and I just laid on the floor with a huge smile on my face and a weight lifted off my chest.
The rest of Fire in the Night has just been time after time of God reaffirming that I am in the right place and that He is healing me, healing my heart, and making me brand new. I was talking to someone the other day about what I've gotten out of this internship, and all I can say is that I've learned to pretty easy concepts that have drastically changed my life. It's that obeying God is the right thing to do even if you don't want to, He's taking you in the right direction; and that God doesn't just love me, but He really, really likes me. God is taking me in the right direction and He just wants to be with me, and wants me to want to be with Him.
I feel like I'm more ready to be a part of FSM than I ever was before, but that I don't regret the way things worked out at all. I'm excited to be a part of the class again that got to experience the beginning of this Awakening that we're still getting to enjoy, and more than anything I'm just so excited to leard about God. Learn about what He thinks of me, what He's going to do, how He works in my classmates lives and just how he's moving in the IHOP community. I feel like God has placed me here for right now, to have felt the freedom and love that I feel now, and to serve Him rightly during this season of my life as an intercessor in this Prayer House. I'm excited to find out what other stories will become a part of my testimony in the coming seasons.
