RUN AWAY CHILD(God's grace)

 A few years ago, I wanted to run away. To run away from all the hurt and pain I had experienced and because every corner of my house reminded me of sleepless nights of agonizing pain and every street of Kigali led to that hospital I drove to for 6 months going for my chemotherapy session. I just wanted to run away from all that because I thought it was the answer to my healing. What people didn’t know was that as my body healed, my emotional wound grew wide and wide spreading all over my body. The nights I spent crying from pain, I then spent them feeling scared for my future. What was life after a near death experience?

I wanted to run away to another country where everything was new, where I could finally create a new story for myself. I wanted to be in a place where nobody knew my past but this is one of the many discoveries about myself I recently came to understand. The reason to my desire to seek refuge in another space (country) was obvious all along. From that point on every decision I made was out of fear, fear of not filling this void of emptiness in my heart, fear of caring this pain and hurt with me to all the corners of the world, “to my new world”. A year later after multiple failed attempts to move away, I receive Jesus in my life and everything just took a 360 in my life.

Amidst all the chaos, I learned a big lesson that no man nor place on this earth could ever heal a wounded heart nor fill an empty void. Neither man nor place could ever change one’s story but only in Christ we find refuge and a new beginning, my void to seek refuge was filled with the hunger to seek God more and my heart still burns with that desire. See, you can seek refuge in the world but that shelter last hours if not minutes, you will feel a sense of peace but that will only be temporary. But only in Christ we can experience an eternal sense of peace. Christ healed my wounds and made me brave by giving me strength to tell of his goodness boldly. Today I use my pain that I wanted to run away from to restore hope and bring people to God. It’s funny how when you encourage people some how you feel encouraged too. I accept that my story is God vessel to touch his people and I am grateful I was chosen by God to be used today.  I understand why gold has to first pass through fire to shine. I have embraced that God had to let me go through pain and suffering so that I become who I am today. Imagine if I could have actually moved away and lived an ordinary life away from God’s destiny for me, I promise you I wouldn’t be as happy as I am today. Nukuri, I look back and I can sense the misery I would be living in. Please listen and accept God’s plan for you, it’s beautiful. Because I surrendered to God, which was and still is my biggest challenge (So, pray for me shaJ) I now try to live my life according to his will and not mine, even though I sometimes fail God with my human stubbornness of disobedience (Higiness) I know I have received forgiving grace and that God’s will is ten times if not a hundred times better than mine. Brethren, allow him to use you, I promise you, it’s hard at first but it’s worth the try.

As humans, we want the mediocre lifestyle with all the shinny things in life but that’s not God’s plan for us. God wants us to live a great and fulfilling life that gives him honor and praise. To God be the glory, great things he has done for me

Are you blocking your blessings?

We may wonder, how does one block their blessings yet they don’t know what they are. The answer is, nobody knows how God is going to bless them but the word of God tells us that, he (God) alone knows the plans he has for you, plans to bring you good and not harm. Isn’t that reassuring enough? But somewhere between knowing what’s wrong and right, we loose ourselves and we start off by bringing ourselves down which later on brings us harm. We attract and carry a weight that God lifted off our shoulders, even though most Christians have surrendered their heavy weights, we sometimes find ourselves picking it right back.

Now back to our blessings. How do we block our own blessings? By, speaking death into our lives.

    “The tongue has the power of life and death,

        And those who love it will eat its fruit.” Proverbs 18:22

The challenging part is that, most of us (myself included) speak death into our lives without realizing we are doing so because we have made such a big part of our lives and a very casual conversation in our daily lives, for example,

A friend: Hey Karen, how is everything at school going?

Karen: Girlll, am definitely failing one class this semester. I can feel it already.

A friend: Really? What went wrong?

Karen: Umm I don’t really know per say but I just feel like I’ll fail.

See what Karen just did there?

And so, it’s in this way we speak death into our lives and find that things aren’t working in our favor and we go on to nagging and depressing over our failures not even stopping for a while and actually thinking about how we might have initiated/caused it. Most of the time  we speak death into their future because there’s a sense of not deserving which is a lie we are told by the devil. Thing about it this way, why would the devil whisper words of encouragement to you and so if it’s negative it’s definitely from the devil right? But as Christian who have learned and understood the spiritual life and how we have to walk by the world of God, you need you have to CUT IT. If the devil’s lies are starting to sound convincing in your life, you have to revisit your relationship with God.

Let’s not limit God; speaking death into our lives limits God’s work in our lives because God cannot manifest himself in a low faith/spiritual life. We serve a faithful God; he is able and ready to give us beyond and above all what we could ever ask for. Change your mindset and let your faith bring you peace in knowing your dreams, ambitions are in great hands. The great hands of our master and creator.

This is my testimony

Well, this is the part where I explain to you all how my Christian journey begun. I started going into the Lord’s house because I was emptied by the burdens of being self-reliant. I relied on myself to get that university application etc. and so when everything came crushing down in front of me, I thought I’d done something wrong in terms of the process required to get it. Little did I know what was called “God’s plan”? I needed this one thing so bad and  though my relationship with God wasn’t at its best I had this crazy idea of jumping the part where I had to seek the kingdom of God and the rest shall be added unto me. So my prayer life accelerate, 3am prayers, fasting, desperate prayers, I stop going out, partying, basically everything I knew pleased God, I did. So after all that, clearly I didn’t get what I was begging for but I got something  bigger and greater.  It led me to who I am today.

Even though I was pretty devastated, pity parties were thrown eh, it was basically lit up in my room, where I closed myself and sobbed every night. But I knew I had to dig up some courage to keep going, to move on to something (easier said than done,i know). A few months later I got back on my horse called life and kept riding to some sort of purpose. Meanwhile of course round 2, 3 and 4 of that pity party resumed because as much as i pretended to act like I was made of steel, I wasn’t. It’s okay to fall into discouragement as long as you don’t stay there. After a couple of figuring out what my purpose was, I started serving in church and that brought a lot of clarity and deep Salvation to myself. I opened my heart and God healed it, he showed me with great love and peace that I had never experienced before and that’s when I realized that seeking his kingdom is what I wanted, since then it’s not been easy but I’ve given him full control. I have never looked back. 

So am here to testify that, they will be dark seasons in your life but the good news is that they won’t leave you with a cough or flue but with strength, faith and Freedom. xoxo

Saved by perfect Grace

Being a christian and being saved, are two different things. Being saved is acknowledging the presence of God’s grace in your life and accepting it to take full charge, to changing you and to making you a better person, hence being saved by it. Few years ago, i experience the grace of God but didn’t surrender to it completely but instead i took it for granted and pretended it was normal, but it wasn’t, being saved by God’s grace is a big deal. And so after everything else failed, i went back to the fountain and went to seek God’s grace again and it’s in that time where it flooded my heart and filled me up with hunger and thirst to drink more and more from the fountain of perfect Grace. Since then i have never left and it does not make me a perfect person, it just makes me a deserving person through accepting to receive forgiveness through accepting and acknowledging my wrongs and letting him make them right through his mercy and love.

I made a decision to be completed by this amazing grace and also a sign representing the “”no turning back” point in my life. i had been set apart and i was not about to go back from where i came from. 2 weeks ago i accepted my commitment through getting baptized, of course getting baptized doesn’t make us saints or free us from sin but through the act, i buried my old self and accepted to be completely changed and made new by God’s grace which will leave in me through all the days of my life. I live as a reflection of how living in God’s way brings peace and stability of a high level into your life. Since i got saved a lot has changed, not in a physical way specifically but most importantly in a spiritual way( sense of understanding and all). These are the few advantages i can be able to thing about right now, but of course we all experience the Grace of God differently. But one thing in common with everyone who has accepted the grace in their life is experiencing the unending sense of belonging and being loved, which brings out the better version of ourselves. Contrary to being of the world, which brings a lot of frustrations and i am talking from first hand experience. I use to be the most frustrated person, and by the smallest thing, it was so bad, loosing my pen cover would drive every nerve in my body crazy. And of course frustration leads to anger which isn’t the prettiest of looks. But i realized that all that was a result of being independent of my situation, am not talking about the women Independence we as women strive for but the independence of not involving God to take care of our loads which by the way he instructed us to hand to him. But we instead fight for ourselves until we break ourselves.

Accepting his perfect Grace which is available to us 24/7 takes all that away and once again, i am talking from first hand experience.   xx

What will you then live for?

 While making changes in the way we live, what God needs from us is to also change not only how we see life but also a change in our priorities, our relationships, and everything else. It will sometime mean choosing a difficult path instead of an easy one. This is to say, we need to live for the glory of God and God alone. Will you live for your own goals, comfort and pleasure? Or will you live the rest of your life for the glory of God. Knowing that the reward of God’s glory is eternity. Many people hesitate when it comes to this issue of whether to live for God or for them. I remember me, myself before when I would think about giving up the party life. The fact of letting all that go made me terrified and I would find myself living a double life. But the reason to why I thought this way was because I thought that, that is where my joy and happiness came from. I had convinced myself that it was the source of my happiness until I learnt that there’s not true happiness within the earthly things and that only true happiness and joy lays in the house of God. I pray for you that God helps you make a better choice in your life which is to live for him because God will give you what you need and even better. The bible says “Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God had been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally, and intimately, the one who invites us to God”.

One night, it was a Saturday morning. I told my cousin who was staying with us for her holidays here in Rwanda. I told her to come with me to church the following day and her response melted my heart and I was amazed by the honesty to it. She told me, she wouldn’t come to church with me because God is not pleased with her actions so she wouldn’t dare to walk into the house of the lord. Being too deep into the earthly things had convinced her that she wasn’t good enough but little did she know that God has a soft spot for sinners. First, you have to believe that God loves you and that’s a fact. Believe you have a purpose. Believe that God has chosen you to have a relationship with Jesus and for that, he is ready to receive you, no matter what you’ve done in the past. God does not hold grudges, God forgives and forgets. Second receive Jesus Christ as your lord and savior and learn to listen to his guidance. 

"The temporary and the eternal"

 “So fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

In life, we are usually drawn to the temporary things because we feel like; it’s what we need in order to make it in this world. But little do we know that, this world is not our home therefore everything in it is not ours to own as well. I usually say to myself I need money or an education to survive but someone once told me, the people who have all that you want, aren’t they miserable? This is true, even those things that “we thing we need” won’t satisfy us when they arrive. A while, I begun to job hunt and I got this great opportunity to start working, I had desperately been looking for a job and I was sure that once it came through nothing would make me happier and that all my worries and complaints would be put to rest. After a while into the job, I started complaining of how I didn’t like it, how I’d prefer to stay home instead. We as human beings are never satisfied with what we have, even if they came when we desperately needed them, the joy of having them disappears after a while. The reason to why this happens is because everything around us is temporary. Everything we have possessed here on earth is not ours.

Our identity is in eternity, and our home is in heaven. If we understand the truth to this, we will stop worrying about having it all on earth.  We often worry about having it all, education, jobs, etc but we don’t realize all these things just fade and shatter. God wants us to treat all these things of this world as temporary riches and this does not only work for possession but also trials, disappointments and defeats from this world for the reward is eternity. Even while Jesus was here on earth he experienced all of these things because this wasn’t his home. Once we realize that life here on earth is just temporary, we will learn to detach ourselves from it but instead keep our eyes on he, who is greater.

How factors of a temporary life should change us:

Knowing that life and all that’s in it is temporary will change our perspective on life and how we live it every day. The first step is to understand and accept the truth of this matter and from there everything will be clear and it will make a lot of sense as to why things happen the way they do. I have developed an attitude of letting go though some people will considered it “losing hope” it’s not. I have understood and I pray that some day they will understand as well. Not only is it an act of trusting in God but it’s very healthy for our souls, in a way that I no longer worry or feel scared of what’s going to happen in the future, the bible says, (Matthew 6:34, so do not worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own. There is no need to add to the troubles each day brings.)

So with that being said, the changes we need to make in our lives are our day to day tactics of how to go about a situation that crosses our paths. Be positive and begin to see events that happen to you in a different light. Bad things can be seen as blessings and learning experiences. In fact, you become abundantly prosperous because what you saw as trivial, meaningless or burdensome have now turned into rich experiences. Walk with the lord daily and let him change you.

"Follow the leader"

I recently just realized that, I spent too much time and  basically half of my life aiming towards someone else’s dreams. I spent a long time visualizing a life which was considered as “the norm”.  But on my journey as a Christian seeking to see God’s hand in my everyday life, I’ve come to realize that, what I wanted wasn’t what I was designed for and that I don’t have to live according to the standards of this world and what it calls “a normal life” because we are created for something higher. I then, developed an attitude whereby I know and I understand that I have to live for God’s plan and that plan has to be carried out eventually, regardless of how long it takes. So how then does God’s plan start taking action in your life?  By constantly following the Holy Spirit and what it leads your heart to doing. Being on a daily walk, side by side with the Holy Spirit reveals a lot to you and you grow to understand more. The Holy Spirit doesn’t lead you to the so called “norm” but instead it wants to make an exception out of you. Society shouldn’t control us to drifting us from our faith and what we believe in but instead we should be controlled by the higher power which is none other than the Holy Spirit.

The bible says in John 14:17, “I will ask the father and he will give you another helper, who will stay with you forever”.  This helper that we were fortune enough to be granted free of charge is the holy spirit, which is appointed to guiding us each step of the way.