Last Sunday and today, we were prayed for in church as a blessing and commissioning before we leave on our trip. Last Sunday Pastor Dean was there and he brought us up to the front and prayed over us. Today it was Pastor Steve, and he invited anyone who wanted to come forward and lay hands on us and pray. What a sweet privilege to be blessed in this way. What an honor we have to be called to serve Christ.

I felt especially blessed today because my dear friend Sandy was among the people who came forward.  Sandy is such an example to me of what a woman lost in God looks like. Her whole face shines with the peace of Christ. Her spirit is sweet and her heart is true. I can only hope and pray that I can reflect even a small portion of that to the people I come in contact with.

Today's message was about Christ healing the hurts in us. What a testimony i can give to how the Holy Spirit has brought about healing in me.  I wrote on my facebook wall about feeling blessed, thankful healed and whole and only my Jesus can do that.  18-20 years ago, I would have never been able to say that.  I was so broken and crushed in spirit, so beaten down and full of pain... the walls I had so carefully constructed to protect myself I thought were firmly in place yet, the facade was just that-- a facade--  fragile and it so easily could crumble. Yet, look! Look where the Lord has brought me!  He made some thing beautiful of my life.... you know there's a song there....

(the Gaithers:) Something beautiful, something good, all my confusion, He understood, All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife, but He made something beautiful of my life.

Even 8-9 years ago, when we went on our first out of country missions trip to Costa Rica, I was a fearful, reluctant participant. I went, excited, but really in bondage from the fear and insecurities I carried.  I am still a little fearful over this trip, but the fear comes from a completely different place. Maybe calling it fear is even the wrong word. I have questions, I have concerns, i have wonders, I have nervousness and actually the fear is the good kind; the kind that comes from AWE...  not from something bad or wrong or evil.

But this time I am excited and looking forward to the experience, the chance to connect with women who have their own baggage of hurts and oppressions. An opportunity to love on them and share with them from the heart, that as daughters of the King of Kings, we are royalty, we are princesses. that there is hope in Christ. that we can be made whole. Healed and Whole.

MIke, one of the team members also shared in church this morning about the healing the Lord has done in his life. Awesome!  This trip is going to be so cool and the people we are traveling with are a part of that.

That Bruce and I get to experience this together is the best! I look over at him during church and my heart swells with the thrill and knowledge that we are in this together. (and here I am referring to the trip and having CTK in Deming)  Wow, its been  just an awesome awesome time and it's only the beginning!!  :)