We received this very straightforward testimony from someone who attended our latest Fatherheart School.  She asked to remain anonymous, a request we gladly honor.

“For years I wrestled with life, it was like a struggle I had to survive somehow.  I felt left at the mercy of negative thoughts, depression, pain and loneliness. Whenever things were going a little better, I was already foreseeing things would get worse again.  I felt trapped in this circle. I thought I did all I could to get out of it but in reality it got worse until I was completely stuck.

God made no sense to me: if He really wanted the best for me, like I saw Him at work in the lives of the people around me…

He surely didn’t want to have anything to do with me, since I noticed nothing… My life couldn’t be the way He had intended it.  I felt lost and abandoned, I could rely only on myself. I had no confidence in God, in people nor in the future.  The only I thing relied on was the negative thinking: It’ll go wrong again, it always does.

So I believed the lie that nobody could be trusted and I was angry with life, with myself and with God; and also with the people around who did have confidence and a good relationship with God.   I was envious of them because I was struggling so much and I was afraid to become even more isolated when they would move on.  Anger and fear caused me to increasingly avoid people and activities and so I retreated from life more and more.

God intervened by bringing the right people, the right preaching, the right music, the right help on my path. Slowly I started to recognize my own part in this struggle, of which I thought it just happened to me and learned to ask forgiveness.  I saw the lies I had bought into and that isolated me and learned to question the lies and look for the truth.  I realized I had closed my heart so nobody could touch me and learned to open up again.   I found out I held grudges and learned to forgive.

It was a process and the breakthrough came last October at the Fatherheart School.  That week was a struggle for me, I felt an outsider.  It was an image of the battle I had been waging for so long as I can remember.  I felt alone, miserable, rejected, failure. God didn’t cause it, I saw Him at work in the people around me. I concluded it was of my doing, I certainly did something wrong.

But the last night, the breakthrough came. At a certain moment I knew: “this is also for me!” God is there for me, I may belong to Him, I am His beloved child.  And then one moment I let go all control, It’s the best thing I could have done. For a moment I felt not alone, for a moment I felt free. I stopped ‘working’, and so God could do in me what I couldn’t.  He knows exactly what I need, what is good for me.  He gave me a new life!

This experience was the beginning, it is the beacon of a process in which God makes me free. He leads, He care, He is the One who does it.  To Him all the honor! Words cannot express what it means to me to live this new life.  I look forward to God, to what He works out.  It is no longer about me or what I do, it is about Him.

Thank you for organizing the Fatherheart Schools, and for allowing God to use you!”