Teresa K. Page's Blog, page 10

Contend For The Faith: Unbelief and Attempted Murder!!

I was awaken way too early reminded of a five minute encounter I had with a tall Caucasian gentleman a few months ago! Per our conversation, he shared his concerns for his sons' dire need for both work and education.

I learned that one of the sons' passion is to be a chef, yet he already made the case that it would take years to develop in the profession. As a result, he thought it easier not to pursue the dream at all and has sentenced himself to something without resemblance. My stomach began to hurt to know this young man has already shut the book on his whole life  and has decided to forfeit the courage to grab hold to his dreams at all costs!

As I spoke a little longer with this gentleman, he began to tell me of his years in law enforcement and his dream to be an event planner to enjoy happier moments. I smiled and began to provide resources that could help him achieve that goal. After every statement I made indicating how it could be done, I watched him shoot the hope of his own dream down one bullet at a time!! After the 5th or 6th dreamshot, I stepped out of civil character to speak of our original purpose; its wealth and how we owe it to ourselves to live out our passions in this lifetime! There was a look of shock on his face as he said I should be a motivational speaker and walked away! As he walked, I sent a message to his son that at the risk of failing miserably, he must try to become what his heart says become!! 

That whole ordeal was painful and I have to give pause to my perplexity to inquire what the John Brown has happened to us? When did we sign the agreement to surrender our innate dominion to become eternal cowards? Where did we learn to rather suffer than pursue our supreme purpose? Who or what has taught us to become trained assassins to our own lives? For as much as we want to place blame on the boogie man, haters or bad luck, it is by our own hands that we commit attempted murder on our desired pursuits!!

For five minutes talking with this gentleman, I stood on the opposite side of unbelief and "it sho' was ugly" (In Shug Avery's voice)! I wonder if this is how the Lord perceives us when we do not, cannot or will not believe in Him...His ability...His performance...and His immutability of counsel to fulfill the promise in our lives!! I now understand why it is impossible to please God without faith! For it matters not that we have a Heavenly Father with manifold riches, grace and mercy to finance our dreams if we don't first believe in Him, ourselves or that we can be what is hardwired in our DNA!

Now before anyone says, "I was never shown or taught that I can be anything!", I will be the first to admit that it is hard to believe without a precedent or reference! BUT isn't it both ironic and wonderful that the whole concept of faith is void of precedence, experience and what we can communicate with our physical senses?  Faith is the hope of things NOT SEEN! It is the invisible power source that makes the impossible possible and the unthinkable feasible! Therefore, I should not be moved by those these I can see; for if I can feel it, see it and attain it in my own strength, then I have no reason to hope! I want my life to be fired by those things beyond my human reach as it will force me to invite the Lord's unlimited nature to manifest something mind blowing in my world and the world I influence!

I don't want the Lord to catch me on the other side of my unbelief! I only want to be found contending for the faith! Our enemy knows that the Lord's blessings cannot be stopped, but our adversary will weary or obstruct our hope by a barrage of blinding disappointments to skew our belief system! If our foe's attempts and assaults are successful, then our faith is compromised! And if our faith malfunctions, we chance binding the Lord's hands from having a free course in the Earth!

Wrap this around your head!! Faith is the only thing the Lord requires of us to move Him—it is not by our goodness or by our works!  From salvation and beyond, He wants to show Himself strong in our lives!! In fact, His eyes are going to and fro over the earth seeking for such ones!! Today, our hearts are sick because we have deferred our hope! If we mess around, just once, to take a chance to fulfill the desire of our hope, it is our tree of life!! I charge you to contend for your faith! Fight for it so that the Lord's hands, which are full of wonder, are always open towards us!!

~Teresa K. Page

In Love With An Idea...

Should you find yourself wrestling with your personal self view, remember this...

The Lord was so in love with the thought of us that He had to make us a tangible reality!

Cease the internal struggle and let us live in such a way in this world and the next to remind Him that His ideas were correct!!

The Hope Of His Calling! An Excerpt from "My Journey to Wholeness: The Sojourn Continues"

With the recent suicide of two influential icons of our age, the social conscious spotlight has been diverted to shine intently upon the spike of this kind of death over the last decades. Some attribute these tragedies to mental illness, depression, drug abuse, etc., but the real truth is that the human spirit, in today's world, is hurting on atomic levels that is beyond our body, mind and emotions!

While I am not a doctor or scientist, I have a theory! I believe the real culprit of our profound grief is that we are not living up to our original assignment to be fruitful, to multiply, to have dominion and to subdue! Somewhere along the line, we have been tricked into living a lower form of life and it is driving us mad--literally!

Because of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, we have the opportunity to be reintroduced to our first selves and our first minds!! Check out "The Hope of His Calling" and let us be well!

~Teresa K. Page

The Hope of His Calling...

An Excerpt from "My Journey to Wholeness: The Sojourn Continues"

Want a real battle on your hands? Tell a Page woman that she does not work hard—and the fight is on as a never ending list of all she has done with little to no sleep is tallied. As an apple hanging from the same family tree, you cannot tell me I have not put my time in! I was living on my own at the age of 17 and since that time, I have wholly poured out my soul onto good and righteous matters! In the name of the Lord, all that I have performed was accomplished with a fervent anointing and sincere heart.  Impressed? Me neither. For the past twenty some years, I have been pretending to walk out my life’s calling. Afraid to compete, I have taken planned escape routes to avoid true achievement. In my cloud of working menial jobs; hiding out in small towns; championing other people’s projects and entangling myself in doomed relationships, I have managed to paint the facade that I am actually happy and taken good care to keep purposelessly busy!

I have to come clean! Daily I am mocked by the restless disgruntled groaning in my belly for not living my little girl dreams. The glimpses of my destiny haunt me without ceasing and I cannot find solace. I am fully aware that the Lord Himself has orchestrated the housing of books, music and businesses in the chasm of my person, but I still run from the notion that my aspirations live in corporate buildings and in global markets. I figured if I ignored these foolish thoughts long enough, I would wax old and they would leave in peace. Not so! Every morning I awake to New Mercy staring me dead in my eyes daring me to become all the Lord smiled and predestined me to be millenniums ago! I give up! I give up, for even my body is turning on me for tolerating the delayed fulfillment of my life’s intent! I can no longer avoid the hope of the Lord’s calling on my life (Ephesians 1:18)! Uncle—I cry, Uncle!

Like a bolt of lightning striking me in my chest, I am forever changed by the next italicized words of Proverbs 13:12. “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life”. Let me repeat that. “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life”. These seventeen words answered why I often scaled the ledges of depression. It was not that I was slowly losing my mind! It was not that I was weak in body! It was not that my life was spiraling in shambles. On the contrary, for my intelligence is quick on its strong feet as they stand in the most awesome of places. Plainly put, the root source of my blue funks, which could paralyze me for days, was the sheer postponement of my destiny.

It is most interesting to me that Proverbs would mention the sickness of the heart instead of the body, but I get it. Heartsickness is a documented illness that ultimately takes shape in varying degrees and forms of depression. Whether classified as the mildest “low spirits” or the most extreme “melancholia”, depression, left to do its work, has the ability to debilitate the entire human body from the destruction of the emotions to the breakdown of its functional systems. Could the deferment of our hope be the real reason many are physically and mentally sick among us? This is a theory to strongly consider, for if we look at our communities, schools, workplaces, houses of worship and especially the hospitals and prisons, the candlelight of ambition has dimly cooled. The lack of vision is fatal! It fades natural beauty; trades swift footsteps for shiftless scuffles and chemically warps the brain from producing original imagination! Such conditions coupled with systematic laws designed to prevent success subjects the human soul to slavery.

It is not coincidental that the symptoms of underachievement are mistaken for affliction. We make appointments to sit in sterile doctor’s offices just to stand in line at a white washed pharmacy with an illegible prescription in hand to pacify our subsistence! This minimal level of survival cannot be medicated and we consciously know it! Yet, we are twistedly comforted to cope with poorly disguised mechanisms designed to sedate the mind into crippled living. Regardless of our sedation efforts, we are ever awake and incapable of escaping the fact that a life lived opposing its intention is of low generic quality. It is time to stop popping the pretty colored pills; snap out of this trance and unplug from this ungodly matrix!

I know what many of us are thinking! We think that it is too late  to begin and that we do not have what it takes! Oh, but the devil is a liar, for this is the age of the unlikely hopefuls. We are not  only highly suspect, but perfect prime candidates that are most apt to confound the wise! 2 Peter 1:10 affirms, “Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall”. Who cares if many of us do not have a silver spoon jammed in our mouths—we shall never fall! Forget that we are labeled as the forgotten, the overlooked and underestimated—we shall never fall! Though we may be uncultured, unpolished and very rough around the edges—we shall never fall!

The Lord highly enlightens and anoints His people to walk upright in the offices He has placed us. Too wise to utilize a singular approach, there are a myriad of gifts, operations and administrations, specialized by the same Holy Spirit, for us to fulfill our work in the earth (I Corinthians 12:1-31)! So, as long as Philippians 1:6 tells me, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ”—there is hope!

Therefore, with both fear and bravery, I take a deep breath to answer the call!

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Too Deep For The A.M.: The Inquisition of Blood

Sooo...it's a holiday and I have been wide awake way before 6 AM! I log into Facebook and was hit by an old memory post I wrote describing a terrible dream I had three years ago and the revelation thereof! Can I just say "WOW?", for this post was heavy then and just as heavy today!! I am going to title this..."Too Heavy for the A.M.: The Inquisition of Blood"!

Too Heavy for the A.M.: The Inquisition of Blood

All of my life I have been a vivid dreamer, wherein the Lord shows me specific things that are both joyful and terrible. I woke up this morning in tears from a dream laced with ancient racism, sexism, war, terror and assault and my heart is so heavy. The terrible things I witnessed from thousands of years ago causes me to wonder why our world still wrestle with these legendary principalities today.  We, as a human body, in all of our pompous technology and knowledge have yet to learn how to defeat the repetition of our history! Instead, we keep passing these poisons from one generation to another and each generation figures out how to make the detrimental uglier! 

We believe we are superior enough to wield our detriment as power on the world's stage, but it only results in mass degrees of tragedy! And it is during these tragedies that I ask, "Lord, Where were you?"! I ask in such accusation as if He is not all knowing and aware of these occurrences! What nerve; for He was neither the initiator nor the blame! We humans boast in our power of free will, but when the error of our poor decision-making reaps into a horrible, but accurate consequence, suddenly we expect for this God to blow the referee's whistle to put an end to our madness. We forget that our cause will always have an effect one way or another! 

I guess my real concern is toward the innocent that always get tagged in the midst of these erratic crossfires. What broke my heart in my dream was that an innocent bystander was made subject to the whims of the wicked. I remember the look in that person's eyes, and as the dreamer, I could not reach in to help them. In my heaviness I asked the Lord why again and He led me to Psalm 9 as a reminder of His judgement. I read it and my heart is back at peace! The thing about us humans is that we want justice and we want justice NOW! There is nothing wrong with that! Sometimes we get it and sometimes it is reserved for a specific time. Sometimes evildoers think they are getting away and sometimes they get tangled up in the very traps they have set out for others. It's a toss up! 

We keep forgetting that our Lord is PROACTIVE and has already set an expected end from the beginning! We must stop thinking that just because the Lord is not REACTIVE to the rampage of injustice that He does not see it! You better believe that He definitley sees it and according to Psalm 9:12, "When he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he forgetteth not the cry of the humble". I love that word "inquisition" for it means judicial investigation! So when the Lord makes His "judicial investigation" for the blood that has been spilled, He will remember. 

The Lord is not slack concerning His promises! Venegence is His!! Now is the time that grace must abound! Though these are dark days, GRACE still abounds! But when that great notable day of the Lord comes...smh...I don't even have the words! In the meantime, let us keep our trust in the Lord--for He is our refuge in the time of trouble!

 

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Perfect Love Cast Out All Fear...

It is impossible for fear and love to dwell in the same space.The scriptures indicate that, " Perfect love casts out all fear"! So that stands to reason that the presence of fear is the absence of love! And where perfect love abides, fear is forbidden and has no legal right to be in the room!

Until recent, I have discounted my capacity to love because some could or would not receive it in its most genuine state! No more! I had no idea that love is the solution of all things and the greatest source of power known to man IF we know how to wield it skillfully! 

The love that is branded to my person is not for everyone and cannot be bought with a price! Yet, it is good to those that choose to bask in the light of it and must be given away freely; for who could rightly judge its value?

I will love beyond myself in Christ Jesus and will not cower to the possibility of rejection or deception! If rejection comes--let it come! If deception arises--let it arise! For this kind of living cannot be reduced to just emotion, but is a kingdom expectation that is not for the faint at heart! 

Life is way too short to be afraid and careful! I was selected to dock in this Earth to unload divine cargo and my vessel will leave this world empty of its treasure! Death will not have the opportunity to profit from anything of mine! It's all or nothing! I choose all!

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