Take Me Back to the Milestone
In the bible, many times people would erect altars for memorial purposes including the stone Jacob slept on in Genesis 28 and the twelve stones are chosen out of the Jorden River by the 12 tribes of Israel in Joshua 4. Today our altars may not be physical like those were in Jacob and Joshua’s days... We tend to call them milestone moments.
Ask any mother about the day one of her children was born and she’ll likely recount many memories of the day... Whether it was her 1st, 3rd, or 5th every child changed her, even if it’s as simple as 1 more human to care for.
Just like wedding days, births, and deaths, our spiritual journey has milestone moments that we never forget. I remember the 1st time God became real to me, when I was a preteen, and then again in my mid-twenties. I’ll never forget receiving the Holy Ghost in my bedroom. I’ll never forget the service where God told me, how He saw me. Or my trip to West Monroe, LA in Aug 2009, I had a man pray over me and tell me, “The devil is a liar”. Many times, along our journey we can look back and draw strength from them; we remember who we were and what that milestone moment meant to us.
I can speak about the battles faced when facing depression; I know how lonely and isolating it can be and how alone you can feel, even in a room full of people. I know what it feels like to feel unlovable. When God filled me with the Holy Ghost in 2006, I had been taking prescribed anti-depressant medication, and I felt that that night God cured me of needing that medication; later my doctor concurred with that assessment. I started saying, “my saddest days with the Holy Ghost are better than my best days without Him”. I’ve had some sad days, some loneliness, and some holiday blues, but you know what I’ve noticed especially in the last 5 years since I became a part of TLC (my church)? They never seem to last long and/or they never seem to deteriorate into a full-blown tailspin. When I’m reminded of the group of people God has surrounded me with and I look at those days when I did not have a friend to call upon, sometimes it humbles me to tears. When I walk into the sanctuary on a Wednesday after a holiday weekend and I begin to see faces that I missed that prior Sunday, I can’t help but be smiling ear-to-ear as I quietly whisper, “this is my family”. When those hard days come, I can look at old Facebook comments, old posts where someone put a care emoji, or times when someone told me I had been on their heart, and they were praying for me. Each of these can be the milestones I pull from, and the other cool thing is, sometimes it’s someone else's milestone moment that we can pull strength from, and thus “we overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony”.
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