Surrendered Faith Walk – Part 2

On my 45th birthday, it was the first time in my adult life that I honestly didn’t care to be celebrated. I just needed to be alone to process my encounter with God that I had experienced at the camp a couple of days ago. My husband and children made me a cake and gave me gifts. It was so special. Immediately after celebrating, I went to Barnes and Noble to get away from everyone. Like, wow something very real just happened to me unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before and I didn’t quite understand it all. I was at the bookstore all day, entering in the morning and staying until closing time. I was looking for a Bible and reading all of them. The speaker’s voice echoed in my mind. Read your Bible, Read your Bible, Read your Bible …  as I searched for Bibles. I walked out with a Bible for  everyone; my husband, my sons, my brother and a new one for myself. Everyone got a new Bible for my birthday. I couldn’t wait to get home and read it. 

When I returned home, I had this wild insatiable desire to read the Bible like it was my job. I couldn’t get enough of it. At every opportunity this urge became my strongest desire. I even downloaded the pray.com app and it allowed me to listen to a track episode called Bible in a Year where it puts the Bible stories in chronological order. I would listen to it while cleaning, driving, cooking, in my downtime relaxing, and in my quiet time before I went to sleep. It was like a movie playing out in my mind as the narrator spoke. My kids would listen to the Bible in a Year stories in the car with me and they would really get into it too and ask questions. My kids and I also began watching the show Superbook on Prime which was also amazing as it follows the Bible very accurately in an animated series. They were also so intrigued and so into it. How did I not do this for all of these years? It’s sooo good! You know how when you taste food that’s amazing you want everyone else to try it too, so that they can experience what you experienced? Yes! Like that. It’s so good! Try it! Listen to the Audio Stories in Bible in a year! It’s like honey on your lips. Sweet. 

 As I began deep diving reading the Bible, the Bible began reading me!  I was like whoa! Like in awe at all that was written in it about the wisdom of life. I wanted to know everything.  A few of the mind blowing things that stood out to me was:

Exodus 34:5-7 ”Then the Lord came down in a cloud and stood there with him; and he called out his own name, Yahweh. The Lord passed in front of Moses, calling out, “Yahweh! The Lord! The God of compassion and mercy! I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. I lavish unfailing love to a thousand generations. I forgive iniquity, rebellion, and sin. But I do not excuse the guilty. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren; the entire family is affected— even children in the third and fourth generations.”

I was in awe and so enlightened to learn that God is a God of compassion and Mercy. I had always viewed God as so powerful and hard on people. Just as I had experienced my mother. My experience with her wasn’t always with kindness and compassion but more so very dictative, angry, and mean. Sadly, that’s how I used to view God. God says in his own words who He is and He gives us His unfailing Love and faithfulness. Yes! He is indeed powerful and his wrath is fierce and yet God is also very gentle and warm hearted. He’s a very loving and forgiving God. You get to choose what side of him you want to experience by your obedience and your freedom of choice. I don’t ever want to be on his side of wrath. I know that for sure! I also realized that when we don’t repent for our sins, even the unseemly “good people” sins that we tend not to see, he passes them down to our children for generations. See! don’t play with God, don’t take him for granted. He’s Slow to anger. It’s ok to make mistakes but confess them to him daily or very often, ask for forgiveness and learn the lesson, turn away from sin. Draw closer to him and he will draw closer to you! 

 I began to keep a record of my repentance prayers in my notes app on my iPhone. I could see a pattern of behavior of things I’m always doing wrong and begin to address them appropriately by replacing the behaviors with better choices and approaches with more patience. The pattern I kept seeing was Anger. I had no idea I even had issues with my anger until I read my repentant prayers in reflection; the subject of the majority of those prayers was about how I acted and reacted in anger. 

I mean there’s so many good things to talk about in the Bible read it for yourself. It is the users manual on how to navigate this life. It tells us why we are here and what our purpose is. Who we are, who we belong to, and our super powers we have access to that we will need in order to get through this wicked world. More importantly it clearly tells about the Loving Nature and Character of God. Our Father in heaven.

This also stood out to me like a blaring trumpet: “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me” Matthew 16:24 Never go back to your old sinful ways. To illustrate this, Peter cites “As a dog returns to his own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” Proverbs 26.

The Bible is the real deal! Anyone who repeats the ridiculous nonsense and says it is only a book of allegories or that it’s been tampered with or it’s the colonizers slave book.  People are only listening to what they heard and repeating it. They actually never read it for themselves, if they did read it they didn’t comprehend it or they read it without the willingness to actually understand and acquire the wisdom of life it gives. Please do not repeat these foolish things. This is coming from someone who is not religious.  But simply from someone who went from never having read the Bible in great lengths before to Experiencing a divine encounter with God and Reading the Bible with a new purpose and listening to the Bible in a year in its entirety, plus so much more you will come to learn in the next chapters to come. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Love. The Bible is The Word of God written not to you, but for you. May my personal experience and testimony give you clarity if there was ever any confusion. I didn’t write this to debate or offend people, it is simply how I experienced it truthfully. 

Then I began to write a long prayer to God of my willingness to completely surrender my life. It took me several days to write to my Lord God. It was full of gratitude for keeping my life intact and healthy with a sound mind after all that I’ve been through. In all of my “good people” sins he poured out his grace; his undeserving favor. Repentance for every single thing I ever did that I could remember, I hid nothing, I bared it all to him. I requested wisdom and revelation so I could have a greater understanding. I requested that God please confirm that I can completely trust him with my life in my full surrender.  Before I was finished, when I wasn’t yet expecting an answer, I suddenly had this real life-like visionary auditory dream. As I was laying  in bed next to my husband This was so randomly unexpected and out of the blue. (only a few weeks after I Encountered God at this revival camp)

On September 28, of 2022  I saw a vision of bright lights and heard an audible voice that must have been in my head because Keith was laying next to me sleeping, unbothered. This voice was instructing me to wake up and write this message down. He answered specific details to the questions in my surrender prayer. This verse was revealed to me, Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than a bird?  Can you by worrying add a single hour to your life? This was confirmation for me that I know I can trust him with my life completely. I know my life is way more valuable than a bird if you can take care of them, surely he can take care of me. 

It was also revealed to me that I have a new name. He instructed me to write the new name down on the back of my baby picture. This picture just so happened to be sitting out of the photo album, in my desk drawer appearing right in front of me, as soon as I opened it, at the time of this trance-like dream. So I wrote out the words that I heard him say “Aurelia” is the new name you will be called and I was told to look up the meaning in Hebrew. Now, I don’t know anyone with this name and I’ve never heard of it before and no one has ever called me this. I took a picture of it and sat it aside as I had no idea what to do with this information. Like how do I just wake up from a random dream and change my name?  It was so odd to me so I just wrote everything down but the experience was so real, I really did hear that. 

I became fueled by the urgency of now needing to move immediately after that dream experience and remembering what the speaker said, “when you hear from God; move immediately”. That was quite an experience. I was one hundred percent sure that my dream was me hearing from him. I was in search of something that was stirring up inside of me unlike any other feeling I’ve ever had before.

 I went and did some research on the speaker that had impacted me so profoundly. I thought to myself whoever taught him, I wanted them to teach me, because he was amazing. I texted Pastor Chris, the youth pastor from the camp, and he reminded me that his name was Ian Ross and he was part of a group out of Huntington Beach, California. I immediately went online and filled out an application to join the group. Soon after, I participated in the interview. I learned that unfortunately the program was only for young adults under 25. I was saddened to hear that. Then just a few moments later the guy who interviewed me called me back and recommended their sister organization, based in Kona, Hawaii. He said, “It’s very much like a college campus to learn more about God; it’s for everyone, young adults, families, couples, singles, divorced, & widowed”. He said, “it would be for our entire family”.  This was it, this was the call for our next move! I was so sure of it. We immediately applied to do the Discipleship Training School in the Spring of 2023. I was overjoyed that this would not just be my personal journey of my own, but one together as a family! 

The next six months would prove to be a risky, bold, tested faith walk in every way. We began the preparation for uprooting our entire family to move to Hawaii. I couldn’t believe it. I had always dreamed of vacationing there but to live there was so awesome and beyond my wildest imagination! It would take great courage and blind faith to follow through and detach from everything we owned. As none of it could come with us except what we could fit in a suitcase. We literally had to let go of everything and lay all of our lives down. All that we had built and established over the years. We weren’t necessarily in a season of strife and despair but we were in a season of comfort . Which made this move even more difficult. My husband and I had a deep longing for a greater purpose to have something more than the regular day to day that just exasperated us. This monotonous hamster wheel called life.

My husband, Keith, was in dire need of real rest from work. He needed a complete mental break from it all. Keith was just completely overworked; he lacked so much sleep and suffered from severe migraines and this began to take a toll on his mental health. That all gas no breaks, sleep is for suckers mentality is a horrible standard to strive for. I mean even God rested. We were just so tired of striving and performing. Continually, trying to fill up society’s bucket of what the world said what “happiness” should be. We were so sick of independently shouldering life all on our own. We realized this is not how life is supposed to be lived. We wanted to experience the same childlike pure joy that’s like a bubbling eternal spring that’s within us when we are Holy Spirit filled. Where we do not need to strive or toil. This is gifted to all of us by simply being obedient believers with our lives as we know it completely laid down for Christ.

We began to adopt a minimalist approach to living, by mentally detaching ourselves from any and all material possessions. Can we live without Gucci bags? Can we really live happily without a big home? A brand new truck?  Beautiful home decor? Jewelry? Fancy clothes? Do we really need a thousand pairs of shoes and sneakers?  As we explored these options we were truly beginning to realize all of the “things” we had we didn’t really need. We often tend to think the more stuff we have, the greater our comfort; the happier we are. Actually, the opposite is true. We lived so long with this false sense of what happiness was supposed to be like. In reality all of the things we accumulated over the years were now a heavy burden on us as it consumed our entire space with clutter, it was a collection of meaningless forgotten things. So, we did a huge home overhaul. A purge that took several months to complete through garage sales, three truck loads of donations, online sales, and even a huge dumpster that sat in my driveway from the renovations we filled it with excess furniture garbage that no longer served a purpose in our lives.

I donated my used Toyota car to Kars for kids and then right before we left I sold my brand new 2022 Grand Cherokee Jeep. We gave up our generous salaries and successful careers. We gave up our beautiful seven bedroom colonial home located on a tree lined cul de sac street, that came with wonderful neighborhood friends that became family to us. We also left our own immediate friends and family all behind. My children’s childhood friends from public and homeschool, our new church home and youth group friends. All their toys, their newly remodeled bedrooms and their entertainment center with all their video games. We packed up our dressers, closets, and items that we wanted to keep and put them in storage. We also did extensive repairs and restoration in our entire home. We got new flooring throughout the home, a new roof, brand new toilets, we upgraded the bathrooms, upgraded the laundry room. The basement eventually got upgraded with brand new flooring, walls and ceiling. We restored and painted the outside deck, restored the leaking ceiling in the garage, installed a brand new hvac system, and painted the bedrooms. We had to fast track all of our renovations, not what we had originally planned. Our prior plans were no longer important. This was all done for others to enjoy the comfort of our beautiful home as we planned to leave it all behind.

In the middle of all of our many simultaneous renovations and packing up, getting ready to uproot our entire family in just two short months. On the evening of January 17, 2022 as I was right in the middle of planning a joyous celebration. I received the most heartbreaking and devastating call from my older brother Richard that his son, my 26 year old nephew, Rashid whom I loved so dearly and cared for, just died in the Emergency Room after an hour of doctors trying to revive him they were unable to intubate him due to the severe blood clot blockage in his lungs. 

My whole world was rocked at its core. Rashid was the sweetest young man ever, a real teddy bear with a heart of gold. On New Year’s Eve, Rashid called me as he was running errands preparing to go out to a party and I spoke to him for hours before he headed out. He told me for the first time he fell in love with a girl and she was upset with him and he was asking for advice on how to win her back.  It was then I had just begun to talk to Rashid about getting to know Jesus and the importance of getting saved and getting his life on track and aligned with God. He said,  “Auntie, I don’t know about all that stuff but if you say I need to know him, I’m willing to learn about him”. He agreed to read the Bible with me. I was elated!  I put him on speaker phone, I went on Amazon and immediately purchased a Bible for him and had it shipped directly to his home in LA. I had his agreement with no fuss. I was overjoyed. About two weeks later he called me to tell me that he finally got the Bible. He was so happy, he thanked me and told me he would always keep it close to him and that no one ever got him a Bible before and that he felt special. He also said he was looking forward to reading it. Then right before he hung up said he wasn’t feeling well, we were supposed to study the Bible the same day he got it when he returned home from work. Rashid said “Auntie, I think I’m gonna go home early and rest. I’m not feeling well, let’s postpone it till I’m feeling better” he worked at the Apple Flagship store in Santa Monica, on the Promenade.  I said, “Ok love, rest up and feel better then we’ll start later.” I gave him a piece of mama’s TLC recipe on everything to do to get well. He said he would do everything I explained to him. Then he said, “Bye Auntie, I love you”. I said,”I love you more” and then I asked him to call me when he got home and let me know how he was doing. I wasn’t aware of how severe his sickness was. He was always so positive you could never tell if anything was bothering him. He called me a day later and I missed his call. I called him back and I got no answer. I also texted him to call me back and I got nothing. I figured he was fine and maybe he just didn’t get back to me because he was busy or something. Him calling me from work that day would be the last time I would ever speak to him forever! Just like that he was gone!

My heart was completely shattered, broken to pieces. Immediately I ran to God for answers. I cried Lord, why him? Lord, Why now? I didn’t get a chance to help him save his soul?  I wrestled with the dread of not knowing what was the status of his salvation. After the initial shock of it all, I was just numb in disbelief. The complete inability to do anything had simply consumed me. All I could do was weep and cry all day, all night, for days. I had to give myself space away from everyone to process what happened and why. I went through all of our pictures and recollected all the wonderful memories he left us. I eventually had to come to grips with what my new normal would be like without my nephew ever being in my life again. We were in touch almost everyday. He used to live with us. We were all so close to him. I had to seriously process what my life was going to be like without his sunshine. No more … “I love you Auntie” or “Good morning Auntie” or “I miss you” texts that brightened my day, or his prank jokes would send me reeling but filled me with so much laughter. He was such a good kid with a pure heart.

Rashid helped everyone that was in need when oftentimes he couldn’t even help himself. He was a real superhero. This was such a huge loss in my heart and everyone else’s too. We were all completely devastated. My boys loved him so much. My husband was deeply saddened. Rashid’s father was wrecked. His siblings, best friends who were like brothers to him and his co-workers at Apple the loss of his life was a hard blow to everyone who knew him. 

 Our entire family was just inundated with an abundance of grief as Rashid became the third 1st born child that died out of our first cousins generation one after the other All in the same year. The Bible verse I wrote above came to my mind like a rude awakening! Exodus 34:5-7 

I was riddled with so many questions: Why did this happen to such a good person? Why was his life taken away without any warning? The most important question I wrestled with was Lord, was his soul saved? Did he make it to heaven, so I can see him again? I was drawn to find answers in the Word of God. 

When we pray to God, that is us speaking to God  When we read God’s Word in the Bible, that is him speaking back to us. We must know his word.  As hard as it is to acknowledge, we must remember that there are no “good” people, in the absolute sense of the word. All of us are tainted by and infected with sin. God allows things to happen for a reason. Whether we understand His reasons or not. 

The Lesser Good is that we lost someone we loved so deeply. We all know everyone will eventually die. That’s a for sure guarantee. It’s a very hard pill to swallow when that time comes suddenly.  We must always remember – The Greater Good is that God is always good, He is a Just God, loving, compassionate, forgiving and merciful. 

The Lord gives life and he takes it away. The why’s are often unknown. Perhaps it’s best we don’t know why, but sincerely trust that God is the author of our lives. Some things we must simply place in a mystery box. Often, bad things happen to us that we simply cannot understand. Instead of doubting God’s goodness, our reaction should be to trust Him. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. 

What I know for sure, is that while I didn’t hear from God directly, I didn’t get answers. I didn’t have any visual dreams with auditory experiences. I didn’t hear anything from God. I did feel this overwhelming sense of pure peace that settled my soul beyond my own understanding. This warm spirit of love consumed and comforted me. Once I managed to finally stop crying and collect myself. My angst soon stopped in my most grievous time. I was able to endure all that was placed on me for planning his homegoing services, I was able to forgive, I was able to share the goodness of his life and treasure the memories and funny stories he left us with. 

For the first time ever I spoke on a beach with a beautiful sunset in the background in front of many of his friends and colleagues and encouraged them to pick up the torch and carry on a good thing that Rashid began and that was a willingness to get to know the Lord by reading the Bible, Giving your life to God, so that you don’t miss the opportunity to save your souls!

I don’t know if Rashid ever had the opportunity to save his soul. I’ll never know for sure if his joyful willingness to know God was his yes to salvation. I can only hope and pray that it was enough. I won’t know till I get there in heaven.

Listen! No one knows if their next breath will be their last breath! Something so delicate we tend to take for granted thinking we have plenty of time. We don’t!

Find rest and comfort in God’s peace that allows the burden to be lighter. The loss should bring about a change and a renewing of our minds so that our hearts are filled with hope in God and not the outcomes of life. So that the life that was lost is not wasted in vain or avenged so that anger and frustration consumes you and leads you further away from God! Instead it should bring you closer! The loss of life now serves a greater purpose to honor the life that was lost. Out of our pain and suffering during our greatest trials it should bring you closer to God so that he put his spirit upon you and rebirth new life, new hope and a new purpose in you.

My new purpose birthed from this loss. We became more on fire for God spreading the good news of hope to everyone. Encouraging everyone to save their souls! You absolutely need to make it to the other side – run towards Jesus; this is your hope and future!

I pray this story ignites a firestorm within you. I pray you all have eyes to read the truth in this message and ears to hear it! I pray that God softens your heart that will allow you to draw closer to him. I hope all who read this message get filled with the Holy Spirit that will lead you to all truth and guide you to the way through Jesus! 

In Jesus Name, Amen

 

This Story Is Dedicated to my Loving Nephew

Rashid Patrick Lopez

May 16,1996 – January 17, 2023

Revelation 21:4

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away .”