Fifty-four days…
This is only part one of the chapter. I will be breaking it up into two shorter segments. Here it is…
Strongholds
As I share my story, I am reminded of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened after they ate from the tree. When we are young, we seem to live in our own private Garden of Eden, feeling invincible and strong. The older we become, after taking a nice big bite of the juicy realities we experience in life, the feeling of invincibility we once had is snatched away. We then become more aware of fear, and fears can become strongholds.
To this day, I can recall exactly where I was when that fear developed in me. I was sitting with a group of women in a room talking about pregnancy when one of the women shared her story about having a miscarriage. I can remember at that moment thinking, “This could happen to me.” I cannot be absolutely sure why I was instantaneously gripped by a new fear at that moment, but my spirit tells me I had a weakness in that area I wasn’t even aware of at the time, and Satan honed in on it and attacked. I want to make sure I do not give too much credit where credit is not due to the enemy, because sometimes we have a tendency to pollute our own minds with fear, doubt, and unbelief, which makes us easy targets for strongholds to develop. We need to keep in mind that when we accept Christ as our Savior, we are covered with the blood that He shed when He died for us. We only need to give our fears to Him in order to be delivered of them, yet this concept seems to take a lifetime to conquer.
I needed to grasp onto God and give Him my fear, but I was not as spiritually mature as I needed to be to fight it. I was a Christian, I went to church, I lived for God, but my prayer life was not what it should have been, and I wasn’t reading the Bible the way I should have. Make no mistake; I am not trying to convey that this miscarriage or anything else negative in the past, present, or future happened because I wasn’t pressing into God enough. I believe it was simply part of His will for me. Things like this are not always meant for us to understand. Proverbs 3:5 says it best, (Of course, the Bible always does.): “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” (N.K.J.V.)
