Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing (16 page)

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Authors: Stormie Omartian

BOOK: Stormie: A Story of Forgiveness and Healing
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Once we were married there were many problems to work through. Fortunately, the problems were not between us, but each of us individually was dealing with scars of the past, and being married surfaced those things.
Michael was never, in any way, abused as a child. He had a wonderful family. But his mother, whom I loved dearly, had been a domineering woman with extremely high expectations to which Michael felt he never lived up. She told me soon after we met that she had made mistakes as a mother.
“I was way too hard on him as a child,” she tenderly confessed to me one afternoon. Her big, expressive brown eyes were filled with hurt and remorse. They conveyed the guilt that torments any parent upon realizing that he or she has made a mistake with a child and that there is no going back. “He feels he can never live up to the family’s expectations, and it’s my fault,” she sighed heavily.
“Michael is a good man and a great husband,” I encouraged her. “The problems of the past are definitely a reality, but he’s getting over them and God is using them to show Himself strong in Michael’s life. Please don’t feel bad. It’s all being healed. Really.”
She was somewhat comforted, but still concerned.
The difference between Michael and me was that Michael suffered from feelings of never living up to what was expected of him while I suffered from the belief that no one ever expected anything of me. Part of me always felt like a misfit that should never have been born. Fortunately, the great love and trust that Michael and I had for each other provided a strong bond that laid the groundwork for the healing that was to come.
I gradually discovered that while receiving Jesus as my personal Savior and being born into the kingdom of God was instant, allowing Him to become Lord over my life was a process. I let Him have more and more of me as I went along, but each time I thought I had given Him my
all
, I discovered I had only given all I could. If I wanted to live in peace, enjoying God’s full measure of blessing, I had to obey God’s Word—not in the strict, legalistic sense, but with an attitude that says, “Show me what to do, Lord, and help me to do it.”
In order to live in obedience to God’s Word, I needed to find out what His Word said. So I bought a large, heavy Bible that had four different translations in it. I read the Bible from beginning to end in one translation, then began all over in another. People who saw me lugging that huge Bible to church must have thought me exceedingly spiritual. I wasn‘t—just exceptionally hungry.
As my hunger for God’s Word grew, so did my desire for more teaching. Attending church once a week was not enough, so I added Wednesday and Sunday evenings to my schedule. This also opened up possibilities for making more new friends, and I found associating with them a significant source of strength and encouragement.
I had always written songs, but now I began to take my writing seriously as more and more song lyrics about Jesus came to my heart and mind. I could barely write them down fast enough as they came stream-of-consciousness style. I rewrote and pared and honed until I had the right word with the right note and each song said exactly what I wanted it to say. The thrill of hearing these songs recorded by Christian artists, and knowing that God was using them to bring happiness to people, was a privilege I valued highly. I believed this was part of my reward for obedience.
Michael and I soon realized that we had neglected to take one very important step of obedience—that of being baptized in water. Jesus Himself was baptized in order to do what was right, and He commanded us all to do the same.
Still cautious about doing something that was merely a religious ritual as opposed to taking a step of obedience with understanding, I studied further. I found out that baptism in water was an act of obedience by which the lordship of Jesus in your life is declared. The past is washed away in the water and you come up cleansed while it remains buried. There was nothing magical about the water itself. The power is not in the water, but in being obedient to the Word of God whether you understand it fully or not. All steps of obedience, and this one especially, carried with it the opportunity for deliverance, freedom, and wholeness, and I desired everything that God had for me. After discussing it with Michael one afternoon, we were baptized together that same night. I didn’t feel any different afterward, except that I had the joy and confidence that comes from knowing you’ve obeyed God.
Still, through all the growth, I continued to struggle with depression. Oddly enough, my depression seemed to be growing in intensity. Every morning when I awoke I was plagued with thoughts of suicide. It was like a bad habit I couldn’t break. However, I wasn’t shy about asking for help at church. I was so convinced that Jesus was the answer to every need that I regularly visited the counseling office. The counsel I received always helped, but the problem of depression was never completely eliminated.
I could not understand why. I had the gift of eternal life and total forgiveness from Jesus. I had a loving pastor who taught me much about God and the Bible. I had a wonderful husband and financial security, so I no longer had to work to survive. Yet I still felt like I had nothing to live for. What was the matter with me? Was a part of me missing, just like with my mother? I was still afraid that I would end up crazy like her. If I had all I wanted and still felt lacking, if I had much to be happy about and yet remained depressed, if I had everything to live for and still wanted to die, then what hope was there for me? I was certain that Jesus was the answer to my every need, and if He couldn’t help me, then nothing could.
As the suicidal feelings increased, Michael urged me to call the counseling office again. I was embarrassed at the frequency with which I made appointments there, but the staff didn’t seem discouraged by this. They ushered me into the assistant pastor’s office and I told him about the length and severity of this depression, plus the suicidal feelings that weren’t letting up.
He thought a moment, then said, “I think you’d better see Sara Anne.”
Sara Anne turned out to be a pastor’s wife and a member of the regular counseling staff at the church. She was steeped in the Word of God and had great faith to pray for and see people set free from emotional pain. She was highly knowledgeable about people with my kind of problem and was one of the most powerful ministers of God I’ve ever met.
I entered her office and sat in the chair across the desk from her. She looked up from her papers and gave me a big smile. She had a beautiful face of intelligence, understanding, and warmth, and I felt comfortable in confessing my problems and past to her. She listened for a long time, nodding thoughtfully and seeming not the least bit shocked by anything I said.
“You need deliverance,” she stated matter-of-factly when I had finished talking. “Do you know what deliverance is?”
I shook my head. I had heard the term but didn’t understand it. It sounded like a strange activity involving red-eyed demons and whirlwinds, but I could tell by her calm demeanor that this was not what she meant.
“Don’t let the word ‘deliverance’ frighten you,” Sara Anne explained. “It’s a process of becoming everything God made you to be. Deliverance removes all the past brokenness and bondage from a person’s life so that the real you can come forth. A lot of people are afraid of deliverance because they think it will change them. But deliverance doesn’t
change
you; it
releases
you.
“I’m talking about oppression and not possession,” she continued. “There are spirits that attach themselves to you. They can come into anyone’s life through the work of the devil, who has been allowed to influence our lives through our own sin. Our responsibility is to pray for deliverance from whatever oppression is tormenting you, whether fear or suicidal thoughts or whatever. Second Corinthians 1:10 says that Jesus will
continue
to deliver you. Deliverance is like salvation in that we don’t earn it. It is God’s gift to us.”
She continued, “I think we should fast and pray and meet again next week to see what God wants to do for you. Certain deliverance will not happen in your life except by prayer and fasting.”
“Fasting?” I gulped.
I had heard about fasting because Pastor Jack taught about it. In fact, the whole church was supposed to fast every Wednesday. I guess I thought Pastor Jack was speaking to the church staff, the elders, and the superspiritual. Surely he wasn’t talking to me.
“Yes, there is a certain kind of release that will not happen in your life without prayer and fasting. It is an act of denying yourself and positioning God as everything in your life. Fasting is designed to loose the bonds of wickedness, undo heavy burdens; set the oppressed free, and break every yoke.”
“Fasting ... of course,” I said hesitantly, unwilling to reveal my true feelings of concern that I might die in the night if I went to bed without dinner. “How long?” I held my breath.
“You should stop eating Sunday at sundown and I will see you Wednesday morning at ten A.M.,” she said confidently.
“Do I just drink water during this time?” I questioned.
“Yes, water. You don’t have any physical problem that would prohibit you from doing that, do you?”
“Oh, no,” I answered, trying to think of something.
“Now during that time you must be much in prayer. Ask God to bring to your mind every wrong sexual relationship or encounter you’ve ever had, every sin you’ve committed, every occult practice you’ve been involved with, and list them all on paper. Bring it with you next week.”
“I’ll be writing day and night,” I thought to myself in horror. “What are you going to do with the paper?” I asked, trying to mask my concern.
“When you’ve confessed it all and we’ve prayed, you will tear it up and throw it away.”
“Good,” I said with great relief, and she laughed heartily at my response.
I left Sara Anne’s office feeling hopeful that God was going to do something for me. The fast actually seemed like an adventure, and I was glad I was being forced to do it.
The first two days of the fast brought no problems. I worked on my list of failures and drank water every time I felt a hunger pang. On the morning of the third day, as I was getting ready for my appointment with Sara Anne, she telephoned to say she was sick and needed to postpone our meeting for one week.
Instantly my hopes were dashed to the ground. I could hear the congestion in her lungs, and she could barely talk. She was apologetic, and of course I understood. But instead of seeing this as the devil’s attack upon her body, I believed the devil’s lie that there would never be deliverance for me.
“See, it’s never going to happen,” I heard the voice in my head say. “You’ve had these depressions for 20 years. It’s never going to be any different. You were a fool to hope otherwise.”
During the week that followed, the depression became so bad that when Michael wasn’t home I lay in bed for hours from sheer exhaustion. Sara Anne instructed me to fast again, just as we had the previous week. I had lost all hope of anything being accomplished through it, but I fasted anyway. Out of obedience I would do what Sara Anne said and let her discover for herself that nothing was going to change.
On the morning of the third day I wearily got out of bed and dressed, half-expecting the phone to ring and the appointment to be canceled. But no one called. Just before I left, Michael and I prayed that God would work a miracle.
Once in Sara Anne’s office, we got down to the issues immediately. She had me renounce all my occult involvement, specifically naming each type of practice and asking God for forgiveness. “Let your astrologers come forward,” she read from the Bible, “those stargazers who make predictions month by month, let them save you from what is coming upon you. Surely they are like stubble; the fire will burn them up. They cannot even save themselves from the power of the flame. ”
1
“ Let no one be found among you who ... practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord.”
2
What the Bible said about the occult was pretty clear. If you are aligned with it, you cannot be aligned with God. I remembered Pastor Jack saying, “The occult is real in its power, but wrong in its source. It derives its power from the realm of darkness.”
At first I didn’t want to believe that these things were wrong. I had always thought of them as a method for getting closer to God. But I believed what Jesus said and that the Bible was God’s Word. So if God said these things were wrong, I was willing to give up my involvement with them. Yet somehow, in my lack of complete spiritual awakening, I had never thought to
verbally
break the ties I had established with the realm of darkness. I thought that to just stop practicing these things was enough. But I was wrong. I had been aligned with evil and had never sought to identify and break its powerful hold over my life. When Sara Anne read those Scriptures, I knew that this was exactly what I had to do. She instructed me to renounce each practice specifically, and so I did.
“Heavenly Father,” I began my confession, “I bring before you my involvement with spirits other than Your Spirit. In the name of Jesus I renounce astrology, I renounce fortune-telling, I renounce Ouija boards, I renounce reincarnation, I renounce seances, I renounce numerology, I renounce tea-leaf reading, I renounce horoscopes, I renounce automatic writing, I renounce sorcery, I renounce hypnotism, I renounce Yoga, I renounce astral projection, I renounce spiritism, I renounce ESP, I renounce tarot cards, I renounce palm-reading, I renounce mind control, I renounce transcendental meditation, I renounce levitation, I renounce false religions. I recognize these practices as satanic and I confess my involvement as sin. I bind these powers of darkness and in Jesus’ name I break any hold they have had on me.”

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