Ashes to Beauty: Freedom from Shame and Deception

0:00 I would say that you are loved beyond measure. God loves you. You are significant. Your life is powerful and you have a purpose. Welcome to the iRefresh podcast where every conversation points to the life-changing power of God's living word. Let's pursue God together one conversation at a time. Welcome to another episode of iRefresh. I have with me a great new friend who is making a difference in my life. Hi, Deb. Hi. Welcome. Hey, Cheryl. Thank you so much for having me. Okay. She is a manager of Red Light Method, and she's a personal trainer.

0:40 And so we have gotten to know each other very early in the morning. So it's been great to get to know you as you've been helping me on my health journey. Yes, thank you so much, Cheryl. Thank you so much for having me today. I've seen highlights of what life has been for you and you shared snippets. I would love for you what God's put on your heart of what God has brought you through and how you've been able to overcome some real huge things in your life. Sure. Yeah. So this morning when I was at the gym, I always have wonderful quiet time with the Lord at the gym. And it's usually with him talking to me and me listening, not me necessarily talking to him, but he will talk to me between reps and sets of whatever I'm doing.

1:26 And this morning, he laid on my heart this song that's on my workout playlist. It's not one that I typically go to all the time, but he just brought it to my mind. And he said, I want you to take this perspective on what you share today with Cheryl. And it's a Christian rock punk kind of song sang by a girl. And it's called Not Dead Yet. And it's called Not Dead Yet. And the chorus of the song goes, but I'm not dead yet, so watch me burn. And in this song, the scene is set where she goes into a boxing ring with the devil.

2:07 And he keeps punching her, beating her up. She's all bloody. She's down on the ground. But she keeps getting back up. And she keeps saying, I'm not dead yet. You may be digging, thinking you're going to dig my grave right now, but I'm the one that's going to watch you bleed because I'm going to keep breathing and I'm going to keep fighting. And really, that is the basis of my testimony, really. Um... I teach a class at Victory Church. It's a life group type deal called Mind Games. And it's over Pastor Paul Doherty's book, Mind Games.

2:49 I've read it. It's wonderful. It has a great book, especially for, People have had a lot of emotional ups and downs, but to the point of even deadly. And it's just inspiring us, right, with scriptures and his journey of how to overcome. Yes. On those games that the enemy tries to play on us. Yes, practical teaching and just, again, he creates a safe space for people to open up about those kinds of things. I was teaching that class on Monday night and one of our members said, and says, she said something like, Deb, I just thought you were this good little Christian girl that had this good little Christian life with everything that you teach.

3:38 And I'm like, nope, you know the truth now. Jesus said in this life, we will have trouble. But he said, take heart, I've overcome the world. And we can overcome the world just like he did. And he said, Key word in that for me right now being there will be trouble in this world. We live in a broken world. But the cool thing is, is that when we give our hearts to the Lord, when we are completely His, nothing can snatch us out of His hands, nothing at all. And I like to describe it as when we give our hearts to the Lord, we are on God's island. Nothing can take us off of that island.

4:20 Yeah. You know, we might not always be on the beach with a fruity drink relaxing. We might be on the other side, you know, tromping through the jungle, but we're still on his island. We're still in his care. And I can see that throughout my life. And I'll often say that I see a lot of Joseph's story in my life. Yeah. When he was young, he had a vision of where God was going to be taking him, and he was so excited about that vision, and he told his brothers about it, and they were just like, we don't like this, we're going to take you out.

5:02 And as we know the story in Genesis... He went on this very up and down journey, but he always had favor with the Lord and the Lord was always with him. And no matter what dark dungeon he was in, the Lord pulled him through and pulled him out and got him to that place. And we see that in Genesis 50, 20, where he tells his brothers, all of this happened for God's glory. This didn't happen because you were trying to hurt me. This all happened to bring God glory and for the saving of many lives. And so with my testimony right now, God has brought me to an amazing place.

5:45 He's brought me through a lot of muck and mire. He's brought me through a very dysfunctional family growing up. I didn't grow up in a Christian home. I didn't. When I became a teenager, I started exploring witchcraft and new age type philosophies because I was always looking for truth. And I was looking at different family dynamics going on around me. And I just thought, this is not what life's all about. There's something better out there. There's a meaning out there. And when I was 16, my oldest stepsister came back into my life and she actually shared Jesus with me.

6:29 And God just gripped my heart. She shared some of her testimony with me and God used it to grip my heart. While I was telling her about all these new age philosophies, things that I was learning about, she was telling me, you know, Jesus is real and that's not the truth. Well, they're counterfeits, right? Yes. I think that that is, I'm glad you said that because if you look at it today, there are so many things that are enticing and they're very worldly and the new age comes in even things like the Enneagram. Um, it's very prevalent in the church, but the roots come from a new age basis of what number am I?

7:12 Well, the Lord identifies who we are in Christ. And so I'm not caught up in a number and, you know, all of those little things of the, from the horoscopes to wanting to know what our future is, because we kind of walk in fear of what's ahead of us, right? So we are enticed by the fortune telling or the cards, the tarot cards. And, The Harry Potter, I mean, there's been such a cycle over the last decade plus of things that have drawn young people, even all the books today, young readers is enticing them into the very things that you're talking about that probably gripped you at that point in time until your stepsister spoke some truth to you.

7:53 Yes. And I knew very little about genuine Christianity. I knew very little about Jesus. I was not involved in a lot of quote-unquote sinful things other than the witchcraft. I wasn't doing drugs. I wasn't rebelling. I was I was actually overperforming in school and things like that. It was a coping mechanism. But I came home that day after she shared with me, and I just remember it like it was yesterday. And I just hit my knees in my bedroom and just cried out to God and said, Jesus, I don't know who you are.

8:36 But I know that you're real and I know that I need you. So please come into my heart and just take over and show me what truth is and show me what to do. And pretty much since then, I was on fire for the Lord. and experienced some amazing prayer meetings, amazing youth meetings when I was in high school. And then when I went to college, it was a little bit different because I was in a relationship, boyfriend relationship. Very naive, very young, no guidance on how to handle anything like that in a Christian way.

9:20 Not a warning sign, huh? I didn't know what the warning signs were. Couldn't read them. And so I ended up trying to save this person. and pull them along with me into my Christian walk. And we know that that is not God's will at all. but I ended up getting pregnant when I was in college. Um, and, and at that point I gave up on myself. I gave up on my dreams. I, I originally felt called to go to Oral Roberts University, which we are both attending now.

10:02 Um, yes, I'm much older. Uh, for those who don't know, uh, I decided to go back to school when I was, uh, to start a master's. So yes, it was 40 plus years ago that I did my undergraduate work. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, we're both doing a master's program though. Yes. Yes. And that's kind of how we got to know each other is talking about our papers early in the morning. It's rough. Yeah. Anyway, back when I was 17, 18, I felt called to go to ORU, but my family that was around me was not for it. They were against it. They wanted me to go to school somewhere else.

10:45 I felt like I needed to respect and honor them. So I went a different direction. And that led to a domino effect in my life of a lot of trauma, a lot of abuse. A lot of that came out of that relationship. That relationship that I was in was with the father of my children, and And it just got to a point where I saw myself so far away from the calling that I felt on my life, from where I was with the Lord. I thought, I'm too far gone. I can't go back. I'm too deep in this mess.

11:28 I was trying to save him and ended up nearly getting myself killed because he was demon-possessed. He actually prayed to Satan to be filled with demons. And I witnessed things happen through him that you would normally only see in a sci-fi movie. But because of that soul tie that I had to him and the fact that I was so overcome with shame... I just gave up and I did not see a way out. However, I was still a spirit-filled Christian and, in that situation.

12:10 And God still pulled me through the muck and the mire. And on the other side of all of that, I came out so much stronger. And that is, I do want to tie that back to that song that the Lord gave me this morning, is that was, that was about, seven years of a situation where the devil just had me down and he was just beating me up and beating me up and beating me up. But God, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, okay, here's our way out. We're going to get out.

12:52 And so that's where the hope is. And I think we need to help people understand is it's the thoughts that you entertain. And that's what I'm hearing from you, Deb, is there are all these beating thoughts when I talk about shame. It's like, you don't feel worthy. You don't feel like you can be forgiven. You feel like you've betrayed what you know. You know the truth and you're thinking, yeah, the truth is supposed to set me free, but I'm actually making a choice and I'm not going to be forgiven. And the simple truth is that we have to accept that God forgave. If I repent, God forgives. He doesn't hold it against me. And that's the beauty that I want us to also pinpoint in this place is that God is a loving, merciful God who...

13:39 He loves us even in our state and he wants to now help us to overcome so that we're not, he's not a condemner. He's the one who wants to set us free from that. So it's that changing of our thought process of understanding what the word is. It's forgiven and I'm set free and now I'm going to live it. Now, the other part is we have to learn to forgive ourselves. Yes. Yes. I mean, I think that's been my revelation over the years is I know God who He is. I know He forgives. He's a huge God, but it's to be able to look in the mirror and say, can I forgive myself for what I know was wrong and I chose sin? And I think that journey is where God can also help us to strengthen us to say yes to trusting that the Lord helps us to see the value He has in us so that we can learn to accept us of who God has made us to be.

14:31 Yes, yes, exactly. And, you know, the enemy will do everything he can to distort our identity. And that's the biggest thing that the Lord has been teaching me over the last couple of years of the healing journey I've been on. is that the enemy from a very young age with all of us, he will take little opportunities to distort our identity, to implant in us vows and lies about ourselves in certain situations. And then as young children, those things eternalize in us.

15:11 And then we will take those things if until the Lord, until we give them to the Lord and he heals them, we carry those things into adulthood. And that leads us to make those bad relationship choices. That leads us to those self-defeating thoughts. That leads us to thinking we're not good enough. We're not strong enough. that the Lord can never use us. And when we let the Lord come into those places and do his surgery... Then we begin to see who we really are in Him. One of the things that the Lord has brought me to in the last couple of years is Psalms 139.

15:58 And I was at a point in my healing journey a couple years ago where He said to me, I want you to read this out loud every morning. Psalms 139, and he was reinforcing to me who I was in him, my identity in him, my identity as his daughter, accepted, loved, cherished, whole, because he's made me that way. And one of the things he also pointed out to me at that time, and I don't remember which verse it is, but it's where it says, I'm not. I've written all the pages of your story before anyone ever, any one of them came to be.

16:41 And so the Lord was expressing to me at that time that I already knew all of this was going to happen. And you're right where you need to be right now. And that was coming to my mind. Speaking of ORU, coming back to school. So I had the opportunity to come back to school and finish my bachelor's degree at ORU that I started, you know, 20 plus years ago. Right. Graduated in May with that. And I was going through a mix of... being very happy and grateful, very joyful, I'm getting this done, but also kind of triggered at the same time that why didn't I do this 20 plus years ago?

17:25 Why did I not? And the Lord spoke to me nearly audibly 20 years ago when I was at an orientation at ORU and said, leave it all behind and stay here with me. And I didn't listen to that because what came to my mind was the lies of the enemy. You're not worthy. You don't have enough money for it. So just forget about it. And instead of listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit at that time, I listened to those lies. And so when I was approaching graduation, I kind of had this mixture of happiness yet sorrow and regret and the Lord just said you're you're right where you need to be I wrote your story you're where you need to be right now at this appointed time and I'll go into another part of my testimony as I say that um and so Just take joy in where you're at.

18:24 Be grateful for where you're at. Look at all the open doors that you have right now. And I feel like with everything that I went through over the last 20 years, that the Lord just used it all to build me. Talking about personal training, talking about fitness, how do we get stronger? We get stronger by training hard, by challenging ourselves, by sometimes beating ourselves up. Our muscles tear and they get strained when we lift weights, but they grow back stronger. And I'm thankful for everything that I went through. And that's a weird thing for people to understand sometimes because we think of comfort and You know, we think of a lot of people think of Christianity as being comfortable and it's not.

19:11 It's the opposite of being comfortable. And if we will embrace the rough things and the hills and the valleys and the tough things that come our way, um, Even when we make bad decisions, if we will embrace those things, take those things to the Lord, He will use those things to strengthen us, to build us up and make us stronger than ever before. And it's through the obstacles that we get stronger. Mm-hmm. And so back to the point of being exactly where you're supposed to be at the appointed time, I'll tell another little part of my testimony that I've never told at like out public like this.

19:55 But the first tattoo that I got on my back, it's a butterfly about this big. And it has the scripture Esther 4.14 below it. And that's where Mordecai was talking to Esther and said, to save your people. And so when I came out of that abusive marriage from the father of my children, I came out of that just barely with my life. When I came out of that, I lived with my brother for a little while and I was not in shape.

20:37 I was almost 200 pounds. I was just not in a good place. But at least I was away from the bad situation. And I woke up this morning, this one morning in the house. Nobody else was home. And I walked into the restroom. There were no windows or doors open. I walked into the restroom, closed the door behind me. And this huge butterfly came out of the middle of nowhere. It was like this big, huge butterfly out of the middle of nowhere. When it was flying, it looked like a monarch butterfly. And it landed on the mirror right in front of me. And on the outside of it, it looked like a brown moth, but on the inside of it, it had a layer of wings that was colored like a monarch butterfly.

21:22 And I looked at this thing, I was like, good gracious, what is this? And the Lord spoke to me and he said, this is what life looks like right now. It may be brown and drabby on the outside. You're not what you want to look like. You're not who you want to be. But on the inside, I'm going to make you beautiful on the inside first. And then the outside is going to match the inside. And I put my hand next to that butterfly and it crawled onto my hand. And then I walked it downstairs and let it go outside. I've tried to find that butterfly for years. I've never been able to find it.

22:03 But I commemorated that moment with the tattoo on my back. And that's exactly what God has done in my life is he's taken all the yuck and given me Beauty for Ashes And that's what we want to encourage you and our audiences. No matter where you're at in your life right now, if you are struggling, or maybe you know someone who's struggling, maybe you're on the other side of overcoming, or maybe it's in your future, we don't know. No matter what our choices are in life, God is so merciful. He's always trying to talk to us and woo us.

22:43 And if we miss it, He's always going to try to continue to bring things into our life to get our attention. That's the great thing about is God's always trying to draw us into a place where he can communicate with us and give us that, you know, the hope that if we trust him, he will heal, he'll restore, he'll make all things new. Just like the story of Joseph, you know, it's that out of the jealousy of the brothers who threatened his life. that God turned it around, that he would rescue the whole nation, right? And more than that, right? So it's beautiful how God makes something look so awful and turn it to, wow, you have two beautiful children, you know, out of that as well.

23:25 I mean, that God turns all things together for our good. And that's the hope that you have. And So even as we're summarizing, what would you like to share with our audience, Deb, that would just encourage people wherever they're at in that stage to continue to press in and ask the Lord to help them? Sure. I would say that you are loved beyond measure. God loves you. You are significant. Your life is powerful and you have a purpose. And from the very beginning, even before you were born, you were on God's mind and He was watching you.

24:08 And even today, He's watching you. He's waiting. He's just wanting so much for you to bring your cares to Him, bring your concerns to Him, to sit with Him and listen. And if we will take the time to sit and listen to our Father in heaven, He will tell us everything that we need to know. He will guide us. He will love on us. He will show us where to go. And He's not a big judge up in heaven waiting to pound you. He's your Father in heaven, and He wants more than anything to have that beautiful, close relationship with you where you are walking step-in-step with each other.

25:00 He knows the beginning to the end, and he's just waiting to partner with you, to hug you, and to lead you where you need to go. That's beautiful. Well, thank you, Depp, for sharing your testimony. And we want to encourage you, if any of this of Depp's stories has resonated with you and you would really like prayer and encouragement, go to our website at irafresh.net to connect with us, and we will be glad to contact you, pray with you, listen and see what's going on. what you're needing, because God has hope for all of us. He cares for you and desires for you to live in a place of freedom. Amen. Amen. If this episode encouraged you, don't let it end here. Open your Bible, seek God's heart, and discover the life-changing power of His promises for yourself.

25:46 Until next time, keep pursuing the God who changes everything.