Brave Surrender Read online

  When Jesus took me back to my years with Greg, it surprised me that I could see the glory and redemption even in this story. I saw the prayers of my grandparents commanding angels to surround us and fight on our behalf. And I saw a little girl who refused to be broken or allow her voice to be silenced. Jesus reminded me that I used to go in my room at night, turn on my music in my little cassette player (my favorite was Whitney Houston), and sing my heart out. He showed me that even in that moment as I listened to pop music, He was there with me, loving every minute of my singing and encouraging me to never stop.

  I also saw that Jesus provided moments of peace and safety for me in the midst of the long battle. Even the one year spent by the ocean seemed to be a gift. Every time I looked outside my window and saw the ocean waves, I felt so much peace and happiness deep down in my soul. It was as if God created the ocean just to give me a beautiful view and bring me comfort. Never mind that it was only one year—it was just the boost I needed. The freezing winter when we lost our heat and electricity was also a gift, because I didn’t have to endure certain difficult things I was experiencing at school at the time.

  And the relief—the sweet, amazing relief—when Greg left! To this day, I have no idea why he decided not to come back, and I don’t need to know either. When I looked at that memory, I saw the heart of ten-year-old Kim finally resting after a long battle, while Jesus stood close by, keeping guard while I carried the same confidence that He had built into my DNA the exact things I needed to endure the battles that lay ahead—a fighting spirit that wouldn’t accept defeat and big emotions that caused me to love fiercely, stand up for what is right, and stay loyal to the end.

  It felt so wonderful to be so known. Though I could talk all day about explanations and excuses for the poor choices of these men, in the end, their decisions, the plan of the enemy, and the abuse still did not stop God from loving me and meeting me. It didn’t take away from His plan for my life, and it didn’t change the fact that He created me and that I belong to Him.

  A Pure Heart and a Great Purpose

  Jesus also took me back to the memory of the woman who stopped me from worshiping in church, and my mom telling me I needed to know when to stop. Through my new eyes, I saw that everything I had believed about that experience had been a lie. Jesus didn’t see a little girl putting on a show for attention, but one who was full of pure intention as she sang and danced in total and complete surrender, pouring love and adoration out to Him. Her innocent heart had been ignited with the hope of a future. I could see the joy on the Father’s face as His little girl worshiped Him.

  Everything I had felt, hoped, and believed in that moment about God’s love and His purposes for my life had been real, but the lie of shame had led me to cast it aside. When I realized what had been stolen in that moment, it broke me. How different could my life have been if the woman hadn’t sat me down? How different could my relationship with God have been if I had not been overcome by shame, embarrassment, and anger?

  Thankfully Jesus gently reminded me that with Him, nothing is wasted. Tempted as I was to see myself as lost because of one moment, He never saw me as lost. I was His from the very beginning, and no amount of shame, anger, or pain could destroy what God had placed deep inside me. A fresh conviction of His sovereignty and the power of His redemption in my life settled deep in my heart.

  Jesus also showed me the spiritual stakes of this whole experience and its consequences. Through my embarrassing experience with the woman, the enemy had been trying to attack three things in my life—my calling, my identity, and my relationship with the church.

  When I sang “Amazing Grace” in the talent show, the gift I carry in worship made its first appearance, and a huge part of who I am as a worship leader was birthed. I surrendered to God in hunger and desperation, experienced an encounter and breakthrough moment with Him, and then shared it with others, leading them into their own moment of surrender and breakthrough in worship—the very pattern that has played out again and again throughout my life and ministry. I still remember opening my eyes after I sang and seeing people crying and being moved into worship. Likewise, when I stepped into worship at church the next Sunday, I knew I was doing what I had been created and called to do.

  Knowing this, the enemy wanted nothing more than to shut down my gift and keep me from living in a place of surrender to God. He engineered an attack in which I felt humiliated for being “out of control” and unprotected by the One who had opened that vulnerable place of love and longing in my heart in the first place. The pain of humiliation was so intense that it made me want never to be out of control or vulnerable again. I numbed my emotions to stop the pain—at the price of silencing my gift and calling.

  But the gifts and callings God places inside us are irrevocable, and there is no force on earth or in heaven that could come against or stop His love. Though the enemy wanted me to stay a scared and wounded little girl, God had set a plan into motion before any of these circumstances came about. I saw that He had been there in the moment of that painful attack, feeling my pain, yet full of strength and determination as He steadfastly covered the seeds He had planted deep inside my heart, fought for the gifts He had placed in me in my mother’s womb, and looked ahead to the worship I would one day offer Him on the other side of this long battle. Even when I believed He was not protecting me, He was.

  Jesus wasn’t just protecting me and my gift for my own sake, however, but also for the sake of those whom these gifts would serve—members of His body. This was the enemy’s other objective in attacking me—to cause pain through another believer, lead me to mistake them for my enemy, and get me to choose a path of isolation, mistrust, and distance with the church. This is a tactic he has used repeatedly in my life, as he does with all of us. Recognizing my true enemy made it much easier for me to forgive the woman for her misguided actions.

  As important as it was for me to forgive her, however, the person I needed to forgive most was myself. When I was able to do that, it finally broke the power of that shame I had listened to in that experience. That was what enabled me to stop punishing myself for my rage and let my walls of self-protection come down at last.

  Forgiving myself also broke the lid off the box of insignificance and purposelessness that shame had forced me to live in for so long. After my encounter with Jesus at the church camp, my first thought was that I wanted to do “something big” for Jesus. Dreaming and thinking big, as well as a desire for significance, flowed out of me naturally. As a child I had even dreamed of becoming the first woman president! But the enemy’s lies had shut all that down. Later, when I was a teen, he had used the moment my mom said it wasn’t my job to take care of her to double down on making me believe that my life had no purpose or value and lead me further down the path of isolation and self-destruction.

  At one point when I was in high school, some ministers visited our church. In the meeting, they called up different people and prayed and spoke truth over them. One of the ministers called me up and said to me, “It is very important to the heart of God to tell you and to make sure you know that you matter. You matter.” He said it over and over.

  At the time I hadn’t yet fully committed my life to Jesus, and I didn’t fully understand how deeply my heart cried out to feel like I mattered and had some importance and significance to the world—but, more importantly, to God. When the Lord healed my heart, I understood that this was a cry He Himself had put in me.

  The enemy had recognized it and attacked it, but in the end, God’s purpose in my life couldn’t be stopped. It didn’t matter that I was banned from high school choir. Big whoop! My destiny was set at the foundations of time, and nothing can stop what God has set into motion and what God has put inside me. I could see that little girl who danced and sang then grew into a teen who performed in pageants, sang the anthem at football games, sang with her mom at church, and moved people to tears and worship every time she sang from her heart. I could see the power of tha
t breakthrough anointing coming out as I shouted over my dad as he lay in a hospital bed. I could see the courage and strength God built into my DNA as I cared for my mom while she fought for her life. And I could see that this passion for worship was something that God placed in me from the beginning.

  Chapter 6

  MY FIRST WORSHIP TEACHER

  The journey of learning to see my identity and my past through a new lens, through God’s perspective, was the beginning of true transformation in my life. And one of the first insights I was given as I began to live out of these new beliefs was that He also wanted to change the lens through which I viewed and related to other people—particularly my family. I discovered that a person misses a lot when they grow up seeing family members through the distortion of dysfunction, anger, and pain. After I was set free from those things, I was able to see truths about the people who were closest to me that I had never seen before. And the most surprising truth of all was seeing that the one family member I had pushed away most was the one whom God wanted to use to demonstrate His love to me in a way no other person in my life had.

  As a child I never really felt angry with my mom. I saw her as a victim, just like myself. It wasn’t until she had fully moved on with George that I felt upset with her. I was jealous that she could so easily leave the past behind while I felt trapped in it, unable to move forward. As I became healed and set free, I was able not only to forgive her but also to open my heart to her. It took a lot of time, but we eventually reached a place of deeper relationship and connection. With new eyes, I could see the fierce determination and strength it took for my mom to keep going. I could also see how strong she was to have endured the cruelty and trauma. I could see her devoted love for us and the way she made time to play with us and have some fun. It became apparent that my mom had many times laid down her own ambitions and needs to take care of ours. She had found a way to look after us, even when she was very young and probably very afraid and uncertain.

  When we were little girls, I saw my sister Amy as an innocent and somewhat helpless child I was responsible to protect, and we were pretty much inseparable. Once we reached middle school and high school, however, we began coping with the pain of our traumatic childhoods in different ways. I watched as she embraced George more easily than I did, making me feel that, like Mom, she was moving on without me. As a result, I distanced myself from her, and we struggled to get along.

  After I worked through my healing and began moving toward my sister, I discovered that she too was on a journey of healing. Through my healed lens, I saw that Amy was the only person in the world who had gone through the same things as me and felt the same pain as me. I saw that she had a strength inside of her too, which she wasn’t even fully aware of yet. I saw how tender her heart was, as well as the gift of nurturing that God put inside her and protected. We both started to be vulnerable with each other and share the pain and brokenness we were processing, and thanks to that time of reconnection, we became best friends and bonded deeply and forever through our shared experiences and healing journeys.

  George was a different story. When he married my mom, I had made George my enemy. I was certain he would fail us and hurt us, and I refused to open my heart to that kind of pain ever again. As George began to do things that made me happy, I fought the temptation to change my beliefs about him. The thought that he could be a good guy was even scarier to me than believing him to be a bad guy, because it required me to risk opening my heart to being loved by him.

  Only on the other side of my healing encounter did I finally begin to see and accept that George was a friend and father who loved me, and someone whom I loved. In fact, as I looked back after my integration healing at the time George came into our lives, I began to acknowledge that not only was he not the bad guy in the story; he was the hero.

  Generous Love

  George adopted my baby brother, Matt. After Greg, Matt’s biological dad, had disowned him, I was both relieved and scared for my brother. He was only two years old, but he understood what had happened, and it was very apparent that he was in pain. For a long time, any time we mentioned “Dad” or “Greg,” Matt would clench his little fists and shout, “Don’t say that word. I hate that word!” Then he would grunt and hold his breath with a look of anguish, his little cheeks turning from bright red to almost purple, until we shouted at him to breathe before he passed out. We tried wrapping our arms around him and loving him in those moments, but it didn’t seem to help. He couldn’t verbalize everything that had happened, but he knew and felt the rejection.

  I remember the day Matt, at only two and a half years old, came to us and announced, “George is my new daddy now.” George wasn’t even married to my mom yet, but Matt had already made up his mind. A couple of years into the marriage, the adoption became final, and Matt received a new last name. It meant so much to me to know that my brother would have a very different life than I had. Matt and I have always been very close—I was more like a second mama to him than a sister. I felt so incredibly thankful to George for adopting him and taking care of him.

  After my sister and I both graduated from high school and moved to California, George wanted to do fun things with Matt almost every weekend. I called Matt regularly to see how he was doing, and on one occasion, I heard a very disappointed-sounding Matt on the phone. I asked him what was wrong. He said, “Well, Mom and Dad want to take me four-wheeling at the dunes this weekend.”

  “Um . . . wow, Matt, that sounds like such a bummer,” I said, my voice full of sarcasm. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t want to go with them,” he whined. “They are so old!”

  I burst out laughing and said, “Kid, you have no idea how good you have it!” And I was so happy that he had it so good.

  George was just as loving and generous with Amy and me. He loved country music and dancing and used to take us to the Bum Steer Dance Palace, a Christian-owned country dance place in our little farm town, to learn the two-step and line dances. He bought my sister and me button-up shirts with tassels, bolo ties, cowgirl hats, and boots and made us feel like rodeo princesses on the dance floor.

  Every once in a while, George would pick us up from school on a Friday and surprise us with a weekend trip to a waterslide park or some other fun place. Best of all, every summer he arranged a clothes shopping trip for “his girls” that made us absolutely giddy with excitement. He would book a suite at a fancy hotel, usually right next to a shopping mall, and let us order anything we wanted from room service for breakfast. We thought it was the most amazing thing to have a giant stack of pancakes and bacon delivered to our room door and eat them in bed. After breakfast, George gave each of us a wad of cash and sent us to the mall to pick out new clothes for the upcoming school year. To teenage girls who had gone through so much hardship, it felt like a dream come true.

  George loved sports and encouraged me to participate, happily providing new shoes and equipment for each sport I chose. Despite my caution toward him, something in me still wanted to please him and gain his acceptance, so I did my best to excel in this area. Track was probably my best sport—I ran hurdles—and George was never shy about cheering for me at my meets. I also started taking golf lessons and joined a putting team at school as the only girl, winning our competition at the end of the year. My senior year, I played on Mom and George’s team in a golf tournament and ended up winning “closest to pin” for the women. George, who was an avid golfer, was unbelievably proud of me and made such a big deal out of it. I tried to stuff down how happy it made me to make him proud, but it truly did.

  Unfortunately I didn’t have the same success in basketball. A tall beanpole of a girl, I was constantly tripping on my own feet and falling over. It didn’t take much for someone to bump me and send me flying—my freshman coach ended up nicknaming me “Mop” because I was always on the floor! George would laugh until tears came out of his eyes, but he kept cheering me on nonetheless.

  George was fai
thful to get up early every morning and spend time in prayer and worship. Every now and then, I would secretly listen in on his prayers, and one of the things he always prayed was, “Thank You for my girls.” He usually had tears streaming down his face.

  I couldn’t understand why he was so thankful for me and why it made him so emotional. In fact, it made me angry. Due to my experiences with my other stepdads, I had come to believe I was unworthy of love, and it was painful to hear that I might be wrong, much as I wanted to be. For the same reason, it made me mad when George would randomly come to me and tell me how much he loved me and how proud of me he was. I usually rolled my eyes and walked away or made some smart remark. I didn’t want to love him or feel happy with him, and I especially did not want to believe or feel his love for me. I felt that to do those things would leave me vulnerable to pain again.

  What No Man Had Ever Done

  Over and over, George disproved my negative beliefs about him. I kept waiting for him to be the villain and even tried to bring it out of him. I was constantly cold and rude to him, even cruel. I made it clear that I didn’t trust him, didn’t need him, and was just waiting for him to disappoint me. But even the one time I thought he finally proved me right about him—about four years into his marriage with my mom—didn’t turn out the way I expected.

  It happened one night when my cocker spaniel, who slept with me every night, woke me up barking and whining to be let out. As I opened my bedroom door, I heard the faint sound of voices arguing. Groggy as I was, it took me a moment to realize the voices were coming from Mom and George’s bedroom. I quietly walked down the hallway and pressed my ear against their door to listen. After a few seconds, I thought I heard my mom cry out, “You’re hurting me!”