2022 Re-Phew! The Power of Testimony

I just have to ‘re-phew’ this last year. What is a re-phew? It’s when you review all the events in the last year and say over and over again, ‘Phew! How did I get through that experience?’

Hello, my loved fellow human!

This year did not disappoint as my record continued with every year of my life being between eventful and super eventful.

How about you? Has your last year made you re-phew?

And if you felt that your year was rather uneventful or even dull or boring, is that a bad thing? I invite you to re-phew anyway. Many times there are more ‘Phew! How did I get through that experience?’ events than we at first remember.

A few learning experiences I had the honor of encountering this year:

Loss of a family member of my generation. That changes a person’s world.
Trying to learn German. Man, is this language challenging! My ability to converse is getting better, but I am far from elegant or even understanding vast portions of communication.
Juggling a job that includes traveling, serving ministries, running a website, motherhood, a relationship, and doing my own internal work to be more Christ-like.
Taking in two Ukrainian families. We worked so hard to help them. There is so much running around, paperwork, and needs. It was worth it but very intense on top of everything else.
Wrote two books.

Alright, I’ll stop there for now. My guess is you have quite a list yourself.

All these experiences we are having are important. They might not all be comfortable, but they are important. Those experiences become a life lived, a testimony made by the lessons you choose to get out of the experiences. We all choose what our testimony says.

What is a testimony?

In my own words, it is a first-hand legal account of what you think is true in what has happened. You are a ‘witness on a stand,’ so to speak.

There is a Scripture that says that we “conquer Satan by The Blood of The Lamb and by the word of our testimony, and by not loving our lives even unto death” (Revelation 12:11).

We quote these powerful Scriptures to one another in posts on social media so often that it’s like going to church where everyone knows the church lingo, but somehow it does not change us on the inside. We get to feel powerful in ‘knowing The Truth,’ and somehow, we move our attention onto the next thing that might give us that powerful feeling.

Overall, my conclusion is that we are missing the points of these powerful scriptures. I think some of the main points are:

Powerful scriptures should help us to feel humbled at how hard loving is and choosing to love even unto death; allowing us not to hold on to grudges, allowing us to let go of frustrations, disappointments, fears, and yes, even allowing us not hold on to fear of death.
Scripture should lead us to forgive others and ourselves, especially when we can’t find a good reason to forgive. This is an aspect of not loving our lives even unto death. This way of thinking kills our pride that wants to hold on to bitterness, grudges, and guilt. I just watched this video of a man who said, ‘forgiveness and happiness are the same thing.’

What do you think? Are forgiveness and happiness the same thing?

Scriptures should bring us to a point of gratitude, even when some of the events of our lives are drastically wrong and difficult. What I am trying to say is: what you CHOOSE to believe about an experience you have had – aka. your testimony – should have some element of gratitude towards something in that event. This is so super hard to do. I realize this. I will share a personal example a little later.
If powerful scriptures are not helping you to make up your mind and testimony to include the elements of humility, love, forgiveness, and gratitude, I have found that it is a sign that Scripture may be being read from a place of perfectionism, condemnation, and control issues. Man, am I tattling on myself with that list (a very, very sad face on my head right now). I could not have made up that list if I had not been guilty of such attitudes. BUT my testimony continues that our Good Loving God ain’t finished with me yet! LOL!

Making being ‘Owned by Love’ practical

If you are familiar with the newsletters and materials I produce to try and help you in your spiritual walk, then you know that I love to try to make it all practical – something you can actually do in everyday living and not just shout out scriptures and spiritual lessons you have memorized. So here, let me put all these ideas I have mentioned so far into a sharing of one part of my personal ‘re-phew’ that might be used as a template for yourself if you like.

Now here is my personal example about choosing to believe:

I’m going to take the first event I mentioned in my list of things that happened this year, that a family member died.

I am clear in my testimony of what happened. But as I think we all know, more questions about the event always arise when you are on a stand in court which becomes part of a testimony.

Let’s make this a little bit easier for me in this example by answering what, when, where, why, and how. And I will break down with each how to have a balanced testimony with ‘how to overcome by The Blood of The Lamb and the word of our testimony, even unto death’. I will honestly struggle with that last one of even unto death as I am still trying to kill fear and pride in myself, which seems to take time in all of us. I see progress, but there is always something else popping up to be healed and strengthened with God’s help.

First book I ever wrote finished this year! It was a work driven by gratitude to God and love for my fellow humans.

What?

Word of testimony: A family member died, and I am a witness who saw it.

The Blood of The Lamb: Whatever choices were made and whatever happened before this final event and including the final event, is forgiven by the strongest power there is, which is The Love of The Power of Christ’s sacrifice, which makes this physical death nothing since the person will live for eternity.

Not loving life unto death: This family member and I forgave one another for whatever we could. We killed some of the life of pride within ourselves and thanked God for His personal forgiveness first. This put us in a deeper state of humility, love, forgiveness, and gratitude. Personally, I still have some weaker, but lingering negative emotions and use my tools every day to chip away at them, so they will disintegrate. It will happen. I repeat slowly, with conscious choice, over and over when I have some kind of negative emotions that I fully forgive and release. And I thank God that He has fully forgiven the deceased family member and me.

Now on to…

When?

Word of testimony: It happened earlier this year in January.

The Blood of The Lamb: The Blood of Christ covers every spot of time.

As Revelation 13:8 says- ‘And all who dwell on earth will worship it (The Beast), everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.’

Christ’s blood was accounted as already spilled before the foundations of the world were laid. Every spot of time has The Blood of Christ as the highest law.

So whenever this family member lived and died, The Blood is active. As far as I know, this family member did not worship The Beast. That’s my testimony of what I know.

Not loving life unto death: Choosing to give such a positive testimony of God’s highest power of Love through His Son’s sacrifice definitely ticks off The Beast. Accusation, control, pride, and thinking someone other than God is right is worshiping The Beast.

Not giving in to accusation, control, pride, but on the contrary, giving room and acceptance to God’s wisdom and believing in His Goodness in my life is renouncing Satan.

Since I do my best to overcome the beastly tendencies, well, let’s just say I’m not keeping my life safe from the prince of the power of the air (Satan).

Where?

Word of testimony: It happened here in Germany in a hospice unit.

The Blood of The Lamb: Just like there is no time when The Blood is not active, there is no place where The Blood does not cover. I will say that even though this last sentence is true, a person’s free will can choose not to allow that highest law to apply to them. A person is free to reject the sacrifice of The Blood of Jesus. I did not see or hear this person rejecting Jesus’ sacrifice on their behalf.

Not loving life unto death: Losing a family member can lead to despair. Losing a family member can lead to doubt: will the family member who died go to Heaven or Hell? Losing a family member involves a lot of work connected to ‘putting things in order’, which can lead to frustration: Why me? Why now? Does God not see that I have already so many tasks to manage? Why am I alone in this mess? Satan feeds on these feelings. He thrives on our abyss.

Whilst I was touched by all the emotions mentioned above, I managed to stay true to Our Savior. God is good to everyone and this new situation allowed me to practice gratitude to God. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD (Job 1:21).

I trust that God loves everyone more than any of us could. So I trust God with that person’s eternal life. I am not afraid of His judgement.

Again, Satan hates such testimonies that point to The Highest Law. It means that Satan is not glorified, but Christ is instead, and how powerful Christ is over everyone else. My enemies, who want all humans to perish, will not be happy with the word of my testimony and about the power of The Blood of Christ, which shows the love and true nature of God.

The passing of a family member made me stop and remember to look at beauty and consider each moment I have left.

Why?

Ok, before I answer this one, let me point out that this is where any accusor likes to linger the longest. Why? This is where they get their ‘juice to attack the strongest’. The accusor is trying to find who is guilty with this question. And the accusor wants you to go into blaming someone else and/or into personal shame from a place of fear of the consequences of being the guilty party. This question will be where most of the fight in your personal reviews will take place.

Word of testimony: Why did this person die of cancer? Whew! This is a tough one. I would say it started with Adam and Eve making a poor choice, where death entered in with sin. And then every human after that, excluding only Christ, but including the person who passed away and me, made some poor choices on top of Adam and Eve’s choices. This soup of humanity’s poor choices led to sickness and death for all of us. WE ALL, TOGETHER as a human race, are guilty of the sickness and disease on this planet.

We would not have made a better choice than Adam and Eve did. I know this because I see the choices we have made after their fall, and they have been no better.

To dig deeper here, though, since I know Satan likes to accuse us day and night in any way possible, I linger here and try to think up as many things as I can that someone who wants to make me guilty would think. I try to hear the accusations of the enemies.

If I linger here on why this person died of cancer and if I had even a sliver of responsibility, I truly can’t answer the question. Many times I can find a slew of reasons I had something to do with a situation, but this one eludes me other than I hold guilt like everyone else on how we have treated this planet that has contributed to the increase in cancer.

In other cases, when I do find a slew of reasons I might be responsible for a situation, then I try not to hide or look away, and I see what I can learn from any mistakes I have made. I try to learn how to do better in the future. And then I go straight into The Blood of The Lamb.

The Blood of The Lamb: Thankfully, The Blood of The Lamb, showing God’s mercy, can be liberally applied. But, WE have to apply it of our own free will. It looks something like this: “Lord, I am sorry for my responsibility for what I have done wrong in this situation. I ask for forgiveness and help to do better in the future. Please help me to overcome doing things wrong because I am usually not strong enough on my own to overcome them. I plead The Blood of Christ to pay for my sins in this incident first! And I thank You that You have forgiven me fully. And now being cleansed by The Blood, I plead The Blood for all other guilty parties! May The Blood make us ALL innocent before You!”

Now, I realize at this point there probably are a TON of questions going through your head. What about those who did not choose to have The Blood apply to them? What happens to the people that know nothing about Christ or The God of the Bible? How do I know my intercession of applying The Blood on their behalf, for those in those categories works at all? Can I trust that God will take care of the people I care about and not send them to hell or eternal nothingness?

So many individuals are desperately plagued by those questions that it makes them terrified of God and terrified of making mistakes, and terrified for their loved ones. I believe a healthy respect for a being who created you and is more powerful than you and anything or anyone else is a good idea. Power is a biiiiig thing to respect. We respect electricity and fire, which are huge powers too. So yeah, respect and some fear are good. BUT, the one lie Satan made us all bite into from the beginning of humanity is that God is the one who is trying to torture mankind, and He makes things unfair. Satan is the one who projects his own evil nature onto God.

I mean, sheesh! How can a God who believes in us and tells us that everyone should love and respect everyone else be bad? THAT is God’s true nature. How can a God who made us from love, sustains us from love, and much patience be the bad one here?

Yes, I have read the Bible several times, and I am aware that there are some scary things in there that don’t make sense to us. Some areas of the Bible probably make most of us question how God could be good while making something bad happen or allowing something bad to happen from our perception that we read in that inspired book. I get the difficulty in trying to get one’s mind and heart to trust God completely after reading the Bible all the way through or even parts of the Bible. If you do struggle with this issue, as I sure did, I just got done writing a book on how to break through to possibly seeing God as the innocent one and the good one and then putting Satan’s nature and our nature squarely on the shoulders of who that nature truly rests. It will be out the beginning part of 2023. AND I have another book that helps start breaking down the fears we carry around about God and His goodness which you can get here.

A prayer to use

Not loving life unto death: This one I will say as a prayer so you can see that this review of one’s life for the year can just become a template for what to pray for and how to pray.

“Father, I choose to trust You with my life and my death.”

“I choose to trust You and Your love for other people’s life and death.”

“I choose to believe, even if I cannot understand it right now, that You are fully loving towards all of Your creation, and You will lovingly deal with all the situations that have ever been and be fair, just, loving, and perfect. I might not understand how this is so from my limited physical perspective, but I choose to believe it anyway by faith.”

“If You are not that loving, then everything You have created, including me, is in serious trouble, and existence is veeeery scary. I trust that You are Pure Love and have a perfect plan.

“We are safe with You as The Creator and Sustainer of everything. That is my testimony, God. I trust you with my life and death and with the life and death of everyone else.”

Yeah, that prayer should give you something to grab hold of and tweak as you feel led. Oh! And if you have a hard time fully believing the words of that prayer, you can say it anyways and just add in honesty to God that You believe in what you are saying one percent or ten percent only. Then ask Him to help heal your perception of the percentage that is left. He will help you if you ask for it. It will be a journey to change your perception. Don’t expect results overnight. Very few times has my perception changed overnight. But I get totally surprised by how He changes my perception by the events that start happening in my life that teach me something that then changes my perception of Him. It works. I use this all the time. And like I said, read my book that helps with this issue also.

More concretely in that moment of loss of my loved one: Not loving life unto death means giving it all up and in the hands of our Lord: the pain, the frustration, the guilt, the anger, the fear. Everything that involves my little being who wants to be in control, wants to know, wants to have: this earthly part of me has to die. In giving it all up to God’s power, to God’s goodness, I am making a choice to kill ‘my old man’ within me and let Christ’s nature live in me instead.

Taking a moment to be thankful on a business trip in Switzerland.

How?

Word of testimony: This person died of cancer. I witnessed it with my own eyes.

The Blood of The Lamb: Thankfully, even though we all sooner or later experience a physical death, we get to have eternal life, if we want it because Christ paid for it with His blood. Permanent death is not forced on any human. It is a choice that each human makes for himself.
Speaking of choice, Satan is into giving us choices but no good choices so that he can control us. God gives real choices. As Moses said in Deuteronomy 30:19 ‘…I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days…’

I am taking this verse out of its natural context only to prove the point that God gives genuine choices. Satan does not.

Not loving life unto death: Well, we all face our ‘Beasts’ in this life that would like to scare us into making poor choices regarding what our testimony will be about all things we experience. Our beasts are scary since The Beast has the power to take your physical life or the life of those you love when you choose to not play nice with him and reject his offerings.

Perfect Testimony?

I don’t know if I will always be successful in making a perfect testimony that leads to elements of humility, love, forgiveness, and gratitude, which glorifies God’s complete love and all power over everything and everyone. I don’t know if I will deny Christ in some way in the future as I am being tested and purified by my human experiences. Will I be able to face fearful situations and even unto death not worship The Beast? Will I stand up as Stephan (Acts 7) did in the midst of the Sadducees and Pharisees who were filled with hate, control issues, and poison from being possessed by their anger and fear? Will I lay my life down and stand for what is right even when it costs me my physical life?

Well, I don’t know. I see cowardice in myself still in some situations. Other times, I see courage in myself to trust God. But I won’t stop practicing to get better. And the way I can get stronger for the experiences and tests left in my life is to review and ‘re-phew’ what I have already experienced and done in those experiences so far. By evaluating where I have been and where I am at, I can then have the chance to humble myself and ask God to finish the work He has so graciously started. I know I can’t succeed without His strength. And I know that my strength is tied into my joy in The Lord (what good He has done for me and everyone else) Nehemiah 8:10. So, if I continue to work on slaying all the things in me where I am not so joyous about my Lord, and I find hope that He is 100 percent good all the time (and I don’t just mean knowing it in my head. I have to know it deep within myself), then my capabilities for success rise.

I am hoping that you can now take this template, based on my example, of how to review your experiences in this last year. My strong desire is that you too can get traction on making a habit of producing a more balanced testimony that will make you spiritually stronger and bring more health to you physically and spiritually. Pretty please also use the template to see how to receive forgiveness by forgiving yourself. You cannot receive the forgiveness of God when you reject the forgiveness by not forgiving yourself at the same time.

If you are angry with God or have doubts about Him being a hundred percent good then, another pretty please with a cherry on top, download and read the free e-book which is already out and the one which is coming very soon. I made them especially for anyone struggling with these issues. I desired strongly to write these books for you for decades because it has tools that I feel God gave me for my own breakthroughs from being mad at Him and being terrified of Him. These tools work! Over decades I tested them on myself and with others.

May your re-phews for this year go well and set you up for success in becoming prepared for the return of our Messiah!

I can’t wait to hear what you think about it.

We Are Owned By Love,

Katrina