Many of us have had very difficult situations to overcome in life. If each of you were to write to me about some of the most painful events in your life, I would receive an array of utter devastation that each that you have faced. Yet underlying to each would be the footprints of pain that now walk the halls of your heart. Pain meant to tie your every thought to the worst of life. I understand pain linked to difficult events. The footsteps of my painful past ran a regular pathway through my thinking. I became imprisoned by the pains of what life had offered. Then the Lord started opening my heart to see how I had allowed my thinking to become altered by the pain. Where faith had been the strongest emotion in my life, I had allowed pain to become dominate. Where hope had readily sprang from my heart, I had allowed fear of being hurt again to reign. It starts slowly, these changes…I had allowed Fear to start speaking louder than my Faith was…and I had started listening to it more than I was the comforting love of my Lord Jesus Christ. Many of us fall into this cycle of thinking. We don’t mean to allow this to take place, but it does. God started helping me to understand that the Fear is a natural temptation of life, but it didn’t have to be something that I gave in to. But if I started spending more time staring at Him than I did my past pains, I would start gaining an inner strength that I would be able to use to fight against those temptations of fear. God was right. Honestly, I have to fight down painful thoughts over my past, but I do live now in a freedom that I had not been experiencing prior. The painful things of my past happened, there is nothing I can do to change that fact, but what I can do, and am doing in the STRENGTH of Christ, is learning that His love in my life is far greater than that pain ever was. I will never truly be able to express to the Lord how grateful I am for this experience with Him, but I will do my BEST in life to continue to share with you all the utter love that is available in Jesus Christ for those of us that have been broken in life due to any number of reasons. For each of you, I wish only that your journey with Christ can become one that starts touching the freedoms that are available in the Love of Jesus. Pastor Daniella