Out of Darkness: a journey of hope and healing

By Rebecca Kylie

We all have darkness hidden inside. Secrets locked away that whisper lies about who we are and our value. As hard as it is, we need to confront this darkness and bring the Light into these dark places. We need to come face to face with our past and break the hold it has on our future.

We are loved, beautiful and full of God giv

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebecca Kylie
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648843122

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Out of Darkness

A Journey of Hope & Healing

© Rebecca Kylie 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmited in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permision of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Angency.

All scriptural references are NIV unless otherwise stated.

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® NIV®

Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society®

Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Published by:

Rebecca Kylie

WA, Australia

Typesetting: Rebecca Kylie

Cover Design: Rebecca Kylie

Cover Image: Kiwihug on Unsplash

https://unsplash.com/photos/ZzHnFYMYBrg

ISBN: 978-0-6488431-2-2

Dedicated to

Abraham’s Heirs

May you rise in the knowledge

of who you are, and take the

land promised you.

Contents

Wrestling with God: Questions....................1

Never too far away: Love............................19

Everything is against you: Promises............29

Strong and Courageous: Shield....................39

Battle of Fear: Be Still.................................49

Fight the Good Fight: Warfare.....................63

Letting Go: Surrender.................................79

For Such a Time as This: Purpose................89

Royal Authority: Position............................101

Quiver is Full: Power..................................113

Holding On: Rest........................................127

CHAPTER I

Wrestling with God

Questions

There was a time in my life when I called on God to help me to deal with a part of my heart that was locked away. I didn’t fully understand what I was asking God to do, or what I was stepping into but I continued to ask. Whenever this darkness would overwhelm me I would cry out to him and he would respond. I knew he was responding, as he always did, with a question, ‘Are you sure?’ At the time, I found it a strange question and was quite frustrated by his continuing to ask it and not just help me like I wanted him to. To unlock a part of my heart, to break through all that was barricaded and let the light shine in. To extinguish the darkness I so longed to be free of.

God has an amazing ability to prepare us for what lies ahead. He knows what we are walking into, what is before us on our journey. So, he prepares us. I kept asking and God kept responding for eight years. Once I came to the place where he had to break through into the darkness, I understood why he had to wait so long and asked so many times. He needed me to know that the journey is not for the faint of heart. It is not for everyone, though he longs for all to make the journey. He needed me to seek after him in order to be ready to step into this place of shadows.

I don’t know whether you are in the asking stage or at the beginning of the breaking stage, looking for hope. Either way, you are journeying into the abyss, inside your own darkness. It is this journey that will bring you face to face with the worst of who you are, what others have done to you, and what you have done to yourself and others. You will confront skeletons and demons in this closet and God will reveal himself to you in a whole new way. You will question why you stepped into this place, and God will remind you of those times you called out to him because the darkness was eating you from the inside out.

He reminds us of why we called out because he is breaking through doors in that place full of gloom and fear. He is tearing down walls built up by shame and pain. He is dispersing the shadows and letting the light in with each brick and plank removed. Sometimes he does it gently, when it is particularly painful, other times it feels like he is using a sledgehammer. Each step forward, each piece removed, as painful as it is you are walking the darkness with Jesus and will come out the other side a new creation.

There are others who have walked the journey to healing ahead of you. Some tried to put everything back in the box and to board it up, though the darkness always seeps as we all know too well. I want to show you some of the people who made it to the other side and how God used their brokenness to bring glory to himself. This is the very reason we step into this dark place. We feel it is holding us back from all that he has for us. We long to be used by our heavenly Father, to have significance, importance, meaning.

We try to break the mould we have been placed in, being pushed down and not knowing how to get up. We hear the Holy Spirit speaking to our spirits reminding us that we are made for more than this. We hear the words spoken over us and we start speaking them to ourselves, and before long, we start believing them. It could be years or decades later and these beliefs are still undermining all that we are working towards in relationships, work endeavours, parenting and even our relationship with God.

Jacob battled with the labels he was given. His name meant ‘he grasps the heal’, which culturally translates as a ‘deceiver’. Every time someone spoke to him, they spoke this over him. They were telling him, You are nothing! You are a liar. You have no value. No good will ever come to you. I know many of us have heard similar things. People speaking negative words over our lives. When it is all we hear, it somehow becomes a part of who we see ourselves to be. Jacob was no different.

He lived up to his name and everyone’s belief of him. He deceived. He tricked his brother into giving him his birthright, which was a double portion of inheritance. Not stopping there, he also fraudulently gained his father’s blessing, intended for his first-born son. He didn’t make great choices, and it didn’t help that his mother was scheming right along with him. It all came to a head when Jacob had to deal with the consequences of his choices. He had to run away so his brother didn’t kill him in retaliation! Ultimately, this was the best thing to happen to him as it placed him exactly where God could reach him.

Have you ever found yourself in this place you are not quite sure how you got there? One minute things were going okay and then everything was just so messed up and there didn’t seem to be a way out. God is always the way out. God didn’t need Jacob on the run. Jacob was very resourceful and could work things out for himself but right at this point, Jacob was at the end of what he could do for himself. He was broken by what had happened. The situation created space for God to move into.

All my life, all I ever wanted was to get married and be a mother. I loved looking after other people’s kids and I did so from 13 years of age. Kids responded well to me and I enjoyed the space to just be without over-thinking. When it came time to have my first child, I was so excited. The first year was amazing. He was a fun boy with lots of energy. He was crawling from 5 months and climbing everything from 8 months. Once he was walking, he started to become hard work.

As a toddler we used child locks and gates around the house, spending big money trying to prevent him from getting into everything. By the time he was two years old he could open every child lock on the market. It was exhausting. And the bigger he got the bigger the problems got. We had to deal with a short attention span at school and struggling to interact with his peers appropriately. When I use to drop him off to school he would have to be taken from me screaming so he wouldn’t run off when I left.

By this stage I had my second son and he was a child that I couldn’t put down. He wouldn’t go to anyone else willingly, including my husband. He cried all his first year and I descended into Post Natal Depression. Here I was dealing with all these issues and I completely agreed with what everyone was telling me. I was the problem.

I wasn’t parenting correctly. I wasn’t instilling appropriate boundaries and needed to be firmer. I needed to listen more and give them more attention and use attachment parenting. I needed to detox my children’s diet to help them with their sensitivities that were affecting their behavior. While many of these may have been good advice because I didn’t know who I was, I was easily influenced. I was inconsistent in my parenting because I was convinced I was doing something wrong and if I changed what I was doing, that would be the answer. Please understand I love my children, it just wasn’t what I had expected. I had gone into parenthood with the wrong expectation. I was so desperate the know who I was, that by becoming a mum, I thought it would relieve that internal tension.

This belief that I was the problem was deeper than just my parenting, yet this was the process by which God brought it fully to the surface. It took me a long time to see clearly but I spent many nights crying about my kids and ways to help them. What I was really in need of was peace while I travelled the journey of raising kids.

At this stage, after being married six years and attending church together since before we were married, my husband told me that he no longer wanted to attend church. I was devastated. It added to the already heavy burden I was feeling with my kids. While I felt the pain of disappointment for many months after that, I soon discovered this was not a truly bad thing.

I always had a vision of my husband and I seeking the Lord together with all our hearts. It didn’t happen. I always wanted to go into full-time ministry as a couple, this was the end of that dream. What I didn’t realise though was that by my husband being authentic with what he really believed and not faking his faith, it enabled me to leave a church I wasn’t being fed in and find a church that enabled me to grow. It was actually God creating space for himself in my life. This was the lead up to me stepping into my own darkness after asking of years, and the beginning of my life truly unravelling in God’s hands.

God is not scared of our mess. He will reach right into the middle of it and call us to Him. While Jacob was on the run from his brother, God gave