It's Not a Solo Fight: SHE Overcame

By LaShandria Redman and Renee Castillo

GOD DOESN'T WANT YOU SICK 

Don't let your diagnosis determine your destiny. 

What if one day your life changed and you were challenged with a physical affliction? This might be your current reality or the reality of someone you know. If you are silently suffering through physical illness, t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647733179

Book preview

It’s Not A Solo Fight: She Overcame

LASHANDRIA REDMAN

RENEE CASTILLO

Foreword

This book is a beautiful story about two ladies’ journey with God. It is filled with encouragement, as it propels and motivates you to find your purpose and chase after God. They go on to share their pursuit in finding Him; explaining how you, too, can experience the same life-changing relationship with your creator as they did. All it takes is you making the choice to seek after Him with all your heart. 

The authors explain how they found their faith in God. They teach you how they had to build their faith until they were able to take the limits off God and totally trust Him for the impossible. They do this by sharing their stories of trusting God.

LaShandria and Renee share their stories of healing. They both explain God as the creative healer that you need to trust completely, with all your heart. They go on to share the importance of trusting Him. In their stories, they emphasize how important it is to take the limits off God and trust Him with your whole heart and have faith that He knows exactly what He is doing with your life. He created you. As you trust God in this way, He perfects your faith. 

This is validated through the author’s personal testimonies of what God did for them. These two women were both healed through surgery instead of a sudden, supernatural experience. They share how difficult it was to trust God in this way and how they had been mocked and scoffed by other believers. Yet, they continued to trust and obey God, standing completely on His written word. They had to release their preconceived ideas of how God heals and allow Him to be the creative healer that He is. When they did this and embraced Him totally, He showed up and healed them through their surgeries. 

In the end, they saw that God is the creative healer and He heals and moves in many ways in our lives. They simply go on to share their walk by faith and explain how you need to get all the limits off God and allow Him to move in and throughout your life. They explain how you must constantly read and speak His word and cancel out all fear in order to stay strong and steadfast in who you are in God. You must depend on Him daily and not allow fear to creep in and take you off track. Keep the faith and you will fulfill your purpose and become the woman of God you were called to be.

The story of their walk will both encourage and inspire every woman to be the woman they were created to be. Your faith will be made full and your eyes will be opened to truly trusting God to bring you the testimony He has purposed just for you. This book will help you build your faith and take the limits off God, so He too can become your creative miracle worker. 

Dr. Michelle Corral

Foundress of Breath of the Spirit International Ministries, Inc.

Orange County, CA

Preface

We (LaShandria and Renee) started this journey together over two years ago. Having met and become close friends through worship dance ministry in Tucson, Arizona, we would later part ways as LaShandria moved to Oklahoma and Renee to Texas. Upon reconnecting several years later, we both discovered that we had each gone through life-threatening illnesses that had turned our worlds upside down. We believed that if God had brought each of us through our personal journeys with illness, then there was something spiritually vital that He wanted to impart to others from what we had learned. Hence, SHE Overcame was birthed. At the time of our trials, we did not have resources, such as this book, to guide or equip us during our personal battles. It is from this need that we felt compelled to reach out to other women and empower them with the right tools to apply the Word of God in their trials. There are many women who are silently suffering through physical illness and our hope is that this book will inspire them to stay strong and to hold on to hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. We wanted to reach out to other suffering women to remind them that God’s promise of healing is evident throughout His Word, and that promise is both real and relevant to their walk-through physical trauma. This book is for all women-young, old, single, married, mothers, and wives-who have ever suffered the painful battle of an unforeseen diagnosis. This book is not just for women who are currently suffering from health battles, but also for those who will go through, or have gone through a chronic illness. We pray that these words will equip and empower you to seek the Lord and trust in His unwavering and faithful promise that because of Jesus, you too can overcome.

Acknowledgments

LaShandria’s Acknowledgments:

A book can be a divine way to express the heart and soul of an author. Writing a book is a journey in itself and for me, a journey that wouldn’t have even occurred without the Lord and the leading of the Holy Spirit. I completely acknowledge the hand of God upon my life and upon this book, and for that I am thankful.

I am also thankful for so many other people:

First, to my husband, Covito, for the many times you would make sure I could write without distractions. I want to say thank you for your encouragement, support, always having my back, and being on the journey with me through sickness and in health.

To my children, Saniah, Micaiah, and Amaris, thank you for loving mommy and for being one of my reasons to write this book.

To my family, my mom, Sandra, my dad, Irving Sr., and my brother, Irving Jr., Aunt Jackie, Aunt Katy, Aunt Ciana, my mother-in-law, Mary, and all my family members; thank you for being there for me, praying, and loving me back to health.

Thank you to all of my friends and NDI church family for your calls, prayers, and uplifting encouragement while I was sick.

A special thank you to Erica Deguire, for the early stage feedback, editing and proofreading of chapters. Thank you for your encouragement.

Thank you to the editing, publishing, and marketing team at Trilogy Publishing. I appreciate your expertise and help to make this happen.

Thank you to Dr. Michelle Corral of the Breath of the Spirit International Ministries, for supporting our book and writing the foreword.

They say two is better than one, and I am a witness to this truth. I want to say thank you to my partner in writing, Renee. I had no idea God would bring us together to accomplish this, but I’m so glad He did. Thank you for taking the ride with me and sharing a piece of you, not only for the book, but also with me. You are my friend and my sister and I want to say thank you.

Renee’s Acknowledgments:

When God first put the idea of transcribing by personal journey, I had no idea that it would one day become a published book that others would be able to read as well. God certainly has plans for our lives that far surpass the limitations of our own ways of thinking. I want to first and foremost praise and thank the good Lord for healing me and preserving my life so that I might be able to share my testimony with others. Without the comfort of strength of the Holy Spirit, my thoughts would have never made it to paper. Our God is an awesome God!

I want to thank my husband, you not only stood by me every moment of illness and recovery, but you believed in the vision of this book and supported me emotionally and spiritually every step of the way.

To my daughter, Alegra, you encouraged me even at a young age, to continue to write and share my story. Thank you for not being afraid to share Mommy’s testimony with others, and thank you for being the best daughter I could ever have.

To my mother, Susan, and my father, Gordon, who always encouraged me to achieve and do my very best in school, college, and beyond. If it hadn’t been for both of your support through my education and desire to write as a young girl, I would have abandoned the dream of writing a long time ago.

To Nana, who has always shown me what living a life of excellence and love should be.

To all of my family and friends who prayed unceasingly for my healing and recovery. Without your prayers, I would have lost all hope.

Thank you to Trilogy Publishing for having enough faith in SHE Overcame to partner with us and provide us this blessed opportunity.

Thank you to Dr. Michelle Corral of the Breath of the Spirit International Ministries, for supporting our book and writing the foreword.

And a deep, heartfelt thank you to my dear friend and sister in Christ, LaShandria. If you had not called me that one momentous day and asked me to take this writing journey with you, my story would have been tucked away in a journal. I am forever grateful for your vision, for your passion to serve God, and for your obedience to the Lord’s call to write for His glory. God certainly made a divine connection when we joined forces, and I am so grateful to be on this journey with you. Thank you, friend.

Introduction

Life can have many blessings such as falling in love for the first time, graduating from school, acquiring a dream job, having healthy children, or even waking up each day. But life also comes with challenges and trials that we face; some expected and others unexpected. The key to navigating through life is in our response to the many blessings and trials on the journey.

What if one day, your life changed and you were challenged with a chronic illness or death? No one wants to experience the physical, emotional, and mental pain that comes with an affliction. Unfortunately, that is the current reality for so many women; and that was our reality. A reality that was presented to us as a test. Whether we passed or failed depended upon our response to the challenges we were facing.

Yet even in the trial, there is still a blessing that can be discovered. You see, how do you respond when you are challenged with an affliction or death? Is your first response to fear or rather to turn to the One that gives life and can heal every sickness and disease? ‘I will give you back your health and heal your wounds,’ says the Lord. (Jer. 30:17 NLT)

Women are birthers by nature. We were created with wombs to carry babies and birth life. We have everything we need to care for and nourish a baby that will grow inside of us. If this is the role for us naturally, think about how this applies to us spiritually. The enemy will try to come after our spiritual babies or seeds. If the enemy can stop us from birthing what was placed on the inside of us, that is his goal. The enemy will use anything to destroy the seed, and that includes physical, emotional, and mental affliction and pain.

If our bodies are sick and weak, we cannot fully live and walk out the purposes of God, and our seeds die because they never fully develop and are never birthed. No one who is battling a sickness or illness has the physical strength or mindset to minister the word of God to others, to pray for the brokenhearted, to feed the hungry, or to do what they were created for. Therefore, the enemy will use this attack to try to stop the message