Completely Whole: Finding Healing Under the Shadow of the Almighty

By KerryAnn Hayden

Unleash the unspeakable joy of living in complete wholeness, wellness, and prosperity!

Be transformed, elevated, and live an extraordinary life! Dive into this amazing journey through the lives of powerful women of the Bible and receive the tools to:

• Experience victory over emotional ene

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Jan 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781647737177

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Copyright © 2020 by KerryAnn Hayden

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ISBN 978-1-64773-716-0 (Print Book)

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Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are taken from the The Holy Bible, 21st Century King James Version® (KJ21®). Copyright ©1994 by Deuel Enterprises, Inc., Gary, SD 57237. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked BSB are taken from the Holy Bible, Berean Study Bible, BSB, Copyright ©2016, 2020 by Bible Hub. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain. Scripture quotations marked NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

He that dwells in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

—Psalm 91:1

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly: and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Faithful is he that calleth you who also will do it.

1 Thessalonians 5: 23 & 24

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the people I call my circle. Throughout my journey, they have been God’s blanket of love and care spread over me. Through them, I have experienced God’s loving-kindness and help. I dedicate it to them, as it would not have been possible to write this book without them.

My mother, Yvonne

The strength and character that have undergirded my life I inherited from you. The virtues and values that have adorned my life I learned from you. This is, therefore, a tribute to who you are and to who I am because of you.

My sisters and best friends—Yanique, Giselle, and Moya

I have lived for you and by you. You are my greatest investments and my proudest achievements. I pray that the message herein will bless your lives as it has blessed mine.

My husband, Douglas

Your tremendous support throughout this journey has blessed my heart beyond words. I did not sit up one single night working without you sitting right by me. So, without you writing a line, we did this together.

My daughter, Hannah-Noelle

In eight short years, you have blessed my life in unimaginable ways. Your support throughout this process has been as surprising as it is endearing. You have been my biggest cheerleader and manager. I look forward to accomplishing much more with you. May this be a reminder that you can achieve whatever your mind can conceive.

My spiritual parents, Noel and Grace Hann

The genuine, selfless, unconditional love that both of you have poured into my life has been a source of healing and sustenance. You have extended yourselves sacrificially to nurture the spirits of so many of God’s children. The foundation you have given me in the Word of God has made this book possible.

Contents

From My Heart to Yours

Chapter 1: Eve

Chapter 2: Naomi

Chapter 3: Tamar

Chapter 4: Rahab

Chapter 5: Jael

Chapter 6: Bathsheba

Chapter 7: The Woman with the Issue of Blood

Chapter 8: Me

Shalom!

Notes

From My Heart to Yours

In Luke 4:18, Jesus took the book of Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth and declared from Isaiah 61 the purpose of His ministry. He declared:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.

Jesus’ declaration makes it clear that His trip down to us was a mission of extreme and purest love, compassion, and sacrifice. When man was created, his intimate relationship with his Maker created an emotional, spiritual, and psychological shield that incubated him, like the womb of a woman. However, when he sinned and lost fellowship with God, that protective shield was removed. He found himself exposed to the vicious elements of a battle that had been going on long before the time of his creation.

When man welcomed the enemy of our souls into his space, he invariably received seeds of destruction that would manifest in physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual pain. It seems there are parts of our being that were created delicate and vulnerable. When we were in pure fellowship with God, He protected our fragile spirits from attack.

Through the influence and devices of the wicked one, man created social, economic, political, and religious institutions that exploited our vulnerabilities and left us wounded. The enemy’s strategy was ingenious. He would then offer temporary and ineffective means of relief and, by doing so, entice millions of God’s precious creations into his doomed kingdom. In the Old Testament, God ministered relief through the structures of the earth and mediated a covenant with humanity on a collective basis through broad religious structures, such as the Mosaic Law. However collective redemption failed to bring personal salvation. The Author of Love designed a new plan for personal redemption and reconciliation through His Son. Jesus articulated this new plan in His declaration.

It is ironic, then, that in the twenty-first century, Christ’s body is still reeling in pain. At times, I met successful, beautiful, have it together people. As I talked to them, I realized rivers of tears had piled up behind their well-made-up eyes, and there was so much pain bottled up within their well-tailored suits.

It made me realize that the kingdom of the highest God is filled with wailing saints and wounded warriors. Some cry silently and muffle their screams with productivity; some cry loudly in rebellion and attention-seeking behavior; some cry defensively, attacking and hurting others to hide their insecurity; some simply cry.

Some believers don’t refuse to walk in power; they don’t know how. Others try hard to stand for the Lord, but they ache too much. I have met believers who are trying to run a good race, but they are getting cramps. Others struggle to rise, but the burdens they bear are much too heavy.

I am not making excuses for weakness and immaturity. However, the army of the Lord is crippled in many ways by many manifestations of pain. If we stopped long enough to look beyond the makeup and fancy clothing, we would see the ripped-up man and the battered woman who are crying out for our help.

Like any other army, we cannot engage in battle until our soldiers are healed. So many who are on the front line for the King get seriously wounded, forcing them to keep going without healing the wounds inflicted by the enemy. Such soldiers may try to fight until they die; some simply give up. The house of God needs healing.

God Himself acknowledged this; He knew that internal pain was the greatest weapon drawn against the church. That is the reason Jesus declared that He came to heal, deliver, recover, and set free.

Don’t you find it totally awesome, and maybe even amazing, that the same Holy Spirit who is known for accomplishing great exploits from Genesis through Revelation is simply called the Comforter by Jesus in John 14:16? All the power of the Holy Spirit was embodied in the role of comforter. As Jesus prepared to leave the earth, He promised the saints that in addition to power, authority, and might, He would also send comfort. All these things had already been decreed, but the Lord knew that all these great gifts could not be effectively released into the believer’s life unless he or she had the comforter. The word used by Jesus is the Greek word paraclete.¹ According to the Ryrie Study Bible expanded edition, this word embodies the ideas of advising, exhorting, comforting, strengthening, interceding, and encouraging. The Lord knew we would have to fight a fierce battle, and that to endure, we would need within us the divine Comforter.

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever… I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

—John 14:16, 18

We must understand that the church cannot exercise power until we have been healed. We can neither rule the kingdoms of this earth in flesh nor in the Spirit while we are ailing and infirm. Therefore, the message and mission of the church must begin with healing and deliverance.

In the early days of the church, Satan used to physically persecute the saints of God by cutting saints to bits, feeding them to lions, sawing them in two, beheading them, burning them alive, and whipping them until their skin peeled off. That strategy became ineffective, because the more he punished the saints, the more robust the church grew. So, he changed his strategy to suit the times. His most deadly weapons now are fear, anxiety, stress, and depression. Now everyone is suffering from stress, from the newborn to the centenarian. It is a weapon from hell to cripple and kill the church. Stress floods the church from the pulpit to the pews. Have you noticed how many pastors, ministers, and church leaders are dying of heart attacks, strokes, and stress-related illnesses?

God’s interventions grew even more personal when He looked at Israel at the time of the prophet Jeremiah. He saw the state that the nation was in—the pain, the heartache, the misery, and the discomfort—and His heart was moved; He declared through the prophet:

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

—Jeremiah 8:22

The prophet Jeremiah was not the first to refer to this balm in Gilead. The town of Gilead was famous for a specific resin that contained chemical properties proven to heal several illnesses. With no formal hospitals and minuscule developments in medicine at that time, thousands of people flocked to this town to be healed. Many wrote songs and poems about this center of healing, and droves of ailing persons flocked its streets each year to get a bit of this lifegiving plant.

Despite its fame, God was not sending His people down to the town of Gilead. He reminds His people that He is a refuge of healing like the infamous balm in Gilead; He is the Great Physician. He possesses all the healing and lifegiving properties that His ailing house needs; He is Jehovah-Rapha.

He is all-sufficient. His people need not walk around in pain and suffering, because He is their eternal balm in Gilead. What He was declaring that day in the synagogue in Jerusalem is that whether your wound is, social, economic, or spiritual, He is your balm in Gilead.

God wants to heal you. He invites you back to the security you lost by sheltering once again under His protective shadow.

I want to remind you, in this little discourse, that God Himself is the true Balm in Gilead. You need not hurt; you need not suffer. The balm is right within your reach. I pray you will allow the lifegiving resins to flow through your wounded spirit as it streamed through the woman with the issue of blood in Jesus’ day.

For years I had been wounded by the fiery darts of the wicked one. As a result, I struggled with emotional and spiritual pain, until the Savior invited me to shelter under the shadow of the Almighty. I found a healing balm and experienced the mighty resurrection power of Jehovah-Rapha.

The enemy has come in like a flood. The church of God needs to take refuge in His powerful presence and allow the Holy Spirit to lift a standard against the enemy in the mighty name of Jesus.

This little book is, therefore, my sword raised on your behalf against the powers of darkness.

I pray that God may release the power of Jehovah-Rapha, the great Almighty, all-powerful, compassionate Father, Savior, Friend, and Deliverer right now in the name of Jesus. As the Spirit of the Most High moved upon the face of the earth and brought forth life, even so, I pray that the Spirit of the same dynamic Creator will touch your spirit to heal every burn, bruise, or graze inflicted on you by the fiery darts of the wicked one. I pray the compassion of the Most High will begin to rush through your spirit, mending, repairing, restoring, and renewing everything in you that has been touched by the enemy. I pray that every residue of the liar, thief, and murderer will be drawn out of you in the name of Jesus Christ. He bore in His flesh this real pain that you bear, and He put an end to it so that you no longer have to endure it. He has the ability to deliver peace, prosperity, freedom, liberty, and abundant grace to you by His all-sufficient power.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Eve

Surviving Serpents

Who will cry for the little boy?

Lost and all alone?

Who will cry for the little boy?

Abandoned without his own?

Who will cry for the little boy?

He cried himself to sleep.

Who will cry for the little boy?

He never had for keeps.

Who will cry for the little boy?

He walked the burning sand.

Who will cry for the little boy?

The boy inside the man.

Who will cry for the little boy?

Who knows well hurt and pain

Who will cry for the little boy?

He died again and again.

Who will cry for the little boy?

A good boy he tried to be.

Who will cry for the little boy,

Who cries inside of me?

—From the movie Antwone Fisher²

The words of that poem tore deep into my flesh the first time I heard it. The words echoed truths I was unwilling to bear at the time. It revealed that most of the wounds we struggle to heal all our grown-up lives were inflicted in our tender, vulnerable, formative years, long before we had the will to fight or even knew we were in the ring.

Like the man in this poem, many women walk around broken, with frightened children screaming on the inside, crying for love, affection, belonging, help, and justice. The screams have not been silenced despite the many things we have added to stifle them. They bellow from beneath our well-made-up faces and perfectly groomed hair. At times, our flawlessly performed routines get interrupted by the child inside who refuses to be quieted. I have come to understand that many of the thorns we struggle with as adults were planted as tiny seeds in the fertile soil of childhood. Many of our adult failures result from the unhealed wounds of childhood. Many influential, confident, successful people—adults who seem to have it together—still disguise tears for parents who disappeared, lied, and abused, abandoned, rejected, and neglected them. Many even try to come to grips with circumstances they did not choose but were forced to endure. Some of these were harsh, fierce, derogatory, painful, cold, unmerciful, lonely places they were forced into before they could even understand why.

Why does the enemy target our childhood? Psychologists agree that childhood is the tender formative period of our human existence, the time when we are introduced to the social environment in which we spend the rest of our lives. It is that period in which we form a personality and formulate our ideas and attitudes about life, based on our experiences. Psychologists deem this phase as the most important in human life, since it is at this time that all the fibers that will comprise the fabric of our lives are intricately woven together. Unfortunately, the experiences that have shaped our lives have left many broken, thwarted, and disfigured. For many people, especially women, their daily prayer is, Why? Why me? Am I destined to suffer? Is my life meant to be defined by pain? Why didn’t they love me? Why didn’t they come back? Why should my life be so difficult? Why?

The truth is, the answer may just be as loaded as the questions. The quest for the response may take us far beyond Eden. I wish someone knew today that God predestined our lives before the foundations of this world. In Psalm 139, David caught this revelation:

For You formed my inward parts;

You covered me in my mother’s womb.

I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

Marvellous are Your works,

And that my soul knows very well.

My frame was not hidden from You,

When I was made in secret,

And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.

And in Your book they all were written,

The days fashioned for me,

When as yet there were none of them.

—Psalm 139:13–16 NKJV

The events of our lives can make us feel like accidents, or that our lives are like some haphazard tale of insignificant events carelessly etched together. However, listen to what the Lord of love says to Jeremiah:

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;

Before you were born I sanctified you;

I ordained you a prophet to the nations."

—Jeremiah 1:5 NKJV

Each of us has been intricately and intentionally formed and fashioned. We were not dropped onto the surface of the earth to somehow survive like castaways, but we have been fully furnished with the Spirit of God and wired with the purpose of God in us.

There is another who knows this truth. We call him the enemy of our souls. He hates God’s creation, but he does not have the capacity to reproduce after himself like God does. He does not have the creative power that God has to conceive something in his mind and bring it forth; he can only replicate. As a result, he conceived in his heart that to build his kingdom, he must steal God’s creation, or destroy them to prevent the kingdom of God from thriving. He has destined to destroy you before you can fulfill the purpose of God for your life, so he starts at the very moment when the reality of you was conceived. He wants to twist you before the testimony of God has been developed in you. He sees the vessel of honor that the Master is creating, and he wants to embed some tiny pebbles in that clay. He wants to wrap you into a web of lies that takes you a lifetime to unwrap.

However, there is another revelation from God that helps us to put our experiences into perspective. The gospel of John says the devil is a liar. Our victory over his schemes begins with knowing that everything he says is a lie. The Word of God tells us: "He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it" (John 8:44).

As a result of this, we can conclude there is a war going on in which many of us have fallen victim. The first family was no exception. Adam and Eve had no biological childhood here on earth. However, their social experience in the Garden can be compared to the delicate, formative years of childhood. At the time of the serpent’s attack, their social experience was formative. It can be compared to the development stages of children who are at the phase of their lives in which they interpret their new social environment and respond by formulating ideas. Genesis 3:1–7 tells the intriguing tale; as young Eve navigates the stages of moral development, the serpent appears. He is keenly aware of her quest to interpret God’s laws within the context of her understanding of their space. He is also acutely aware that an error at this point would cost them everything. So, he strikes. She falters. Humanity falls from grace, and the consequences are dire.

What is even more critical is that even though God institutes a complex system of repentance and redemption, Eve grows up with the seeds of death already woven into her spirit. Her first son is a murderer. In our short glimpse of his interaction with God and with his brother, we see an array of negative traits and characteristics, including disobedience, hatred, envy, jealousy, and rage. Even though she is covered with the skin of the slain animal sacrifice, the family she creates is in peril. She has reproduced pain, and it has brought forth bitter fruit. The Genesis narrative says that God gave them a third son, Seth, who eventually represented the slate being wiped clean, the chain of pain broken. Through him, deliverance came to the family of God on earth.

Eve’s story is, in essence, the story of so many women today. We were struck by a serpent