When Your Mind Steals Your Soul's Reward

By Carol Farnstrom

We're all searching for something to last. We live our lives ever reaching for the next bar, meeting that right person, getting the perfect job, doing what we can do to make our lives what we think it should be. If you're a believer in Christ, then you pray and you ask favors, requests whatever you want to call them but they are a way of reaching out to the greater power that we do not possess. You may have been the victim of child abuse, a personal crime, a vendetta, or the perpetrator. You have been asking and praying for an answer or miracle to your need and relief from the burden you carry. What we forget is in order to receive from God, we must receive what he gives. Sometimes it isn't what we asked or prayed for, but it's an answer. This book is titled When Your Mind Steals Your Soul's Reward. It is meant as a message, that in order to receive, you must first think it possible. With the power of life and death being in the tongue, speak it!

You must speak into your life what you hope and pray for. Faith is believing in the things that are hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. This is putting your faith into action. You must first think it, speak it, expect it just as Jesus said believe when you pray though your father has already given you what you asked for.

The messages and very deep and personal accounts during Carol's life shared in this book are meant to enlighten, encourage, and strengthen your ability to receive God's amazing gifts and miracles through the power of words. God's abilities are not limited by our faith however. We do limit ourselves by our own spoken words of failure, fear, and felt circumstances. So often we are defeated before ever given the opportunity to see God's plan revealed by the words we speak, therefore directing the path of decisions made. This book is to be read with an open heart and praying throughout that God give you discernment and wisdom as you read as well as the ability to keep going, it will be painful at times.

I believe with all my heart you will see miracles you have prayed for and know it is God and God only who is able to release them to you. It will be because you are finally able to receive through the knowledge of the power of your spoken words. So, go now in the power of his might and seek him so that you may have ears to hear and eyes to see as he leads you in this endeavor.

In any offences at the truths shared in this book apologies first. Led as I am, it is all 100 percent the undeniable truth as seen through my eyes in this journey we call life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640035256

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

About the Author

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When Your Mind Steals Your Soul's Reward

Carol Farnstrom

ISBN 978-1-64003-524-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64003-525-6 (Digital)

Copyright © 2018 Carol Farnstrom

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Preface

The power of words is undeniable. We choose the paths we walk each day through the power of our words which dictate our actions and reactions. You may have heard life and death are in the power of the tongue or that the tongue is like the helm of a ship that steers our lives by every spoken word. So it is in healing and the ability to be healed. So often many people pray and beg God for healing when they never use their words to receive the healing. They just keep asking. It is my hope and sincere desire that each person who has the opportunity to read this book can find in themselves the ability to heal and to share with others how they may be healed. Having survived child abuse, teenage rebellion, addiction, sudden death, devastating heartbreak and loss all while working in a career as a paramedic, firefighter and trauma nurse over a twenty-two-year period gave me some incredible insight as to how people cope with tragedy and suffering. As a believer and follower of Jesus Christ, I would like to share with you some amazing stories and events of things that took place throughout my life and career. Some of the experiences I share in this book are very difficult to read and may cause you to cry or get angry, but hopefully you will hear the message above all of healing and restoration through the power of spoken words. Words are something you can never take back or cover up. They only fade but sound waves are decibels that never stop moving around in the universe, so make sure what you say is what you mean and what you mean is what you say because once they are out there, they are there for good forever bouncing off towers, buildings, and possibly even satellites as our technology is ever advancing to greater and greater possibilities in our lifetimes.

I would like to first above all else say that I am so very grateful just to be alive and able to publish this work that I have spent the last twelve years writing and truly felt like forever however it first started as a journal and diary which transformed into a message for me to share after many talks with God, who I feel has given me much of this book's content through his word, the Holy Bible, and other references as shown.

I am grateful to my mother Bettyann that while I have been both a blessing and burden to her at times has never turned me away or not been there when I needed a shoulder to cry on although at times six thousand miles apart. I hope that each person that reads this book can allow themselves to be open to what is being said as the messages are different and vary although the premise of the book is truly about the words and how to receive healing. It was 2002 when I first started writing while working as a flight nurse on a helicopter in Northern California as a way of coping with the events I was encountering each shift. I encourage anyone who needs to vent or share to take the time to sit and write out your thoughts. Share your gifts and trust yourself to make the right decisions based on gut instincts.

This book is my gut instinct, and I hope and pray you are blessed by it, empowered, encouraged, and able to grow spiritually, mentally, and physically as a result.

We know the world is a really tough place right now, and unless you were taught how to deal with tough times and tragedy, you may be one of those people out there who can never put into words how you feel or want to say. Hopefully this book will help you to share and express your suffering and pain, your triumphs and trials, your blessings and victories. God has so much for us in this life if we only allow ourselves to hear his voice and then receive his message. This takes practice but you have to first know how. To all the ems personnel, critical care RN, doctors, firefighters, cops, and anyone else who deals with seeing death on a regular basis this book is for you.

Read it, share it, pass it around, and please send me your thoughts.

Life is a journey we are all in it together!

When your mind steals your soul's reward, the silence cries out.

Chapter 1

Ifinally decided to begin my book that the Lord had told me to do long ago during a prayer one night while I cried my eyes out to him asking him to take away the pain and emotional torture I was going through at that time. I could even say I was suicidal and would have easily taken my life had it not been for the dream the Lord gave me twenty-three years ago while I had been in a girl's home for troubled youths. I'd always been ready to try the challenging and feared to prove something to myself, so the idea of the act of suicide has never scared me but the next second after the flesh body lies down does. I'll tell you the dream. While I had been a resident at the Duval Stay Center for girls in Jacksonville Florida, I had been sentenced there to nine months to possibly two years. At about six months into my stay there, I had earned day trips out to attend a local church and school. The school I would go to during the week was downtown Jacksonville. I had met a boy named Patrick that I really thought was cute, but that was all there was to it. He was regularly there when I would go to school. I knew we could never be together since I was in a girl's home and not from the area. Anyway, to get to the dream, I needed to explain how I knew Patrick.

I had asked the Lord one night to teach me something to prepare me for going back out into the world from which I had come and from the same scary setting I had left just nine months prior. The reason I asked the Lord for the dream was because I was being released the next day. I really wanted a message from God on what to do on the outs.

That night, the dream came in which the setting was at the school and I saw Patrick. He said to me, Hey, I'm going up to the top of the Gulf Life building and do a back flip. Do you want to go?

Very excitedly I immediately said, Yeah, let's go!

The next thing I was standing on the top of the building at the edge, and I could look down and see that I was very high up. I was standing so that Patrick was to my left and the part where you would go off of the building was behind me, so I was standing on the very edge of the building ledge with my back to the ground below. Patrick and I looked at each other and said, Ready? Go! We both jumped off doing a back flip just as you would do in a swimming pool except this was what seemed to be about one thousand feet up off the ground. As I was falling in my dream, I began to look around for Patrick falling too, but I didn't see or find him anywhere! He was nowhere—he had never jumped. I knew immediately I had been tricked although it was too late to stop now.

I was heading toward the ground at about 120 miles per hour, which is what I believe is the terminal velocity of a person falling with arms and legs extended out; although in 1960, a man named Joseph Kittinger reached a terminal velocity speed of 614 mph or 9/10ths the speed of sound while free falling when he jumped with a parachute from space at ninety-six thousand feet. This is just a tidbit of cool information for you. Back to the dream, as I got closer and closer to the ground coming at me ridiculously fast, just as I was about to hit the ground, I suddenly was standing at the end of a huge green field with the building I had just jumped off at the other side of this green field with what seemed to be about two football fields across. As I stood there in my dream, I saw my body falling from the sky and then hit the ground. It bounced about three feet in the air, and then I was instantly back in my body again, just that quickly I saw myself hit I was back in my body again. As I lie there, I opened my eyes and my face was literally in the dirt. I slowly stood up, yet I could see my body still lie there as if I was now released from my body. I no longer was held by it. That's just the best way I can describe it. It had only been a shell for my soul. As I stood up, I saw this green field again, but the building was gone and it was just the prettiest green color I'd ever seen, and now instead of a plain field, it became a small hill that was stretched out from one end of the horizon to the to the other.

There was a beautiful glow from the other side of the hill and I just knew it was heaven over there. I started toward it and suddenly felt something stop me in my tracks so that my feet felt like they had concrete in them. It became impossible for me to move my feet at all. As I stood there, I could feel a dark gloom come over me, and I slowly started to turn my head to look back as this is where the darkest feeling came from. As I turned my head, it became like a one-way stop cock in that every time I looked just a little bit I could not turn my head back at all to where I started from. It slowly forced me to look back all the way around. When I finally was completely turned around, I saw a black iron gate, the kind you see in scary horror movies with the pointed spear staffs made of iron as the gate itself. It also stretched from one end of the horizon to the other. I could see long claws grasping from inside the gates, as if to be waiting for me. I could hear screams, and I could smell burning, rotting flesh, something like a dead animal smells after it's been rotting on a hot tar road during a Florida summer. I realized immediately this was hell and that was in fact my destiny since I had taken my life. I once had a call while working as a paramedic that led me to find what was a Caucasian man, however looked African American and had been dead already in a small enclosed trailer for weeks. All over his body was bloated and had large encapsulated bubbles of gases trying to escape his rotting body. This is how it smelled in my dream.

When I realized that I had committed suicide in my dream, I began to stomp my feet begging and cried to God to forgive me. I cried over and over, "Please forgive me. I'm sorry,