I remember sitting in my Pastor's office several months ago and he looked at me and said, "You're going to be ok. You're just earning your anointing." When he spoke those words, they meant absolutely nothing to me because at that time all I could feel was the pain of my current situation. If this is what earning your anointing felt like, I didn't want the anointing. I wanted to get as far way from it as possible. Although I wasn't trying to hear those words, they stuck with me on the journey I found myself on these last several months.
This last season of my life has been one of the roughest. I bottomed out and shut down in every area of my life. I was exhausted mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I was empty. I had no fight left. 2018 had given me a well-whooped behind knocking me flat out, and I had determined there was no reason to get back up. There was no reason to get back up if all that I was going to do was fall or get knocked down again. I was tired of trying. Tired of pushing. Tired of fighting. Tired of losing. Just tired. Exhausted. Drained.
And in the middle of this whirlwind of being empty and isolated, I found a way to keep going or keep living no matter how unbearable some of the days were. I found myself repeating back the words that had been given to me. I found my mind flooded with all the words my pastor has ever spoken over my life. I just kept hearing him say, "You're going to have to suffer and go through." "You're going to have to take rebuke and correction." "There will come a time where you will experience that same thing you experienced in the last place just by different people in a different situation." "The Lord's hand is on your life for the good." "No losses, only lessons." "You don't have permission to fail." "This time you won't fail." "You've been called from your mother's womb." Although I kept hearing these things, I was not understanding the weight or the value that these words would come to have. But these words came to give me hope as time progressed. They began to speak to the depths of who I was and who I was to become. At times those words were the only breath I had in my body, the only moments where life still felt as if it could be lived.
I continued to live and push because I would hear every affirming word that my spiritual father gave me resound in my ears daily. And in this last season, they became more than words. Those words became power. Those words became strength. Those words became force. Those words became momentum. Those words became my push. Those words became my reason. Those words became my why. It was those words that stopped me from spiraling. It was those words that carried me and kept me afloat. It was those words that picked me up and dusted me off. It was those words that gave me life when I felt like I couldn't live anymore.
Who knew words could be oxygen? Who knew words could be life support? Who knew words could become so tangible, and so real that they becoming living and breathing themselves. I never took for granted affirming words, but I never knew how much value they could have. But today, I'm thankful for even just a word. For in those words is so much power.
-MelMil
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