DAY 13
Devotional by Kylie Chalfant
When I was a little girl, I was CRIPPLED with fear.
When I was about ten years old, my mom started working at a local department store and she’d go to work and leave me at home for about an hour in the afternoon until my dad got home from work. I would cry my eyes out every time she left, convinced that something would happen to her and she wouldn’t come home. Multiple times I called her store just to talk to her on the phone so she could calm me down & I could hear that she was okay. My dad would come home and I’d be fine until bedtime, then that fear came creeping back again with the dark. Every night I would wait up and watch out my window for her car to come down the street and pray my little heart out until I saw her headlights.
My fear gripped my heart and consumed my thoughts for years. That’s how the enemy works. He looks for those areas, whispers lies, and twists things until he has a hold over you.
God never intended for me to live in fear. It wasn’t until a youth summer camp years later when I let go of that fear and traded it for God’s FREEDOM. He came in with His grace and His overwhelming goodness and restored peace in my heart. Even as a young girl, He cared about my struggle with fear and heard my cries. He set me FREE.
John 8:36 in the New Living Translation says, “So if the Son sets you free, you are truly free.” The Amplified version says “then you are unquestionably free.”
I think so many of us still live like this today; held back by fear, sitting by the window of our situations crying out for God to show up, waiting for those headlights. But God says we are truly (utterly, totally, completely), unquestionably (without doubt, undeniably) FREE. He’s given us His FREEDOM, but it’s up to us to walk in it.
Jesus has called us to live in FREEDOM and to live it out in a way that brings others into this freedom. I believe that this Devoted Conference is set apart. God wants to call us out of our fear, out of our hiding and show us the wide-open, spacious, expansive life (2 Corinthians 6:11-13 MSG) that He has for each one of us. I encourage you to come, no matter what you’re facing or hiding from, and press into the presence of Jesus and the FREEDOM He has for you. Let’s choose to be marked by His FREEDOM, not our fear. My prayer is that Jesus will meet each one of us in a real and tangible way; that we will leave different than we came, walking in His peace and His FREEDOM.