Many Christians have been unable to appropriate God's fullness in their lives due to unresolved trauma and spiritual conflict. As a result, they are unable to experience abundant life and fulfill their God-given destiny. Within the context of biblical community, many are finding resolution and freedom through:

Engaging with the interactive presence of Jesus in healing traumatic memories

Dealing with generational and personal spiritual issues

Biblical and relational discipleship

Brain retraining using Thrive's 19 brain skills

Creative expression

Movement exercise

Fig Leaves

It's Hope!

Love Letters cont.

I was court ordered to see Sandy. It wasn't something I chose to do. My husband passed away in a car accident in 2001. And it was a really traumatic time for me. Because of all the abuse that I had had in the first place, I hadn't really dealt with all of that. I had never really wanted to live, just wanted to be dead. Up to that point, I had tried to commit suicide 13 times. So when this happened, I had decided I wasn't going to live anymore and I wasn't going to allow my children to go through what I went through. When I told my grief counselor, she intervened and they took my 3 year old son into shelter care (my other children were not living with me). I was hospitalized and then I was assigned a case worker who decided that I needed Christian ministry in addition to the care of mental health professionals.

I had voices in my head all the time. I always heard voices. And I thought it was normal. I thought every kid heard voices. When I got to be older and started talking about it, people said I was schizophrenic. I was put on medication for schizophrenia. I was put on medication for bipolar. I was put on medication for depression. I was put on medication for everything. And I was put on medication to counteract the effects of those medicines. When I met Sandy, I was taking 15-20 different pills to get everything balanced out and I still wasn't balanced. It's like the abuse caused me to split myself into a lot of different parts of myself, because I couldn't handle it as one person. Dissociation is a big continuum. It starts all the way from daydreaming to... I'm just not here at all anymore. For example, if you were going to go through the windshield of a car in an accident, you wouldn't stay there. That's why some people don't remember hitting the window. They're not going to feel the pain. And it can happen as instantaneous as that. So little kids when they're being abused, they're not going to stay there. So they just kinda leave their body. Everybody does it to some degree. It's just that when you are really young, and the abuse starts really early, you learn to do it. I just didn't feel real. I didn't feel like I existed a lot of times. I did cutting quite a bit. Some of it was done in anger and some of it was done just to make sure I was alive. And I think it was done to hurt me. I was so angry with myself, I didn't like myself, I didn't like life. When you looked at me, you could see the darkness on me. I was supposedly raised in a Christian home, but it was one way in the house and another outside the house. Our family traveled and sang gospel together. But it was like we were singing about a God I never knew. I felt like I was lying all the time, so I didn't want to go with them. Afterwards,we would be involved in satanic worship. My life was so conflicted.

The first time I saw Sandy, I told her, when I look in your eyes, I can tell that you love me. I can tell just by looking in your eyes, because the love just radiates, the love of God. And that's when true healing began, you know. Because I would leave there and I would know something changed. The first time I left there I was like "oh my, I have chills, I'm like... I don't know". It almost brought me back to my body and I could feel my body. It gave mehope I guess, a little bit ofhope. I used to tell Sandy all the time, when I look at you, then I have to believe that your God loves me. And she said, "Ok, we'll take it from there". At the time, Sandy had just started ministering to people with dissociative identity disorder. So we kind of learned a lot together in some ways. She already had the background in God, but I had a whole lot of background in what I had come from. She learned from me and I learned from her. Together, we would ask the True Lord Jesus to come into the place where the abuse happened, in the memory of it. She would say, "Lord Jesus, what do you want to show her today about what happened"? At first, I was really mad that He didn't get me out of there, stop all the abuse. But as time went on, He began to show me that even though the abuse got really severe, He never let them kill me. One time in a memory He showed me that He came over and laid between me and the person that was hurting me. And so, He protected me from them. It's like He protected the essence of who I am. And He brought that back, He brought my essence back to me. So I began to know who I really was and who I really am. I began to feel my body. He began to show me that it was ok to be me. It was ok to come back to me and allow Him to heal those hurts. I didn't like everything He told me, but we went through the pain together and He was waiting for me on the other side. He would hold me and tell me how much He loves me. And I could actually feel Him doing that.

So, it's been 14 years since I started this journey. I have done a lot of healing and grown a lot. I don't have dissociative identity disorder anymore. God showed me that it was a gift He gave me to make it through, but He put me back together. When I saw who He really is and then started seeing myself as He sees me, it was really freeing. I remember that hopeless despair I use to live in, just utter hopelessness, but as I started seeing Jesus work, I started feeling so muchhope. You can't really explain it. It's just that there is a joy there you can't explain. You just have to connect to it. I have the joy of the Lord, it can't go away! This ministry has given me hope and it's given me a life that I would not have with out it. Jesus, He's the only one who can heal!

RMM

Garden Gate at King's Way was a life saver for me, literally. After battling depression for years - a result of childhood trauma, satanic ritual abuse and emotional wounding, I attempted suicide. After seeing several psychiatrists and psychologists and trying every anti-depressant to the maximum strength with no results, I was told by a friend about Garden Gate and the success Sandy Martin had with people just like me. Within a few days of working with her, I was free from many of the thought patterns and issues I had been struggling with my whole life and also experienced miraculous relief from what had eventually become such hopeless despair, that I saw no reason to live. Indeed, within one hour of working with Sandy, I saw a light at the end of the dark tunnel I had been living in for years.
This approach to healing actually gets to the root of one's problems instead of applying temporary bandaids such as pills or "self help" or psycho babble. Instead it helped me to get down through the layers of a life lived in denial and self deception by helping me see the original core issues and "auto response" patterns I had built for self protection in order to avoid emotional pain. I was stunned to find how everything I had been battling had come from one or two sources in my early childhood, which in turn, "colored" and affected every choice and relationship in my life. How life changing it was to understand that these sources, when exposed, could be dealt with and I could actually "retrain my brain" to respond and react in a whole new and healthy way.

Even though I have been a part of King's Way for 10 years now, I overcame dark depression and hopeless despair years ago and graduated to a place of thriving mental health by comparison. Because of what I have learned, I am now able to help others.  In the beginning of my journey it was very beneficial for me and many others that there was a ministry house where we could go and stay for a period of time to have sessions and build up our capacity to live productive lives. Most of us are not government subsidized individuals. We are all hard working people, many of us professionals, who have experienced early trauma from child abuse/molestation, ritual abuse, or post traumatic stress syndrome, among other things. Sandy gives of her time freely. She has never charged anyone. Donations are strictly volunteer. Some clients are in desperate need of emotional protection and attention on an extended but temporary basis. This ministry needs a location for the more severe cases to be able to come and stay in a safe, protected and calm environment; a Community of Healing. Everyone who has had the benefit of community encouragement and Garden Gate's prayer ministry, have gone on to be stronger, more productive, healthier, independent individuals.
In our culture of broken homes and broken lives, ill treated children, desperately hopeless young people, and adults suffering the effects of years of hidden issues from molestation and abuse as children, there are so many who struggle with the same issues I did and worse. For every one I share my experience of healing with, there are 20 more crying out for help. For Sandy, there are hundreds more crying out for help. She desperately needs a place for people to get the help they need for that healing. Garden Gate at King's Way needs a retreat for broken people to find hope, as I did, so they can move on with their lives, free from the bondage and baggage they have been carrying around, in some cases for 50 years or more.
Sandra Martin truly has a God given gift and is most generous with all her training, experience and time - asking nothing in return. She is gentle, genuine, selfless, encouraging, thoughtful, hardworking, humble and extremely successful at what she does; Leading people out of the darkness and into the light of LIFE.
King's Way is a unique and extremely important ministry. It changes lives. It saves lives.
By God's grace, It saved mine.

NJF

God's Grace

Garden Gate @ King's Way

pursuing the King's Way of Liberty

"For the Lord comforts Zion; He comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness Like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song. Isaiah 51:3

Pass through, pass through the gates!

Prepare the way for the people.

Isaiah 62:10

We read on the page that Jesus healed the leper, gave sight to the blind and raised the dead from their grave. And even as we believe it to have been true, we don’t actually believe He is the same today as He was then. Whether it is that our sin is too grave, our trauma too deep, or our habits too deep-seated, we have believed the lie that the One who created us has no answers. We see the love and compassion of the Father as far back as Genesis after Adam and Eve had covered themselves with fig leaves…He says to them “Who told you that you were naked?” The question is loaded with love: a Father’s love and longing. He had exactly what they needed to remedy their problem, and they’d chosen to believe a lie: that He couldn’t or wouldn’t help.

I believe, after spending years…no, decades with the same sin, trauma and hurt that Jesus was all the while walking with me, whispering, “Who told you I couldn’t heal you?” Who told you that you were naked? These things I had convinced myself were out of His reach, that I had sewn and re-sewn new fig leaves over that even Christians had tried to explain away through basic psychology…they were lies. The thing about lies, is that they are always loaded with enough truth to wear down our will to toss them out…yet false enough that they don’t satisfy completely and we remain suspicious.

This is how I spent decades of my life: beat up and defeated that God hadn’t done anything to “fix me,” with a faith that was on life-support- barely pulsing along…and yet a nagging, constant frustration that I couldn’t just give up on Him. I even tried that for a period of my life-- grief can make fatherless orphans out of all of us without the hope of God. This is where Garden Gate at King's Way comes in. After years of rejecting the merits of this ministry in someone else’s life…I found myself in a place where I was desperate enough to turn to them myself. I’d heard about their healing ministry and shrugged it off…and would proudly quote scripture “He whom the Son sets free is free indeed” and say things like “when you’re in Christ, there’s no need to keep going back over and over stuff. He’s healed it when you were saved.”

Who told you that you were naked?

In one of the bitterest phases of my life, I flew down to Orlando, met Sandy at the airport and not long after, I rushed the throne of God like Jacob. I wasn’t going to let him go until He showed me Himself-- until He convinced me one way or the other that He was real and that He was there. I chuckle a little bit now, because God owed me nothing- you know, the I Am...And Jesus, who took on death for mankind certainly didn’t owe me any explanations. And yet…in a way that only He can, He began to draw back layer upon layer of junk. I was shaking my fist in the face of God yet, Sandy would just pray and wait to see what Jesus was going to do next. It was wild! It was one of the most indescribable experiences- really, there are not words for some of what the Lord did with that time, of which He wasted none. He also overwhelmed me more than once with His love and the potency of His compassion: His perfection, really. I knew for the first time ever, that not one second of my life: from the womb up until that moment had been beyond His reach or sight. There was an intimacy I’d lived a lifetime without knowing, even though I’d read it on the page and earnestly sought it.

And the hurt…it’s almost too precious to write about. It really does take the Holy of Holies to heal some of what I flew down there to try to make God deal with. As if He, being an unfair and apathetic King had denied me all my life of something He easily held in His hands to do. Things people told testimonies about Him doing for them. Those things that hurt the worst, cut the deepest, and have the greatest impact on the course of a life. Those things.
The lie is that He can’t or won’t heal. The truth is that He easily can, and does. And that there is nothing too small, or too great for Him to do. And we don’t have to stay the same because He loves us too much to leave us the same. And that encountering Emmanuel in the very place of our worst pain is what He longs for us to do…just as the Father wanted in the Garden of Eden.

It’s been amazing to share my story with other people who have their own decades of junk-and hurt-and secret shame. It’s a sweet thing to watch their eyeballs become engulfed in tears upon hearing that maybe…just maybe…this Jesus in whom they already believe really might love them the way He said He does in scripture…and that there really might be HOPE for them after all. They’re afraid to believe it, they’re afraid of disappointment, they’re afraid of false hope…and yet, the lie they’ve believed their entire lives has left them also unsatisfied and suspicious. And HOPE KILLS LIES.

To try to explain or describe what it is exactly that Garden Gate does is difficult to do, because what they really do is give people a chance to experience Jesus for themselves. By creating a safe place, and doing intercession for you while you seek Him, they are helping to usher you into the presence of God. And He is where freedom is found. He leads all of it.

Today, I’m still in close contact with Sandy, and life’s turmoil and problems come at a steady rate still. The difference is that I am able to approach the situations with an assurance and confidence that there is an answer-- that God is not a distant, sometimes--benevolent figure. That His sovereignty can be trusted (still working on that one…) Mostly, I’m not groping all the time for fig leaves. Even when I’m totally out of ideas and capacity, He’s the first place I turn-- not the last. RW