In 2012, I founded I Will Stand International to rescue, restore, equip, and empower women and children all around the world. I told the Lord that I did not just want to put a band-aid on issues or do character development. I wanted to see real change, restoration, transformation, and freedom at a foundational level.
In my late teens and early twenties, I struggled with abandonment, anxiety, fear, depression, and suicidal thoughts. I grew up in an abusive household and was the victim of sexual, mental, emotional, and physical abuse. I “got my act together” in my early twenties so that I could function. I got tired of just crying in bed all day. I made a choice to function. I chose life. Shoving it down helped me cope, but I wasn’t healed. I wasn’t free.
Over the course of 15 years, as I cried out to the Lord, sought him, and asked him to heal all my broken pieces, He slowly delivered me and healed me from the internal oppression (demons).
Throughout that time, I couldn’t articulate how I was healing, I just said that it was Jesus when people would ask. While that is accurate, I was internally battling spiritual oppression caused by demons and overcoming it by surrendering it to Jesus day by day.
A few years into IWSI, we bumped into some witchcraft in Africa and some severely tormented and oppressed Christians here locally. I am a problem solver by nature so I went to the Lord and to scripture and started digging in for answers. I wanted to know why believers were so afflicted and tormented. It did not make sense to me because I knew that my God was bigger than anything the enemy was trying to do.
For four years, I studied and prayed with people. We even went through a demonic attack with one of my children in which the Lord guided me through. Had I not been already seeking and studying, she would be on medication right now just to function, but PRAISE THE LORD, she is not. Instead, she is walking in complete and total freedom. Praise the Lord who provides before we have need.
During my research and attempts to help people walk into freedom, there was one woman that kept coming back to me desperately seeking freedom, but we were stuck. I started asking questions like how do we know if someone is completely set free? I know that demons are suppose to obey the name of Jesus but how do we get them to do it. I had the knowledge, but needed some mentoring and a strategy.
I remembered Don Dickerman Ministries, connected with them, and they graciously began training me in deliverance. I had a pretty good knowledge from my self study, but they gave me a strategy and trained me in efficiency and effectiveness. I am forever grateful for their team. Their generosity with decades of knowledge and experience will make an eternal impact through me. The Lord answered my prayer from 2012 about not wanting to just teach behavior modification, but to deal with hurts, hang-ups, brokenness, and feelings of being stuck at a foundational level. I am so grateful for the opportunities that the Lord has given me to be his tool to help and see people walk in complete freedom…to battle the external enemy from a place of full rest and peace instead of trying to fight through the heavy weights of internal oppression. I have had the opportunity to see people instantly go from heaviness to lightness, from burdened to joyous, and have all the negative chatter in their mind removed. They leave seeing, hearing, and walking more fully with the Lord.
I stay in a constant state of awe at how much the Lord loves us and desires for us to live like Adam and Eve in the garden before the fall: at complete peace internally and in constant communion with Him. For more of my testimony, how the Lord took me from brokenness to ministering around the world, and the ins and outs of deliverance, check out my book Arise and Stand.