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“Revelationship is more than a book. It is a God-encounter in each chapter.”
- Pastor Sharon Mullins
When you embrace Christ’s revelations of Himself—His character and His obsession with you—He will meet your deepest needs, wrestle your deepest questions, and heal your deepest hurt.
Discover transformative intimacy with the Christ who pursues you.
Cathy Colver Garland
Deconstruction is a buzzword right now, but I deconstructed my faith when I was 13, over thirty years ago. I informed my parents that I wasn't sure Christianity was for me. Instead of panicking or overreacting, my Dad helped me check out books on each major religion (and a few not-so-major ones.)
As I studied, some religions were easy to discard. (I had no intention of giving up my right to drive so nixing the Muslim religion was a no-brainer—for that and other reasons.) Others took longer to dissect. At the end of the year, I realized the truth of Jesus Christ and the lengths of his pursuit of me. That launched my pursuit of him. And, as I began to pursue, I began to find him just like he promised.
When my first husband divorced me, when I lost my first child in miscarriage, when the man I loved (whom I later married) broke up with me for the third time and dated the woman he thought was the woman of his dreams, when I broke my neck in a car accident, when I lost my second child in a miscarriage, when I waited ten years for the birth of my son—the list goes on...
It was the revelation of the God who makes and keeps his promises that kept hope alive in me. It was the God who sees me (El Roi) that kept me from losing my faith. It was the God who declares his truth (Jehovah -Nissie) about WHO I am—and who I will be at the end of my life—and WHOSE I am, that kept me from believing the lies that my circumstances seemed to declare.
It was knowing and being known by God
that made all the difference.
Would I believe the lie that I'm not "enough" to make a wife to a good man? Would I believe the lie that I may never have children, even though I believed God specifically promised two to me? Would I believe the lie that what I brought to the table was not enough...for a good husband, for children, for God?
In my darkest moment, in a raging storm, in the middle of the night, bone-tired from all I had faced so far, I longed to die. I prayed that God would use the next bolt of lightening to send a tree crashing on my car and just...take...me...home.
And then he spoke. Outloud. As if he'd always been speaking and I was the one who had tuned in to static instead of his clear voice.
"If you don't want your life, I do," he said. I about crashed into a tree! Now, after all these years of serving God, growing up in the church, following (and not following) the rules, we could have a conversation. Now, the voice was not longer outside of me. Loud and clear, he asked me to surrender to him my worst fear: the fear that my all would not be enough for God to notice. That he would walk on by.
After I fully surrendered my worst fear, the rest of my fears and weakness were quickly surrendered. All that I am—the good, the bad, and the ugly—became his to transform. This is the power of Absolute Surrender to the God Who reveals himself for the purpose of revelationship. Revelationship is the pathway of God revealing himself as he pursues us for relationship.
