Where We're Actively 'Living In God's Hope Today'

Marriage isn't easy & when childhood hurts & wounds affect how we relate to others we can fall into self destructive patterns of behavior.

A childhood wound where a teacher had told me I wasn't worth the effort had embedded in my heart & without me realizing it I had fallen into a pattern of pushing people away before they could realize 'I wasn't worth their effort'.

When my marriage had reached a breaking point & my husband had left I reached out for help, Liz Jensen from Manifest Love Church/Light Ministry met with me weekly & opened spaces for the Holy Spirit to unravel layers of wounds creating a deep rejection issue in my life.  

Once revealed Liz helped me forgive & identify the behavior I had developed that had been pushing my husband away.

After the first two month of my ministry my husband noticed such a drastic change in how I interacted with him that he then asked to see Liz too!

I am pleased to say God won this war on marriage, just 6 months after we separated we renewed our vows & moved back in together.

From our time receiving ministry we now have healthy relating patterns & family values set up to guide us through trials.

Thank you Jesus for setting me free!

Ann

Like many Māori woman I was sexually abused as a child, I had been ashamed & traumatized & carried this with me for almost 70 years.

My mum passed away when I was a little girl & dad fostered us out to other family members.  

Where I stayed there were several other teenage foster boys staying there too & they used to 'take me for a walk' somewhere secluded & sexually abuse me, then threaten me so I wouldn't tell anyone.

So on top of grieving my mum's death & grieving the loss of seeing my dad & siblings every day, I now had to grieve my loss of innocence & face the trauma that comes with sexual abuse.

What I learnt over the years was that silence only makes the shame feel deeper.

I went to Liz Jensen for ministry & the Holy Spirit did a miraculous healing in this area of my life.

Not only has the trauma been lifted & the negative memories erased, but my heart towards Māori men was healed & my shame was removed.

We are never too old to take our trauma & pain to the Lord for healing.

If you have experienced something like this in your life, seek help for God to heal you so He can set you free too!

Ange

 All my life I have felt unaccepted & unwanted & I didn't know why.  This feeling had become the base of other bad habits & addictions developing in my life.  

When I came to the end of my own strength to fight these feelings, I rang my brother who attends a church with a focus on healing ministry, he gave me Pastor Liz Jensen's number & I contacted her for an appointment the following week.  

I shared with her my feelings & issues & she said we need to seek the Holy Spirit on where to start, that it will likely relate back to something in my childhood, so we prayed & asked the Holy Spirit to show me a memory of where to start ministry.  

 My mum’s pregnancy with me came as a surprise & she went through a lot of stress during that time. I unknowingly carried the emotional weight of her struggles, which made me feel unwanted and rejected.  

I only needed a couple of ministry meetings with Liz where I found healing through forgiveness, then together, my mum & I spoke blessings over the story of my beginning.    

Now my relationships with my family have changed, my confidence has risen, I feel loved & accepted & my marriage is better than ever too.  

God is so good to us when we seek Him for help, don't wait so long like I did, if there are patterns in your life where you have negativity or bad habits, seek healing today!  

Sylvie 

Rejection is harsh, but feeling rejected by your own parents is soul shattering.

My dad wasn't able to raise me & I was removed from my mums care due to abuse, my saving grace was that my paternal grandparents took me in.

My formative years were dysfunctional, unstable, & often not safe, & this developed issues in my heart & thinking that followed me throughout my teenage years & most of my 20s leading me to make some really bad decisions.

Faith was often in the back of my mind due to my time with my grandparents, but it wasn't until I stopped seeing God as 'their faith' & surrendered myself to Him that He led me, through my aunt & uncle, to a church that focusses on the very things I needed, healing & deliverance.

It has been a journey, with the lows & the highs, but God has faithfully & patiently used Pastor Geoff & Pastor Liz to help me walk through the healing I needed so that I can move beyond my past & break all the generational strongholds that were trying to hold me down as a Māori woman.

God wants all of us to move into freedom, & that requires us to be not just saved but to be healed & delivered too.

Tracey

My mum had mental health issues & sadly this meant my childhood was filled with stress & times of being on the victim end of extreme violence.

To cope with the worst of these situations I used to 'leave my body' so I could disassociate emotionally with what was happening to my body physically.

What this meant was I had fractured myself; my body, heart, soul, mind & spirit were no longer operating as one just like this window, I was in pieces.

Whenever I felt stress or pressure I 'went somewhere else' in my mind to cope.

Through a series of layers of healing God showed me that I had disengaged so much I didn't love myself & I had trouble letting people be close to me emotionally, even my own children were to some degree 'distanced'.

God is so patient & so gracious & through ministry at Manifest Love Church, with Elijah House, & with Liz Jensen means I am now connecting to myself & others in a whole new way.

God is amazing & I wouldn't have survived this far without him in my life!

Vashti

By the end of my marriage my self esteem was destroyed, I was depressed & I thought I was the most useless person, & biggest failure, in the world.

I was raised in a Christian home & so was my ex-husband, but it wasn't long into my marriage before I realized that just because someone grew up in faith & served in church, didn't mean they don't have brokenness in their life.

During my marriage my husband's brokenness was now being pressed into my life, pushing & pulling & twisting me until I no longer knew who I was or even what the point in living anymore was.

I ended up leaving my marriage, by the end I was so insecure & suicidal that I no longer had hope for any kind of future.

God has been so good to me though, restoring me, rebuilding me & healing me through support from people like Pastor Geoff at Manifest Love Church & Leann Murray from Light Ministry.

Now healed & restored I am back in ministry myself, helping other woman, as well as children & men, find the healing God desires to give them for their lives too.

Don't remain in brokenness when you can live in hope, purpose & destiny

Liz

My husband & I both grew up in dysfunction, so the way we interacted was patterned not only by this childhood dysfunction we witnessed, but was added to by our own wounds & brokenness created in that trauma.

Through ministry with Pastor Liz Jensen I realized that judgements towards my mum had trapped me into becoming exactly like her!  I was controlling & constantly stressed creating a stressful home life for my husband & son.

My husband came to realize that his dad being absent most of his life, being a military man, had hardened his heart & he had decided he would just never need anyone.

Putting these issues & patterned dysfunction together in our marriage & family life was chaotic & harsh.

In forgiving our own parents, in allowing God in to heal our wounds, rejection issues, & brokenness we were set free from our pasts.

As our marriage stabilized & through ministry we learnt how to function within our roles as a family the way God intended us too, our home life is completely different & constantly improving as we learn & grow in God.

Erin

When my husband left I was in shock & felt deeply betrayed.  I used to go to church in the evenings & sit in the dim lit areas just letting the worship wash over me & encourage me.

I fought until the end to restore my marriage but my husband had already moved in with & gotten engaged to a mutual friend of ours, long before we could even file for divorce.

I felt like everything was against me, my 'friend' was now living with my husband & engaged to him, & he still had his high paying job while I had first worked to put him through his education & then gave up my career to raise our boys.

I felt like everything was wrong, that I had lost it all.  The separation of assets wasn't going well, I had a single lawyer on my small budget & he had a team of lawyers. 

I felt like all was lost, but with support from my church leaders I prayed & fasted & gave the outcome to God.

That's when God stepped in with a miracle, the mediator that my ex-husband was paying suddenly swung things around & awarded me the highest asset split ever seen in New Zealand.

My hope for my future was restored, when we surrender to Him God is always faithful.

Lou

When we were having trouble in our marriage our daughter began to develop violent behavior & anxiety related issues.

We were already having ministry with Pastor Liz Jensen & she suggested seeing our daughter too.

Through praying & talking with our daughter Liz discovered that she thought our marriage problems were her fault & her response was anxiety & anger.

Liz patiently walked through not only our marriage issues with us, but also our daughters hurts & wounds with her, reinforcing to her who she is to God & how much she is loved.  

Liz also walked through the Fruits of the Spirit with her reinforcing what behavior was not acceptable to God.

The anxious behaviors stopped quickly & the more our relationship calmed the less anxiety she had.  

The anger was a process but over time, with consistent on the same page united parenting, & the more steady our relationship became, the less her outburst happened.

Through ministry God not only healed us & our marriage, but He healed our daughters 7 year old heart too!

(To protect our young people we never release their names on public sites.)

My dad & I never seemed to get along, I felt like the daughter he didn't want while one of my sisters was his favourite & could do no wrong.

Feeling rejected by my dad led to judgements towards men that meant I kept cycling through relationships with guys who treated me badly & eventually rejected me.

Rejection had become my expectation so I subconsciously started to behave in ways that helped make it happen.

I was stuck in a self destructive cycle.

During ministry with Liz Jensen, God showed me how this had been cycling through my life & that I would believe I was rejected even if perhaps I hadn't been.

In forgiving my dad & releasing men from my judgement I now have a completely different relationship with my dad.

Now we talk & laugh & I don't assume I am unwanted & so I don't feel unwanted.

We all get wounded in this world, we all experience rejection & other hurts, God can heal them all, we only have to let Him.

If we won't get healing for ourselves, we should at least do it for our children's sake.

Hannah

I grew up with an extremely violent mum, absent dad, & lots of men coming & going from our home.

My childhood home was full of parties, violence, alcohol, & drunk men.

I was first raped at about 7 years old by one of my mum's boyfriends, then by multiple men on maraes.

Ministry with Pastor Liz Jensen allowed the Holy Spirit to show me the judgements I had made against my mum & 'brown woman', as well as towards myself, & to my own horror in the discovery, the realization that I had come to believe I was 'just a piece of meat that men can do what they want with'.

These wounds & judgements had made me hard & also put me in a spiral of repeating my mums parenting mistakes.

In releasing forgiveness to my abusers, in forgiving myself, & in repenting of those beliefs that were not of God, I have a new freedom in my marriage, in my relationship with my children & grandchildren, & with my boss who is a brown woman!

God wants to heal us, we just have to stop trying to be strong & surrender it all to Him.

Don't keep walking life with your pain when Jesus went to the cross to carry those burdens for us.

Elaine