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I gave my life to Jesus at the age of twelve, at a camp in Katoomba. I
told Jesus that I wanted to work for Him. Within two weeks of returning
home from camp, my mother became ill and was sent to a private hospital
in Sydney.
I was the eldest of four children and the full brunt of looking after my
brothers and my sister was upon my shoulders.
In those days housework was intensive; we milked a cow and the milk was
separated to make butter; fruit from the orchard was picked and placed
into vacola bottles and custard didn’t come in cardboard containers, it
was cooked on the fuel fire with eggs from our own chooks.
One Saturday morning, by now in fourth year at Annesley in Bowral, I was
cleaning out the fire grate on the slow combustion stove, my classmates
were going on an exciting excursion, a bus was to take my them to Jervis
Bay where they were to play hockey against the naval cadets and then
have a BBQ and dance, but I wouldn’t be going with them.
I, not only didn’t have a dress to wear, I had food to cook and clothes
to wash and school uniforms to press for the following week, sat amongst
the ashes in the kitchen and called myself Cinderella.
This same year, I was given an old wooden flute and almost as light
relief, I’d take this old flute and work out the notes; I taught myself
to play it by ear and I taught myself to play the hymns we sang each
week in church.
Throughout my teenage years my mother’s illness continued and this
placed a heavy responsibility upon me. It also meant that with three of
us at private schools and my mother in a private hospital, my father’s
income was stretched to the limit.
The doctors had given the diagnosis of schizophrenia. This puzzled me
as I knew her, not as someone they classified as mad, but as someone who
was a singer, sensitive and beautiful who upheld her Christian beliefs
to the full. She was a member of the choir at St Stephen’s Mittagong,
we had Bible readings and prayer each morning when she was at home,
somehow I knew her illness was caused by inner conflicts and I asked
Jesus to heal her.
So the search for her healing became a focus which by the 1970s led me
into the Order of St Luke and attending the Healing Services where ever,
hear at St Andrew’s Cathedral when possible. I attending every seminar
possible on Christian healing. I wanted to learn and I also found that
I needed prayer myself.
When the first Inner Healing and Wholeness weekend was held in February
this year at The Healing Ministry Centre, I felt the prompting of the
Lord to attend and my reaction was “surely Lord I’ve been to enough of
these things; surely I’ve been prayed for enough by now”, but I went
anyway and it had a profound and lasting effects, in fact it was rather
like having spiritual surgery.
I said to my prayer ministry team “I have no idea why I am here but the
thing the Holy Spirit seems to be impressing on me is a time when I was
about fifteen, when I called myself Cinderella”. I joked about the fact
that I had even landed up with a stepmother and stepsisters, but no
glass slipper, so we prayed about this and about the inner vow I had
made which had had effects upon me, the sense of deprivation of normal
growing up years.
I prayed forgiveness for my parents for what they certainly couldn’t
help, but for the effects upon me. Someone came up to me at the very
end of the seminar and said to me “the Lord is telling me that as you
release the past and forgive, so will He release your flute to play for
Him”.
During prayer ministry, I forgave myself for placing images and names
upon myself that were not from God and then accepted His perfect will
and destiny for my life. We asked the Lord to release me from the curse
and to give me a new name.
The Lord answered those peyers and all those inner memories and feelings
have left me. I feel freed of the consequences of having made those
inner vows and free after fifty years to just be the person God made me
to be.
All glory to Jesus…………..
Robyn
2007 |
