Of Leeks and Garlic and Unbounded Freedom: What is your surname?

I have been wandering among meditations of leeks & garlic and the overwhelming burdens of complete freedom when you have never known anything but generational bondage, codependency and self-doubt.  An amazing thing I find about the anointing to speak, to teach, to write, to preach, to exhort or encourage, to bring His Word and living presence to bear in any way to another human life or even gain insight for my own life is the "Otherness" of the wisdom and revelation.  It is SO NOT ME when it comes through me.  It is only any part of me and my understanding that I can grasp for a fleeting moment, but then I fatigue or falter, and my hands droop and I need the same impartation and renewal again.  We are leaky, imperfect vessels constantly in need of refilling.  The most beautiful thing about the anointing that has ever flowed through me is when it flows back to me in something I wrote or said months or years ago, it is fresh and powerful and full of His perfect presence and revives me because of that Otherness.  It never was from me to begin with.  It flowed through me for a moment.  Maybe it flowed through me then because someday, like today I I would need it to flow back to me and to speak Life to my weariness.
Here is a blog I wrote three and half years ago.  I could never have anticipated then what these words could mean to me NOW.  If you know of the season of my life in 2013 when *everything that could be shaken was shaken*, maybe you can begin to understand what this did for me prophetically today.
So wandering this week among meditations of leeks & garlic and self-doubt in the face of complete freedom, it seems back then I had yet to understand the need I had to shed a false self-confidence that was really bondage to a lie of security in my insecurities and abdication of any freedom at all.

From my singular post to 

Faith Comes by RHEMA

from WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2012

Taking the Name of Your Beloved

Will you be made new? Will you forsake everything you were, everything you had, even your name to belong only to your Beloved? What would it mean to you to take His Name? what will it cost you? Everything? What will it gain you? ZOE- life, abundant and to the full! Eternal life! Wholeness, Salvation, Safety from danger. Freedom.
Would you hold on to whatever desperate attempts you have achieved by the work of your own hands and machinations you have wrought. Are you at peace? Are you in safe harbor? Are you whole in body, mind and spirit? Is your wretched human pride so precious to you that you would not lay all your self-ness aside to identify with Him, who loved you enough to die to save you from yourself?  Is your identity in yourself- whom He made--more worthy than identity in Him who made you?

You see yourself "as through a glass darkly". Come to Him that you may see Him and then see yourself in Him. You are so much more beautiful than you could ever know, but you can never see it but through the Creator's eyes of love for you. For God demonstrates His own love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Broken, used, dirty, ashamed, unlovely... and precious beyond all comprehension to the God who is Love personified and manifest in Christ our Savior.

Have you taken His name? Have you identified yourself with Him and been made new? Do you need to renew your identity in Him as His mercies are new every morning? He will receive you with joy and without reproach. Renounce your self-ness. Take on your Him-ness. No, we do not become gods, but we become God's. Oh what a difference!  When storms rage there is One who will calm the wind and waves with a word. When troubles come, He is a refuge. When sadness overwhelms, He is there as Jehovah Shalom, the Lord our Peace.  What does mortal self-ness have to offer in comparison to all the comfort of the Comforter?


For “whoever calls on [EPIKALEO] the name of the Lord shall be saved.” 

EPIKALEO meaning whoever allows himself to be surnamed "Christ" will be saved. 

That is whoever identifies himself as of the family and lineage of Christ will be SOZO, safe from danger and made whole.

I am a Christian.  I am His.  I am saved.  I am made whole.  I am made new.Others can tell who you belong to.  What do your friends say? Who is your beloved? Self or Him? Are you His today? What is your last name?