Teach Me to War | Module 2, Part 2
In the first part of this module, I talked about how the Lord began dealing with things in my heart that I didn’t even realize were there. I also shared how the Lord spoke to my wife and me from Luke 22:31–32, where Jesus said to Peter that Satan had desired to have him, that he might sift him as wheat, but that He had prayed for him that his faith would not fail.
We didn’t realize at the time what those words were going to mean. For my wife, they meant one thing, and for me, they meant another. But the Lord knew what we were going to face, and He knew what was going to take place in our marriage.
When the Lord Began Sifting Our Marriage
After having gone through so much pain and so much anguish, my wife and I had a very heated argument one Saturday morning. It was because of the fact that I was not willing to deal with the lust in my heart. I was not willing to deal with what was obvious to her, but what, to me, wasn’t the problem.
That argument became very heated, and she told me to get out. I decided right there at that moment that I was going to leave, and I wasn’t coming back. I was going to start a new life, I was going to start all over again, and that’s what I did.
But during that time, the Lord really began moving upon my wife to pray. She had found a place where she would go and spend time in prayer, and one day, as she was there, the Lord told her to continue praying because, as she was praying His Word, that Word was pushing back the darkness.
I believe that darkness was the very darkness I talked about in Module 1, the darkness that had surrounded my life. The Lord was dealing with something that I had not been willing to deal with, and my wife was standing upon the Word of God during that time.
We went through a very, very hard period in our marriage. It was a difficult time, and the Lord sifted our marriage and sifted us both. But here we are today to talk about it, and I believe the Lord knew what we were going to face. He also knew that we were going to come through because He was praying for us.
The Word of God that He had given my wife, the Word that she continued to pray, brought us through and pushed back the darkness in our home and in our marriage. It was through that very difficult time that the Lord began restoring things that had been broken, and He was continuing to deal with my heart.
I Will Instruct Thee and Teach Thee
One of the verses the Lord has given us over the years is Psalm 32:8:
I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.
The Lord began to show us which way to go after we had come back together, after we had reconciled. God began restoring many things in our home and in our marriage, and He’s still working in that restoration process.
During the time of our separation, we had moved to London, Ontario. When we came back together, our finances fell apart, and we decided to move back to Yorkton, Saskatchewan.
When we got to Yorkton, the Lord gave us a verse from Isaiah 43:19, where He says, “Behold, I will do a new thing.” My wife wrote those words on a whiteboard in our living room, and that was something the Lord had given us during that time.
As we were living there, COVID began to hit the world, and the Lord began speaking to us about certain events that were taking place. He was showing my wife some things, and I began to see those very things happening that she had been talking about.
Then the Lord spoke two words to us: Go south. He confirmed that direction in three different ways. One was through a vision, the second was through a sermon, and the third was through a dream. For me, according to the vision He had given me, I understood south to mean the United States.
And so in 2021, we left Canada and came down to the United States. It was here, like Moses and like the Israelites, that God really began this humbling process in my life.
From Deputy Chief to Having Nothing
I had been a deputy chief in my home community for a brief period, and now here I was coming to the United States and having absolutely nothing. We had lost everything. I had no job, we had no home, and for months I applied to hundreds and hundreds of jobs. I mean literally hundreds of jobs, and I couldn’t find work.
We travelled across the United States trying to find employment, going from Pennsylvania right down to Arizona, through places like Oklahoma and New Mexico. We even got to see the Grand Canyon, which was an amazing experience, but I still couldn’t find work. Up to that point in my life, I had always been able to find work fairly easily. I could find a job without much difficulty, but now the Lord was bringing me to a place where I couldn’t depend upon those things anymore.
We were homeless and unemployed, and we had to turn to organizations that provided shelter for people who had nowhere to live. We ended up living in a homeless shelter for two months. There were seven of us travelling in two vehicles, along with our dog and two cats, and those vehicles were packed to the brim with whatever belongings we had. We travelled across the country trying to find somewhere to settle and find work, but through all of those circumstances, God continued to provide for us.
During that time, the Lord began showing me that I wasn’t the one in charge of my life. Derek wasn’t the one in charge. God was the provider, He was the way maker, and He was the One leading and guiding us. He was bringing me to a place where I needed to learn to trust Him rather than continue depending upon my own strength and abilities.
Learning to Depend Upon God
The Lord began dealing with all of those religious garments and cloaks, those religious ways that I had gotten so used to over the years. There was pride in my heart because I had always believed I could find a way to make things happen, but now I was in circumstances where I couldn’t do that anymore. God was breaking off that pride and bringing me to my knees, and there were so many times during that period when all I could do was cry out to Him.
Before we went out on that trip across the United States, I ended up getting COVID and was hospitalized for about a week. It happened around the time of my birthday, and while I was in the hospital, my family was living in a hotel that was being paid for by a homeless assistance agency. We had no home of our own, I couldn’t find work, and now I was in the hospital struggling to breathe. Everything around us seemed to be falling apart, and I was experiencing things I had never experienced before.
I had never had panic attacks in my life, but while I was in the hospital, I began having them. They were so intense that I wanted to pull everything off me, including the IVs and the oxygen, and just run out of that hospital. But I couldn’t even take two or three steps without losing my breath and falling over, so there was no way I could have done that. That’s how overwhelming those panic attacks were, and it was during those moments that I had to run to the Word of God.
The Lord gave me Scriptures to fall upon during that time, and one of those verses was Psalm 56:3:
What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.
Those words became something I had to hold on to because I was afraid, and there was nothing I could do in my own strength to overcome what I was experiencing. I had to trust the Lord, and through those circumstances, He continued dealing with the pride that had been in my heart for so many years.
When We Find Ourselves Fighting God
When God has a call upon your life, when He has His eye upon you and wants to reach you, we need to understand the importance of humbling ourselves before Him. If we’re not willing to humble ourselves, if we’re not willing to repent of our sins, and if we continue defending the very things that God is telling us to deal with, we’re going to find ourselves fighting against God. That’s where I was in my own life, and I didn’t fully understand just how much I had been resisting what the Lord wanted to do in me.
I had been defending things in my life that needed to be repented of, and I had been unwilling to deal with the sin in my heart. The Lord was bringing me through a process where I had to learn to surrender those things to Him rather than continue trying to justify them. My wife had been praying over that time that God would make me a new man, that He would set me free and deliver me, and I believe the Lord began that process when He called us out of Canada and told us to go south.
Like Moses and the Israelites, the Lord had brought me into a wilderness where I had to learn to lean upon Him for everything. I had to come to the realization that I had nothing and that I couldn’t continue depending upon my own strength to get through life. There were things in my heart that God was beginning to uncover, things that I hadn’t recognized before and things that I had not been willing to deal with, and that process of humbling was necessary in my life.
As I look back on that time, I can see how the Lord was dealing with me through those circumstances. He was teaching me that I wasn’t the one in charge, that He was the One leading and guiding us, and that I needed to trust Him rather than continue living as though everything depended upon my own abilities. There was still much that the Lord needed to show me about what was in my heart, and I’ll talk more about those things as we continue through these teachings.