Hello, I'm Alicia Waterman. I live in a rural town in East Texas with my husband
of 11 years, Sean, who's a state trooper, and we had our miracle baby 19 months
ago and his name is Henry. I left real estate when I became a mom, so I'm a
stay-at-home mom. Let's see, I made notes so I wouldn't forget what to say. I met
Ashley in college at Letourneau and Audra, her sister, invited me to the
five-day intensive and I felt like it really opened my eyes to some things, so
I wanted to be able to listen to videos multiple times and really absorb the
information, especially when you're dealing with like lifelong patterns of
thinking and whatever. It's good to be able to just take your time to really
absorb it, so I joined the group and my word of the year for 2021 is abide, so
God's really working on me and believing that I really am loved. I've already
kind of posted a picture of a Bible journaling that I did for the first
video, just really thinking about it and that's the way I kind of do my prayers
sometimes is I'll write out a prayer and then I do a Bible page with it. So my
struggle since childhood because I grew up in an abusive environment. There's my
cat again. I've tried to do this video three times and I'm just gonna ignore
the cat because he's ignorable. All my life I have felt in love because of that
environment and I believe that subconsciously even though I've been
exposed to God's love through my testimony. My testimony is I walked into
a church for the first time in Washington State where you know there is
no Bible Belt. It's very atheist and I felt his presence and I felt his love
was there and I had never felt that before in my life. I had never felt his
true love and then when I read the Bible I learned what true love was. So
like it's there. I've been exposed to it. I still am exposed to his love. I still
feel his blessings you know but subconsciously there's still something
there and there's some kind of stronghold that this is probably my
biggest thing of not entering into rest is believing that I'm really loved and
so that is why I'm here. My pattern of life has been anxiety, worry, striving
because of insecurities. When you know when you don't feel love you don't have
confidence, you don't have self-worth, all those things so you know I'm always
worn out because I'm always striving. Everything is two times harder when it's
done and striving and for years you know I've been trying to learn to let go and
let God and to be still which that's what that means is to let go and let God
and all these things and it's like still it's better like progress not
perfection but it's not I'm still not at rest even after doing the five day you
know when I did it a few times I felt I really felt a difference but there's
just so much it was like I feel like I would have to be doing it every five
minutes sometimes so I'm not sure I feel like maybe it's going to be a process of
figuring out when I'm in rest and when I'm not and I don't really know how it's
gonna work. I'm different because I'm new and yet I've already done the five days
so I have a little more expectation on what the material is but I'm looking
forward to like I said just really let it soak in and not and not strive in
doing the program. The five day I didn't feel like was I was striving it was like
I was excited to see what Ashley had to say each day so yeah I just want to learn
to do things in rest and not striving not
secure. That's kind of seemed to all go together for me. So I guess that's all I have on my notes.
So I look forward to, I'm going to be going through and seeing what some of your posts are
and I thank Ashley for this group and putting this together and for her heart for people to
learn how to rest.