Pat Jessee overcame emotional bondage – endured bitterness
For Pat, acquiring an unwavering faith through endured bitterness meant overcoming emotional bondage with lack of trust and a fear of what people thought about her. She had an inability many times to eat anything except oatmeal, rice, fish or beans due to allergic reactions. Pat sought the Lord by reading her Bible and going to a Christian conference. As she read 2 Kings 20, where God told Isaiah to say to King Hezekiah, “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; behold, I will heal you” (2 Kings 20:5), she felt God had healed her. During the ministry time, the Lord brought up a memory of her mother ironing and not speaking to Pat because she was mad at her about something. It was a repeated thing that brought feelings of rejection. Tears flowed as healing entered.
After the conference, Barbara Watts called Pat and said, “Your food problem is a hidden anorexia. You’re healed.” Pat wanted to eat. She was not trying to starve herself, but because of self-hate, her body was rejecting food in the form of food allergies. From that moment, the worst of the problems with food were over. Today, she can eat anything unless she gets too stressed.
About this same time, Pat went through a mid-life crisis where she felt like a failure with no purpose in her life. Mothering days were over and she stopped painting her beautiful pictures because no one was buying her paintings. The words of a friend spoke to her heart: “God put wild flowers on the side of the mountain nobody ever sees.”
That spoke volumes to her, if God does that, then my paintings are valuable to Him, even if I never sell another.
Pat started painting again. She went back to school and got a degree in Interior Design. God gave her three dreams to go to school; it gave her a safe place to succeed and not fail. God built confidence in her this way, but especially through His Word. Every day, she read Psalm 139:13-14 until she grew to believe God truly did love her: “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
Pat also overcame a mitral valve prolapse which an echocardiogram had revealed was there. After a friend prayed for her, she felt heat and it was gone! During prayer at a conference, her jaw moved forward to where the dentist said it should be. Pat proclaims, “You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). She also claims for herself that “everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:4-5).
Emotional healing comes before physical healing
During her battle, after she was initially healed, the symptoms returned—back to rice and oatmeal. One day, while driving in her car, she prayed, “Lord, what’s going on? Why can’t I get to the bottom of why my healing has not been permanent?”
God’s reply was a vision. She saw him on the cross as He said, “I died for you. Even in my weakness, I conquered on the cross.” She pulled to the side of the road because she felt the heaviness of the Holy Spirit—a good feeling; then, heat in her stomach—His touch again.
God opened her eyes to see her deceased mother discovering her own mother dead. Pat immediately had an understanding of the fear that had consumed her mother—fear of the same thing happening to her. Her mother was always tense and worrisome, unable to trust, and her treatment of Pat caused feelings of rejection with the inability to trust, as well. The Lord spoke to Pat’s heart, I took your mother out of a poor immigrant background, and you brought her to the Lord.
Endured bitterness overcome
Having dealt with the cause of her physical problems, Pat is now able to trust. She does not fear what people think of her. She walks free in many areas of her life and has a boldness to share Jesus as God uses her to minister to others. Pat is also one of the women who travel with Barbara to fast and pray.
God has blessed her painting and uses it for His glory in the pictures, murals and banners she paints of “who God is.”
One of the best things that happened to Pat was receiving a note written to her about an exposed nut–that endured bitterness. The friend saw how Pat was and what she would become—a strong teacher, gifted and powerful, who previously had been like a nut—half hidden under a shell so no one could see the valuable protein and oils inside. She wrote:
What could it do? It was worn out with introspection and could not escape from its shell. As long as no one could partake of its full nutritional value, it would shrivel up and die. It had to escape. So what could this poor nut do? It decided to be still and surrender its case to the Lord who made it in the first place. You take up my cause.
Jesus came and Pat invited him to stay. This nut prayed to God and said, “Lord you made me with so many hidden values and potentials and none have reached their full potential.”
I myself saw this hidden nut. The Lord caused a bird to come along and pick at the shell, until it was fully removed. The nut was exposed; and, so we all looked, but we didn’t see just Pat alone. The whole room was filled with a picture book of the released joy, peace, confidence, and productivity of a Pat who was teaching others the way.
Openly and freely, without shame and excess baggage from her past, Pat says, “I was that nut.” “Oh Lord of hosts, How blessed is the [wo]man who trusts in Thee!” (Ps. 84:12).
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Again, Jesus teaches us, as Jehovah-Rapha, in dealing with Peter. When Jesus warned Peter he would deny him three times, Peter vehemently denied he would, “‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death’” (Luke 22:33).