My Childhood Trauma Resurfaced In My Marriage by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

When marriage gets emotionally demanding

Pastor Stephanie

Everybody experiences moments when it gets emotionally demanding.

No matter how noble it is, no matter how important what you are doing is, when it gets demanding, you start to look at what you love and who you love

Nothing of value is a walk in the park. It will always get demanding, whether it is the pursuit of business, ministry or whatever it is

I was also in school, studying microbiology, which is a demanding course. I was in ministry, leading in different capacities. It wasn't long after we got married that I took in, immediately

So it was schooling, pregnancy and motherhood. It was an extreme sport. The only thing I can liken it to is dirt bike riding through mountains, tumbling and getting back on the bike

I had it all, hyperemesis and everything. I didn't like his perfume and he came back one day and I had thrown it over the fence

There was still the demand of school and the demand of church. One thing that made the process bearable was who I married. He was very hands-on

We would do my schoolwork together. He helped me put together my presentations

Apostle Femi

One part most young couples don't prepare for is that you will see your spouse in the most vulnerable state

When you have a kind spouse, they will do anything not to see you down. My wife will always say I can ask that question 50 times in a day. Are you good?

Culture shock: singleness to marriage

When we got married, I didn't feel married. I didn't know what to expect

I have lived alone with boys all my life, and now there is this girl invading my space. I can always have my alone moment.

Even if we are 50, as long as I have my space, do your thing, bring down the whole world, just leave me

Pastor Stephanie

I had grown to enjoy my space too. From when I left home for school I was more like a part-time student and a full-time minister. I stayed alone

Between when I started working and when I got married I had lived about seven or eight years of going out of your house and coming back to see your cup where you kept it

Then you marry somebody who likes to move things. I like to rearrange. I feel there is always a better way to arrange something

You ask yourself, did I make a mistake? Not from a place of not loving her. But that culture shock made me realize there is a difference between being single and being married

What people don't understand is you are shifting in your mentality. There has to be that transition

Apostle Femi

One day I was looking for my wife. I checked everywhere. Then I opened the store, and there she was on a chair, crying

I said, I didn't marry you to bring tears to your eyes. What have I done? She couldn't talk. She was just crying

Before we got married she had planned to experiment with different foods. I didn't eat, and she cried. With boys, if I cook, they are excited, they eat and don't ask questions

I told her, my life is not hard. Serve me rice, stew, plantain, salad and I blossom. Meat is not compulsory

There was a part of me that was trauma. I went through a lot of deprivation, so I learned to adjust to bare minimum

I felt loved. For the first time in my life, somebody was crying because of me

I used to take breakfast around 7 p.m. and I was not fasting. My body just got used to it, so fasting became easy. That is one reason I don't talk much about it.

I feel it comes easy to everybody

It was a very serious time of adjustment. Many people don't prepare for that mental shift and the shock in marriage, and then they go through that phase not forgiving themselves

A spouse who bottles emotions

When I met my wife, we had fun, we talked. But any time there was something, she would just start crying. Tears would just start rolling

I discovered that when she loves you, she doesn't want to hurt you, so she doesn't tell you what you did that hurt her

Her way of exhaling was tears. There was a lot bottled up, emotions unexpressed, and it had to do with her background

She was happy and joyous, but when I came knocking at that place, it was a roadblock. Don't come here

Pastor Stephanie

I grew up not being allowed to express emotions that were not within the program set for the family and the home

If you were angry at a situation you couldn't express it, because that would go against the constituted structure of the home.

It had to be a happy home, the apex family, with a perception to keep up

I didn't know how to express feelings that were not positive and bubbly. I learned the art of bottling

Then I was with somebody who wanted me to talk about how I felt. He would say, I noticed something is off, what's going on? I would try to speak but I couldn't find words.

Next thing would just be tears

I was finding out parts of myself I didn't even know were there. The conversations were going on in my mind but they couldn't come out. I was almost physically gagged

He would say, this relationship needs to work and if it is going to work you have to talk to me. And I would be shouting within me, I want to talk to you

Apostle Femi

Trauma begins when you don't have a healthy relationship with the right interpretation of your past

Many people are going through a lot and can't move forward because they have an unhealthy interpretation of what they went through

I hit that brick wall and had to be patient. As much as conversation and communication is important, I had to learn the second part of communication, which is being patient and being observant

Most times people want the person to just talk. But sometimes you need to give her time to exhale

I had to understand another side of her. There was a side that was expressive and bubbly, and a side that was not. I had to navigate that so I would not break something

You can bring a white pap out of a black pot. Here was the white pap, and I began to see it was coming from a dark pot that was the covering

Then we started excavating, like an archaeologist, digging from the top. I came to see the concept of the firstborn, and also what ministry does

Thank God for the blessedness of ministry. But among those around ministry, especially apostles and pastors, if you are not careful, while you are helping the broken find healing, your own family is experiencing a breaking

From the outside it is everything anyone could dream of. Sixty, seventy, eighty percent more of it is good. But that dark spot is what would make everybody begin to see

Proximity reveals flaws

Often times people prepare for the idea of a person but not the reality of the person. Proximity reveals flaws

Before I got married I was a personification of trauma. When I teach trauma it is not head knowledge. I have been through it

I couldn't attend weddings. If I attended one I would be shaking, having a panic attack.

I had witnessed only one vow before I got married, because I was the best man, and I was not there for the reception

When people were getting married I would think, are you stupid? You want to use your entire life to go and marry?

When I got into a relationship, everything would go so well until the day the person mentioned marriage. Then everything I felt for the person died. I could no longer see the person as anything

Illustration: the call that broke it

A friend of mine was serving in the north. One morning he called me and began to shout at me. I didn't know what encounter he had with God

He mentioned somebody in my life who had me since childhood, and said those girls are not that person. It was like scales fell off my eyes

Then it occurred to me why the ones before didn't work. This one looks like the person. This one sounds like the person

Even if you don't look or sound like the person, there is a way my trauma will wire it. The day I see the person in you, that day triggers

Trauma has a way of masking itself as strength. You go through a breakup and don't feel it and say, I'm strong, let's go. Meanwhile something had been killed

Loving someone with trauma is a calling

Loving someone who has trauma is like a calling. It is not for the faint-hearted

I could see what God had invested within her. Then the second part of my assignment was revealed to me: roses have thorns

If you are going to have something beautiful, sometimes it will come with something that will prick you. You don't throw away the rose. You don't hold a rose from the petals.

You hold it from the stem, and the stem has the thorns

You can't love only the part that is lovable. People come with parts that are not easily lovable

We tell people in counseling, your partner will change every day. Because they are changing every day, you have to choose each other every day

A layer of the person will reveal itself, emotionally or intellectually. You have to find a way to accept that person, and know that you are changing too

Hope makes things possible. Faith makes them come to pass. Love makes it easy

I look at where God has called her to be and where God has called me to be, and when I juxtapose our destiny I see it is possible.

That is where faith comes in. Love becomes the grease

Spiritual bypassing

When she began to talk to me, that is when I began to see my own trauma. I am from a polygamous family

I didn't know I was using church. Church was the place God had brought me to hide

There is a psychological term for it, spiritual bypassing. Spiritual exercises, the entire idea of spirituality, is used to bypass, to cover, to mask what people are going through

That is why sometimes the church that is meant to be the hub of solution and transformation becomes the place where we teach people to wear masks and to pretend. We sometimes retraumatize them.

They come for solution and retraumatization occurs again

They can meet people who are dangerous but occupy roles of authority. They have learned the language of the church. They are wolves in sheep's clothing

Dealing with someone through trauma is a task, a chore. Because it is difficult to excavate, we want to put a spiritual blanket over it and say, just pray

Some hyper-spiritual people believe trauma is not a subject to discuss in church. Just let them speak in tongues. And you have people praying in tongues for long and becoming more wicked

They are making doctrine out of personal pain, personal insecurity, personal trauma. What ought to be a source of healing becomes a source of injury

The traumatized leader

The primary way to know a traumatized leader is when they themselves don't know the weight of their words

If a leper grabs your hand, the cells are dead and they will not know when they are hurting you. It is the same.

Once I see you don't know the weight of your words, it is a primary indication. You are dead or dying on the inside

You can be so anointed, but at close range there is no kindness

A hurt person will hurt others. Many leaders are still bleeding. That is the reason they can't help those who are bleeding

What church should look like

We have to build a structure that allows people to come, either from the pit or through a person they meet, and everybody is ministered to

Illustration: God is with you

My friend went through a very bad year. He had legal issues and was detained. He went to eat in a restaurant, and some ministers from America had come to minister in town.

He recognized them but they didn't know him

While they were eating, one of them got up, went to him, laid her hands on his shoulder and said, you know, God is with you

This friend had been through an entire year of darkness. Just that statement, he said, brought all the tears.

That is what I feel church should look like. An average person can join hands with you and healing flows

I don't know how we got to the point where the body of Christ that should be healing to the world is the injury to the world

One time I heard a preacher say about someone who offended him, I could kill the person. I got to a point where I could no longer stand action films.

When I heard that, it was like they tore my heart

The church is no longer a safe place for imperfect people. It is a place where everybody has to wear a cloak of perfection to fit in

Pastor Stephanie

We have taught some level of acting, because it is not a place for imperfect people

The truth is, come and experience the perfect God who can perfect the imperfections in your life. He is not punishing you for what happened to you

Jeremiah 8:22

He knew we would experience difficult situations, and there was provision for it

Psalm 34:18

That means your heart can actually be broken, but he is close to them

There was a part of me that wasn't settled with the religious construct. If you exhibit some sort of pain, then you are not spiritual enough, or you don't know God enough. So we are masking.

Even the people asking others to mask are also masking

Books and programs for perfect people

When I read many books on relationships, I wasn't captured in them. They captured people who have their lives put together

You hear father like son, like mother syndrome. There was no capturing for some of us who are not sure if father and mother will sit together on the wedding day

I began to ask, what about the orphan girl? I have a girl who was taken from her mother, a mad woman who is now deceased. She trekked with her mother until she was nine.

She has the memory of that trek. And she is one of the most brilliant girls

I began to see that the relationship books were for perfect people, not for people like me. I don't relate with many Christian programs. They are too perfect

Don't minister from privilege

One time my wife went to speak somewhere and someone asked a question. I watched the meeting live.

When she came home I played the part where the person asked the question. I told her, you answered her from privilege

You married at the time you wanted to marry. Many had to wait ten years. Waiting and getting someone goes beyond dressing and position. Sometimes it is just messy

One of the things we try to guard against is doing what we do from privilege

A pastor friend lost his wife. She preached that Sunday, got home tired with a light headache, walked into the hospital by herself and 30 minutes later was declared dead.

He said to me, whatever I have been telling people who are bereaved was rubbish

There is so much lack of sensitivity. Somebody has lost someone and you say, God gives, God takes.

Sometimes just coming to sit beside the person is what is needed, because words can't encapsulate what the person is going through

One of the major speakers in the Western world said, you cannot pastor me if you don't have scars. If I have not seen what you have been through

Sometimes people speak from the place of their victory and don't tell the journey to the victory.

The journey to the victory is what I am supposed to get from you as my template to help me overcome what I am going through

Pastor Stephanie

Pastors don't know everything. We trust the Holy Spirit to help us

We are building a system where, if I can't relate with you at the place where it has hit you, someone in the congregation who has come out of it can speak to you

How many pastors can someone come to and say, I went to my boyfriend's house yesterday and something happened?

Apostle Femi

One time I was leading prayer and the Lord told me there was somebody there, one of my mentees, joining the prayer from the house of a man she was not married to. Reach out to me now.

This girl picked up her phone straight away and said, pastor, I'm the one

Illustration: the girl rejected from both sides

Father and mother got each other pregnant while in secondary school. The father wanted the child aborted. So did the mother. Both sets of parents wanted the pregnancy aborted

The only person who stood her ground was the father's mother. She said, endure and carry this pregnancy and give me the child. She took the child

The father is now a pastor with another wife. The mother is married to another man

When the girl returns from school and wants a family, she goes to the father's house, who is now a pastor, and she has become a stain that must not be seen with him.

She goes to the mother's house and is told, don't come and implicate my marriage, go and meet your father's people

Rejection from both sides. When school goes on break she has nowhere to go, so she starts scouting

And you know what we do in church to such a person? You are a fornicator and you are going to burn in hell. God is not like that

If the image of God had been painted by many pastors, we would all be dead. God is not like that

As a teenager I went to my pastor and told him I liked a girl in church.

Because of the kind of leadership he had given me, he said, you are a good man, I trust you, I have taught you well, if you feel ready, go for it

It didn't work out. I went to him and he didn't laugh at me. He said, oh my God, what happened?

Years later he said, I kind of knew it wasn't going to work, but I felt it was good for you to have the experience

One reason many pastors don't have what it takes to help people who are traumatized is that they themselves have trauma

A leader posted that we may find we have helped many people go to hell more than the devil has, because we don't have the facility. We are a clinic that can't handle certain kinds of sickness

Adultery is a sin, repent or perish, holiness not compromise, and everybody just points the finger

Illustration: lying down beside him

I used to have a boy who stayed with me who was epileptic. One time he had a seizure and he usually passes out after. We carried him but there was nowhere to take him.

It was in front of a shop on a Saturday morning, and the stores were not yet open

I was a known pastor there. People helped me, then they left. I just laid down beside him. When he got up he looked at me and I was just there.

If there was anything I could give him that day, I would have

This is my concept of relationship. If you are in my corner and something happens and the whole world says this is who he is, you are not going to go down

Illustration: the girl who said look at me

A girl came to meet me and my wife in church and said, I used to sleep around with men. I have been following you for two years now and I have not slept with anybody.

Look at me. I am here, happy, praying

She didn't know that I had not told my wife, but I was at the point where I felt all my effort was a waste. We were about to move to Kenya

I was teaching some prophetic things that were about to happen. It was like a John 6 Jesus kind of message where people say, we don't understand, and are angry or offended. Some were even leaving church

I felt I had to tell the truth. When that girl shared that, it healed me

Healing is not a destination

People ask, how long will healing take? Will I arrive in a year? In two years?

I tell them, rather than focus on a destination, focus on how you feel per time and the recovery that is already taking place

There are certain aspects of my life that got fully healed two years ago

Pastor Stephanie

When I got married and we started living together, I was so happy. I felt, I have achieved, I am healed

When you move out of the environment where you were traumatized, there is the lie you tell yourself: it no longer has effect on me, because I am no longer in that environment

But trauma is not just that something bad happened to you. It has made a house within you and it follows you everywhere

It affects how you see life, how you see yourself, how you see God, how you relate with people, how you interpret situations, how you decipher words.

You no longer see things through what they are but through the lens of trauma

Now I can see pockets in my life where I was not relating with people on their merit. It was based on what I felt human beings, or church people, or people like them would do

I was thinking, I'm good, I'm fine, but it was still the skill set I had built of keeping things under.

When we got to the point where it was going to be a challenge, my body felt sick. I fell seriously ill without a diagnosis

When the body speaks

Apostle Femi

If certain things are not dealt with from the soul, it can affect the body, and doctors will not be able to diagnose it physically.

We have had people who go through all the tests in the hospital and they can't find anything

Pastor Stephanie

My childhood has been a show of strength. I learned how not to pay attention to symptoms. What can two hours of sleep not fix? I would wake up and we go again

Then I woke up one day and told my husband, I'm sick. He asked, how? I said, I can't explain it, but I'm sick. I couldn't place it, but my body knew.

This was after I already had four of my kids

I had no energy. I would eat but the food was not translating to energy. My speech was getting slower. I had chronic insomnia that I didn't even know was insomnia. Everybody is asleep, I am awake

At the hospital they ran an ECG. The technician asked how old I was, looked at me, then at my husband. I could see the worry in his eyes.

The doctor found some arrhythmias and said, Steph, you are one of the most health-conscious people I know, you shouldn't be sick

They checked my hormones and kept coming up with things. Thyroid disease, a heart issue somewhere. I moved from seeing nobody to seeing a cardiologist, an endocrinologist, and the last lap was a neurologist

I had chronic migraines that would take away my sight, palpitations, and no sleep. One time I had gone 48 hours without sleeping.

They gave me an injection and an hour later I was seated on the bed talking with my husband

The doctor said, why is your mind fighting rest so much? He came with something stronger, and my body violently fought the medication

Apostle Femi

There was a part of her that was telling her that if she sleeps, if she accepts it, she will not come back from it.

For your mind to fight sedatives like that, it is because there is fear

Pastor Stephanie

I could hear voices. I told him there were beings by the window, waiting for me to sleep so they could take me. I was hallucinating

Apostle Femi

There was a time I could feel the pangs and the jaws of death. I was praying for her with my eyes open and I saw a door, and she didn't want to open it

We were still going to church, still ministering to people.

I would leave the hospital and go straight to church and run service and come back

I have wheeled my wife on a wheelchair in the hospital. I think people don't know what a pastor goes through

I still carry in my wallet that first ECG result. From time to time I open it, to remind myself never to get back there again

Trauma is not a battle you fight once and step back. It is a battle you are consistently fighting. It is still creeping in the distance, waiting for you to relax so it can grasp your life

Trauma is not trying to disturb you for a few hours. It is trying to take absolute control of your entire being

High-functioning depression

Pastor Stephanie

I went to see a cardiologist for my heart. He kept looking at my file. Tests were saying one thing, scans showed nothing. Then he stopped and asked, have you been through any traumatic experience recently?

He closed the file and said, I don't think you have a physical problem. I don't think there is anything wrong with your body. It is your mind

He said the only solution he could give was antidepressants, because he felt I was in chronic depression and probably didn't know it

That is when I realized it was high-functioning depression. I was functioning at an alarmingly high rate, bringing results, doing so many things, but I was in a depressed state and didn't know

As long as results are showing, you are showing up and executing projects, it means you are fine.

There is a way you can keep escaping into activity, till the day you meet yourself at a corner and the activity is not enough

Apostle Femi

Trauma justifies wrong actions. You feel justified and you make wrong decisions

That is why we must always check on the person who gets things done

Pastor Stephanie

Being alone meant I had to confront who I was, and I didn't want that. I was in so many departments.

I was assistant music director, head of hospitality, in almost every department. I just wanted to be busy

In moments alone I had to find things to distract myself, because silence was scary. When we got married I was always with headphones. If he got up to go to the bathroom, I was behind him

I would sit in the chair opposite him in our home study while he worked, just looking at him

For me being alone meant being unsafe. Part of the trauma I experienced as a child was being molested. If I was left alone, something bad would happen to me

Years later I understood that likening solitude to danger is why I didn't want to ever be alone

Ministers' children

As a child of a pastor I am very passionate about ministers and their children.

My parents were trying to help a lot of people, and some of the people they were trying to help were in our home, and that was where abuse took place

It happened in the place that was supposed to be the safest, and my parents didn't know

My parents would say, Stephanie was always a bubbly child, everywhere, in everybody's face. But something happened and I withdrew. I would sit in a corner with my earpiece, watching people relate

Instead, they asked, why the sudden switch in your character? Why the sudden switch in your perception?

My parents found out when I was already married. I was so conscious of maintaining ministry structure and peace in ministry. I saw the toll ministry was taking on my parents' marriage.

My mother was the apex leader and founder of the church

I would hear, these church people you keep bringing, and I would think, what if I say these church people are molesting me?

I had to protect a lot of things at my own detriment. That built a culture in me of not speaking. I felt the responsibility of the peace in my relationship was on me.

If I communicated that I was unhappy about a thing, I would disturb the natural balance of peace

I carried and carried and carried until my body said it's not going with me again. I broke down. I had panic attacks and began to associate geographical locations with pain

Apostle Femi

If you had used a thus says the Lord, you would have lost her forever.

Being born again and having the Holy Spirit helps you know how to be observant and not to be spiritual in the wrong way, so she doesn't see me as one of those who came around again

For her, people who lift holy hands in church were the ones trying to corner her in darkness

Know when to proffer medical help

As much as we are spiritual, we thank God for the gift of healing and the gift of miracles. But you have to know when to proffer medical solutions to people

In church there is this mindset that if you go to the hospital you don't have faith.

You see people who preach that if you go to the doctor you don't have faith, while they are secretly taking drugs and injections

There is nothing wrong with you if your faith hasn't grown to the point where you are healed immediately.

There is nothing wrong in telling people to go to the hospital, seek help, seek therapy, seek anything that will help you transition from where you are to where you need to be

The voice that says it is just you

We have a retreat with some couples. In one session each couple sat on the floor facing each other and told themselves the difficult things they had not been able to talk about

I said, nope, I won't be here. I know how to escape when things become too intense, because all my life I felt everybody had something I didn't do right

I had to sit down. I talked first, which was a big mistake.

By the time my wife was done talking, I began to hear a voice saying, every other person is getting their marriage right except you.

You are going to fail. It doesn't matter how anointed you are, your life is a mess

I walked out dejected, broken, shattered. The most painful thing was that the voice kept saying, it is just you

On the stairs I met one of the brothers, his eyes red. Downstairs another brother was seated by the dining table, crying. Then I found out that the defense was not from the issue.

It was from the fact that I felt it was just me

That changed my perspective. This is one of the reasons couples have irreconcilable differences. You can be talking, but you are hearing the voice of accusation

In this social media age, where a pastor can be brutalized and insulted, we must pray for men of God.

It can change how you respond to issues, change how you see conversations, put up defenses in you

Children who are raised with finger pointing, you have done this again, you have done this again, are affected in how they grow up to process information

There is something they call fetal trauma. Before the child comes into being, in the womb, the child has already experienced trauma.

The way the child experiences trauma is the way the mother was treated while carrying the child

Someone who is born in that kind of environment is not even on level ground, but beneath it. The person has to fight to get to level ground before starting to come up

This information has to be out there. It provides a pool of information for people to know, this could be what I'm dealing with

It helps them know what they need as a solution, so they are not victims where they are supposed to be thriving

People who have gone through it have to be willing to share it and provide a platform

You are not the only one

Love work is the work that is done to keep love alive: the work of appreciation, the work of sacrifice

One day while talking about sacrifice I looked at my wife and asked, have I ever offended you? Everybody was expecting a no.

She said, yes. I asked, are there times you felt like giving up on us? She said, in action no, but in thought yes

You could see it open people up to want to hear. People came afterwards to say they admired what we had but could now relate with us on a personal level

The bulk of the issue people go through is that they feel they are alone

Spiritual leaders pretend they are not going through it, which worsens the case and isolates. There is also the stigma side of trauma: the fear of being victimized for being a victim

People then feel their situations are peculiar to just them. Meanwhile the scripture is clear 1 Corinthians 10:13

That means there is a human being somewhere who has experienced something similar. It might not be in the exact context of my situation, but it has been something similar

Pastor Stephanie

People meet me and I can see them coming without hope, shoulders down.

We start to talk, they hear some of the things I have overcome, and you can see hope. It is not that I laid hands on them

If someone I admire could go through something and come out and no longer be under the control of that thing, there is hope for me too

If I spiritually bypass their situation and say, I never went through this because I fasted this number of days, they will leave feeling they are the odd one out

As if everybody else's life has been working according to plan except theirs

That is ministering from privilege, where we forget that we too are people helped by God. Your own pain might not be in the same scope, but God has helped you in different areas.

Even your privilege is from the mercy of God

When I see people whose marriages are failing, I come back and say, what mercy, Lord, did you have on me?

With the state I was in, chances are I would have landed in the hand of somebody who would take advantage of my pain and weaponize it

Apostle Femi

When I got married, I jumped over a well backwards. People like me are attractive to narcissists and manipulators, someone who wants control

They will weaponize your pain first. They give you a false sense of comfort.

You are already feeling rejected and dejected, so they say, I am the only one who loves you, there is nobody else who would want you, did anyone want you before I met you?

Some people who stay in relationships where they are struggling stay because the person weaponizing their pain is the person they love deeply, and that person has isolated them.

They have fallen in love with a twisted sense of love, a love that comes with pain, a love I have to earn

Why do people go to a therapist? They need somebody to hear them out without being judgmental, to unpack and offload without someone saying, this can never happen to me

One of the insensitive things people say is, my case is different. I understand your case is different, but how is that helping my own case right now?

The door with a rusted chain

Pastor Stephanie

I would be sitting with a splitting headache and one side of my body would go numb. Some of this happened before I was even 30

One day he had to hold me and help me walk around the room so that I could keep moving, because one side of my body had gone numb

On the day of the stroke symptoms my husband sat me on a chair in our room and prayed for me.

He said, I am seeing a door, looking very old, like an ancient door, and a very rusted dark chain around the handle

He said, I sense these are parts of your life and your pain that you are not allowing God into. It is time to remove the chains

I understood before he gave the explanation. I wept. I had a fantastic relationship with God, with the Spirit upon me administering help and healing to others, and I was in need of that same touch

But I was so scared to open. What will this do to my parents? To the construct of our family? To the perception people have had about me and how fantastic my life has been?

Even the possibility of healing and health felt dangerous

Keepers of empires

Apostle Femi

Many pastors' wives don't know what genuineness looks like. They have all had to be keepers of empires

You see the majestic coming out of the program, the well set hair, everything sparkling, but inside they are dying. There is no real connection.

The man is more traumatized than he is spiritual, he is larger than life, and she feels this is what it means to marry a man of God

It is not only pastors' wives. Wives of politicians, wives of ministers, children of ministers

We have a culture where we allow our children to express their emotions. They go to school, something happens, all right, let's talk about it

I am a very genuine person. If I can't find authenticity, I can't connect. I don't know how to connect with vagueness.

I can't do, hey man of God, God bless you, sanctimonious. I don't believe in all that nonsense