Peace of Mind- Mental Health Conference

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Adventist WholeHealth Network

Dee Casper

Disappointment, Depression, and Deliverance Part 1

God in heaven, thank you for the privilege to pray.

Thank you that you brought Katie here and you blessed us tremendously this morning.

Lord, I pray that you'd bless us now as this story is told and as my own personal journey is told, I just pray that you'd give me guidance and wisdom on what to say, what to keep from saying, because I'm a man who doesn't have wisdom, and I need a whole lot of it right now.

So, Jesus, just come into this room and minister to us, and use us to bless your people, I pray.

As I mentioned, I'm going to have to redact some details here that I normally don't, but I think I should, so I'll do my best to be a good boy.

So, the reality of the Christian warfare is that it's warfare.

We talked about that last night, but there are times in our Christian experience where stuff comes against us.

And when that stuff comes against you, in those moments, we can be tempted to make compromises just for peace.

Right, I don't want to deal with this stuff anymore, and so can you just, you know, like, I'll just not do certain things in my Christian journey because I just don't want to deal with problems anymore.

We can be tempted to spend less time with God or even sacrifice our beliefs for acceptance and relief.

If we're not careful, this can happen when we're dealing with those waves of oppression and difficulty in our experience.

And in my own story, I, once I got converted, I went to the Arise program, like a Bible training school, kind of like CORE.

I kind of came to realize the importance of intercessory prayer.

And I was spending a lot of time in prayer.

I'd walk every day, rain or shine, for an hour, after I'd already prayed for like a half hour, an hour earlier in the morning, and just commune with God, right?

Lay people before God in intercessory prayer.

Ice, rain, sleet, cold, hot, it didn't matter.

And it was such a blessing to me and radically changed my life.

But at the same time that I was going through that season of my life, I also was enduring an experience that is really difficult even today for me to really know how to communicate and how to navigate it.

Have you ever been in a season of waiting on God that just seems to never end, right?

Maybe you're waiting for a job, for healing, a prayer request for your children to come back to the Lord.

Whatever the situation may be, I was in 1 of those seasons of waiting that to this day I don't fully understand.

Prayer, providence, Christian counsel, and the Word of God were all leading me in 1 particular direction, but there were variables in this equation that never fully came about.

And I gave 5 years of my life to waiting on God in a situation that eventually just kind of blew up in my face.

And it was devastating to me because imagine, like, you don't… when you're a new convert, like, you're learning how to hear the voice of God and you're growing, and to be so excited by the fact that God is speaking to you and working in your life, and then to have all of that not really come to fruition can really challenge your faith, right?

It can challenge you, like, did I really know him?

Because, I mean, there are things that God can want, that there are variables in the equation that keep some of those things from happening, right?

The boss decides not to hire you, that God wants you to have that job, or I don't know, whatever else.

And so in my situation, I kind of wrestled with this, And at the same time that that thing kind of blew up in my face, around 2016 actually, here's the ironic thing.

Right after I meet Paul Conniff, and he kind of opens my eyes to the topic of mental health, within like 2 days of me watching his videos, maybe a day later, is when the stuff blows up in my face.

And so I'm still kind of trying to pick up the pieces from what happened and make sense of it all, but it's almost as if like that season of my life and waiting on God, like he led me in a direction to get my attention, and then like once I was to a point that I heard what I needed to hear, that season would end, and I would move to something else.

And maybe that was the point, that God was taking me through this growth experience, and that Once I've come to a form of understanding, then something else changed.

But I do know that right whenever I start to understand the topic of mental health and I got stuff is when things blew up in my face.

At the same time, I'm working for a small ministry, an Adventist ministry that's self-supporting, which means that they're not funded by the church, but they support the church in their work, but they're privately funded, right, either by donors or they have an industry or something else.

So I'm working for a ministry, and at this stage I enter a season in which I will not be paid for nearly a calendar year while working for Jesus.

And that can be a little confusing for obvious reasons, because generally, you know, a laborer is worthy of their fee, you know, and so forth, or their work.

But I ran into a situation where this is where God called me to be, but the ministry just didn't have the money to pay us.

They had ministry to pay the bills, barely, but they didn't have money to pay us.

And so I'm now in a scenario where I've just encountered a crippling disappointment, and I begin entering a season of radical poverty.

Now, I'd been homeless before, so I figured I'd already learned all these lessons and we can move past that now, right?

But God brought me through another season, and to make matters even more difficult, within 3 months of payroll starting to dry up, God lays it on my heart to purchase a vehicle.

Now, I had had a vehicle that someone gave to me when I was Bible working at the job before I worked for this ministry.

Someone gave me a car straight up for free.

She gave me $0.26 because she's heard, I guess I can kind of tell, I have a little bit of real estate.

So this girl, she asked me 1 day, I rode my bike to her house and she's like, Mr.

And I was like, well, Anna, cars are expensive and I don't have enough money.

And she sits there for a second and she thinks, wait, I have something for you.

And she runs to her room, she's like 6 or something, just cute girl.

She comes back and I hear this kind of chink sound and she starts drawing on a piece of paper.

And she hands me this piece of paper and says, this is for you.

So I don't open it until I ride my bike home.

But I open it, and it's this, it makes me want to cry.

It's this pretty little picture of like, it says Anna on it, and there's hearts on the paper, and just this sweet girl.

Because she's thinking in her little 5 or 6 year old brain, like, Mr.

D needs money to buy a car, I have money, I bet you this is enough to buy a car.

But it was just so sweet of her to do this.

So of course, when someone does something cute like this, you post it on social media.

And so I do, and a lady who lives locally is a teacher at an Adventist school.

She realizes, wait a minute, someone gave me this car since I was a teacher for the church school, the same church, by the way, that I'm Bible working for, and Her brother gave her his car.

So she's got an extra car sitting there and she thinks, I should give this to him.

Some months go by and then I do a week of prayer at that school and she says, hey, so you don't have a car?

She said, well, look, someone gave me this car.

I don't know why it won't start, but you can just have it.

So I go and I have a mechanic friend of mine check it out, and he says, there's nothing wrong with this car.

Like, all you need to do is buy flux, which is the stuff you kind of melt over wires, just the wires weren't fully connected.

And that car ran without a problem for like a year and a half or so while I was Bible working for that church.

So as I'm leaving that area, God convicts me to give my car to my pastor, because he and his wife were sharing a vehicle, so I just give it to him.

And it's kind of difficult because I won't have a car at all now moving to a new ministry, but God promised he would provide.

So I go, and as I'm leaving this community, people are just throwing cash at me, all kinds of money at me.

So I got like $2, 000 in savings, and I mean, when you're like an impoverished missionary, that's a lot of money.

I go to this ministry and I try to buy a car, and no 1 will give me a loan for this car.

Like, I got a $2, 000 down payment, decent credit score, and no 1 will give me a loan.

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Disappointment, Depression, and Deliverance Part 1

Transcript

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