Kari Ann

I became a Christian nearly 6 years ago. My mom and I have been going to Women of Faith conventions when we can ever since. I remember a year when Marilyn Meberg was speaking about the state of your heart and keeping things hidden from the Lord. She even wrote a book about it called "The zippered heart" which I've read a few times. I love how she describes your heart as being zippered in the middle creating 2 completely separate sections. We believe the secrets we keep from one another, from ourselves, from our spouses, parents, friends, children, etc can also be kept from God in the zippered portion of our heart, the part we won't let anyone get to or see. I've created an image of this in my mind (well, now in a paint document too...)
Long story short, I know I have a black part to my heart, the place where resentment, anger, unforgiveness, and all those other icky things lie. As well as the bad words I will think inside my head yet not say outloud, thoughts I'll have about people, actions, things... Just all sorts of nasty stuff in my imagination that looks like tar. I don't WANT that stuff in my heart or in my head. I want to be able to unzip my heart and let the red (purity, righteousness, grace, understanding, love, peace, wisdom, etc) ooze into the rest of my heart taking over my entire heart so I have nothing to hide from anyone, especially God. This has been a struggle of mine for the past almost 6 years. To let the goodness ooze into the cracks and crevices where the ick lies and let it take over. It's dying to yourself a little bit more each and every day. And unfortunately there are days where I don't die to myself at all, I live for ME at that moment in time. I'm working on it.

I'm in counseling now with an amazing woman of God from our church, I have so much respect for this woman, these qualities that I believe are of a Godly woman ooze out of her and that's what I have been striving for are those qualities. I don't want to be her, but I see the Jesus in her and that's what I'm after. She gave me homework 2 weeks ago and I completed it. When I came back to her office after our 2 weeks in between sessions she asked me what I got out of it and how it went, what struck me the most. I told her what struck me the most was about who I am. How I see myself versus how Jesus sees me. I want to know who I am in HIS eyes, not my own, and I want to believe that is actually true for myself. I want to search the scriptures and see what God said about me and remember it because THAT is who I am, THAT is who God created me to be and I don't know that person. My counselor got so excited as I spoke, I wondered what was going on. When i was finished telling her about all this, she told me that God told her to study my name for me, to tell me who I was according to Him and she had been doing a name study on my name for the past 2 weeks to find out about my name and my image in him. I was pretty impressed that God had orchestrated all of this. I found out that my parents chose my name because they had heard it somewhere and thought it was beautiful but wanted to spell it differently so it wasn't the same as all the other Karis out there. My middle name is after my moms middle name "Ann". And here's what my counselor told me about me:

Kari - pure, rightesousness
2 Tim 2:22
Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

Ann - graceful, understanding
Psalm 111:10
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise.

She had studied my name without even having a clue that this was what was on my heart and told me who I am which is who i've been striving to be since I came to know Jesus. I don't believe in coincidences, I believe God has His hand all over this and has something in store for me or my counselor or someone else neither of us know and will be blessed by His work in our lives.