The Ride of Your Life

The Ride of Your Life

By: White Dove

"Saddle up your horses and get ready to ride! It's the ride of your life," my heavenly Father whispered. It was early morning and bitterly cold and I was snuggled under a fuzzy blanket writing in my journal.

Until then, I had never been around horses, but this invitation to ride swirled around and around in my mind. Like a siren singing to a drowning soul, I could not resist. I was all in.

My spirit was nearly dead at the time. I had lost my soul in the neverending pursuit of perfection, people-pleasing, and promotions.

The worst sin you can commit is to be untrue to yourself. You lose your identity to controllers who then suck the life out of your soul. Those are the thoughts I had been thrashing around in my journal. There appeared to be only one cure.

I must embrace the mystery of God in all the wildness of the free life we are designed to live. God doesn't live in the land of certainty, predictable outcomes, and clear paths. The free life is wild, untamed, and totally unpredictable!

If you've said yes to an invitation like this, chances are you know it will cost you everything. And in exchange, you recover your soul!

So I said yes. And oh yes, the adventure began!

Horses symbolize freedom, strength, and power. To ride one means leaving behind safety, predictability, and a carefully controlled life. I didn't realize it right away, but I was about to race with horses, following in Jeremiah's footsteps, complaining the whole way.

Jeremiah was a prophet who saw all the evil going on behind closed doors in the temple, among the faith leaders, and in government. He saw the inevitable consequences, even though at the time it seemed God was silent and aloof. But Jeremiah saw ahead; he knew what was coming… times of starvation, death, and defeat. He was having a little pity party when God interjected with a question:

"If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, Then how can you compete with horses? If you fall down in a land of peace, How will you do in the thicket of the Jordan?
'For even your brothers and the household of your father, Even they have dealt treacherously with you, Even they have cried aloud after you. Do not believe them, although they may say nice things to you.'… — Jeremiah 12:5-6

Jeremiah exposed the sociopaths in government and in church. His objective was to save lives… knowing that if only the good people would WAKE UP and TURN THE TIDE OF EVIL (because light always trumps darkness), his country could avoid death, starvation, and enormous dire consequences.

Most of the prophets lived lives of intrigue, danger, and much opposition. It's not any different today. Can you identify with Jeremiah, too?

My life was threatened during an encounter with sociopaths in church leadership. Hell on earth is set in motion wherever sociopaths are in leadership. These are not mere men we are marrying, sitting next to in church, and working with in business.

What I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that we are not powerless against the riptide of evil. We don't have to live by default; we can rewrite our future.

We can ride these horses to freedom. Freedom emerges from the Truth in the words we think, speak, and especially the words we write.

We can write ourselves into a better world… for us, for our children and grandchildren. And if it doesn't all manifest within the few brief years of our lifetime, the writings will pass on as a legacy for the next generation to take up and run even farther.

Life began to turn around for me when I began praying Scripture and inserting my own name into the verses. I began to sing His promises and to dance what I call "freedom moves" with my body. I wrote down declarations of faith, based on God's nature. I slapped those papers on top of any negative news I received.

In the sense of true freedom, I'm not talking about simply learning how to survive or how to thrive, but going even beyond that, to becoming an avenger – someone who races against horses, like God expected of Jeremiah – someone who lifts up hostages of despair and depression and helps to free them from oppression and opposition.

There comes a point when we discover we can put an end to the tyranny of the wicked. Unlike Jeremiah, we live on the other side of Calvary and have been given ALL of Christ's authority to set things right on the earth.

This isn't the kind of Love that shows up for church duties and stretches itself thin to volunteer in a multitude of church activities. No, indeed not! It looks more like the Calvary charging into the fray and shooting arrows of Truth into the darkness of despair and freeing hostages.

Malachi 4 has gripped my heart by a Love so great that in the very depth of evil we are seeing in the 21st century, I can only see Hope. 

God is bringing us all Home and restoring the family as the backbone of society!

We are the King's Bride, clothing and adorning ourselves in acts of righteousness.

Every attack against us is aimed at stealing our true identity. Therefore, every attack can be defeated and deflected by the Sword of Truth. We can take the Scriptures God has given us and insert our names into it. God's Word is LIVING and ACTIVE and SHARPER THAN A TWO-EDGED SWORD. I'm not talking about the Bible alone, but every word that God ignites in our heart to proclaim as Truth.

We can write those words like paint on the tip of a brush and they create a prophetic life story portrait.

The change begins with how we see ourselves, with love and acceptance or with self-reproach and judgment.

As we grow in our true identity as Abba's beloved child, as the King's Bride, we are transformed by the Living Word. It becomes a living family legacy, transforming our children and grandchildren and the ripple effects will cut across generational and racial barriers in a neverending river of hope.

I know these truths as surely as I know that God has a crazy sense of humor. Shortly after the invitation to saddle up and ride with Him, I landed in Wyoming and within a few brief months of training, I became a ranch manager, caring for 30 horses and 100 cows! I had to cowgirl up and during that time I wrote Life Lessons of a Lone Rancher.

Wyoming became my freedom place… the place where God broke me and the place where He healed me. Where is your freedom place? Maybe it's right here, right now, where you are today… yeah, it is!

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With all my love,

White Dove

White Dove knows how it feels to lose everything: marriage and family, church and reputation, finances and businesses, and more. Her upcoming, interactive memoir, "On the Way Home," tells the story of how she came to be known as "the most abused woman" her counselors had yet met and how she learned to navigate to freedom and fullness.  

Today White Dove helps people write their life stories, unearthing the treasures of their past and sowing them into their future, creating new family legacies.

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Tagged as: Choosing Love Today, Create Your World, Deborah White Dove, Getting Your Life Back, Life Story Writing, Living With a Sociopath, Losing it All and Starting Over, Turning Pain to Gain, Unbuckle Your Christianity, Voice of the Bride, Writing a Life Story