Sermon shared on 1 February 2026 at Valley Gate Vineyard, Kentville, Nova Scotia

Good morning. Thank you so much for having me here. My name is Jazmine. I’ve visited a few times and met a few of you in the last year or so. I live out near Halifax and am part of your sister church, the Halifax Vineyard. I’m also a part-time student at Acadia Divinity College doing a Master of Arts in Theology.

I had started preparing something more formal and fast-paced, but couldn’t shake the sense that informal and slow was the way to go today. So I felt led to do is just share some of my story and what God’s been doing—specifically what God’s been leading me through in forgiveness.

Before I begin, let me share this from a friend. She was praying over me coming here today and sent this encouragement she found online: “Only God can turn a mess into a message and a test into a testimony.” So that’s what I’ll do today, share a bit of what God’s doing with my mess.

My Background

I’m originally from the West Coast. I grew up near Vancouver and attended a Vineyard church plant out there as a kid. Life got more serious when my parents divorced.

I joined the Air Force after high school, and after a bunch of years of school and training, I came to the East Coast to fly on the Sea King helicopters. Remember those? The folks who worked on Sea Kings absolutely loved that old bird. We miss her.

When Health Began to Fail

Somewhere during military service, I started to have health issues. I thought it was deployment at first, but there was no acute trauma. I was released from the military in 2015 with continued mysterious health problems.

Over the past 10 years since then, I’ve started to come to terms with why I got so sick. Certainly the stress of serving in the military exacerbated and accelerated poor health. But I had also been in denial about key relationships in my life that, frankly, made me feel chronically unsafe. Being in denial about how unsafe I felt meant I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t envision what those relationships should be like. So I couldn’t seek help—including the Holy Spirit’s—to figure out what to do.

Little by little, physical symptoms took over my life: digestive distress, insomnia, anxiety, muscle tenderness, chronic fatigue. It was really hard as someone who had been very athletic my whole life—very humbling. I felt like my physical and emotional flexibility was getting stolen, drained out, and I couldn’t figure out where the hole was to plug it.

Seeking Help and Healing

The physical symptoms forced me to face the reality that something was wrong. I remember clearly the night I went to bed in tears and suddenly thought to pray, “God, help.”

I also sought out professional help. I saw medical specialists, a naturopath, physical therapists, a counsellor. I also went to charismatic healing conferences and healing ministries, where I realized I’d lost the expectation I had when I was a kid in the Vineyard for God to heal. I started asking to be prayed for regularly by people I trusted.

And I did experience miraculous healing. The intense digestive cramping I had stopped cold. Whenever it tried to start again, I learned to tell it to be still in Jesus’ name, and it stopped. Chronic headaches I’d been getting totally stopped.

The professional help I got did make a difference. Their help was like getting re-parented in a healthy way, like people partnering with the Holy Spirit—whether they knew it or not—to mother and father me. At the same time, testimonies and prayer at conferences and healing ministries raised my faith and expectation for God to work, to break through.

The Problem Remained

But there was a problem: I was still in denial about those key unhealthy relationships. In the midst of the healing, I had picked up another unhealthy attitude that I could withstand anything by just loving enough. That I could stick it out and my love would win. The few that said, “This doesn’t seem healthy,” I answered by saying I didn’t sense a “calling” to change anything. That was not a healthy response! Since nothing changed in these relationships, I still didn’t feel safe, and physical symptoms resurfaced even after healing.

Understanding Denial

Now, denial’s part of the grief process. It’s a safety mechanism that keeps us humans functioning under duress. To do that, denial compartmentalizes emotion to keep us safe from feeling emotionally overwhelmed. But it takes a huge toll on the body that’s trying to hold it all in.

Psalm 32:3 resonated deeply with what I was experiencing at the time: “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.” The psalmist is referring to the physical tension of not confessing his own sin, but anyone who’s been deeply hurt and left feeling unsafe but not told anyone might know the visceral feeling of trying to keep it all inside.

There were some unhealthy attitudes I’d also been trained in by the church at the time about the nobility of “silent suffering.” I had convinced myself I should suffer silently out of love, or respect, or kindness. It felt like gossip or being mean to tell someone how I’d been hurt. So instead, my body and mind suffered, and I felt so alone.

That right there—that isolation—that is not the way God works. So even if I didn’t feel a “calling” to change anything, I was missing the voice of wisdom to admit that things should not be like this.

Seminary and a New Crisis

Now, ironically, while I struggled to discern what God wanted in my relationships, I did experience a very strong and sudden calling to go to “seminary.” My response was: What’s that? I didn’t actually know and had to go looking to find out that it’s where professional ministry training and theological education happens.

I started classes at the seminary a few folks from my church at the time attended—so not Acadia Divinity. It was a year or so before I realized more clearly the message from both the seminary and the church I attended: Women aren’t allowed to preach or pastor.

I pondered this deeply over the next few years. I read and heard things that slowly convinced me that the Spirit, in fact, calls and equips women to preach and pastor. I watched a woman at a charismatic conference speak and the Holy Spirit fell so powerfully. And I thought: if she wasn’t “allowed” to preach, why was the Holy Spirit cooperating so powerfully with her?

And then, I was invited to preach. Multiple people I trusted reacted very poorly. You can imagine how much this worsened the feeling of unsafety even as I was trying to just outlove people’s antagonism.

So I finally cracked, and I cracked big. I got stuck in what felt like one long panic attack, day and night. My chest squeezed tight. My whole torso felt like it was buzzing. I couldn’t fall asleep, or stay asleep. My skin itched, my muscles hurt, I couldn’t eat without major digestive distress. It was all the symptoms I’d had before, multiplied.

It felt like a combination of losing my sanity, my dignity, my agency, my health, my capacity to connect peacefully with people around me, to make decisions, to even think clearly.

Finding Safety

That’s when I reconnected with the Vineyard near where I lived at the time—before moving back out to the East Coast. I just cried through worship. And when people asked what they could pray for, I started saying out loud what had happened—at church, at seminary, and with the key relationships. People listened and prayed. There was safety.

You guys have to know how big a deal it is that the Vineyard welcomes, trains, and nourishes women leaders alongside and equally with men. I know it was a journey for the Vineyard to get here, but I’m so grateful for the safety that it’s brought now. I needed this safety to really start healing.

I moved back to Nova Scotia in 2023, started attending the Halifax Vineyard, and transferred to Acadia Divinity College. My very first day of orientation at school, I ended up in tears in a woman professor’s office. When she asked if I wanted to share what was wrong, I said “You guys are just so nice!” By which I meant, this place and people feels so safe.

I realize now that that moment was like crossing a threshold into the safety that I hadn’t felt in so long. Crying was a sign that my body felt that shift in safety.

Obviously, God had heard my cry for help and is restoring the safety I had lost.

Learning About Forgiveness

So now let me look at something I learned about forgiveness along the way.

First, I used to think that forgiveness was a knee-jerk reaction whenever someone hurt me. “Quick, forgive!” This sounds good in principle, but it’s only a piece of the story that can go wrong very quickly.

Because the day came—after I cracked—when the words “I forgive so-and-so” refused to come out of my mouth. If I were confessing to God in prayer how angry and hurt I was, or someone was reminding me to “just forgive,” my body hurt when I tried to say the words. They felt so inauthentic.

Understanding Anger

It took a while before I learned that all those physical symptoms of chronic unsafety were suppressed anger. I learned that anger is a healthy emotion that tells me when something is unsafe. I learned that emotions aren’t just in the mind but that my whole body participates. I learned that if I felt angry but couldn’t get back to feeling safe, my body got stuck feeling angry all the time.

And I learned that anger was trying to recover for me what I had lost by being wronged.

Let me say that again: anger was trying to recover for me what I had lost by being wronged.

Forgiveness as Letting Go of Debt

I gained a new appreciation for how forgiveness involves letting go of the debt someone else owes me—whatever it was I lost by being wronged. The Lord’s prayer, of course, says exactly this. It gets variously translated as “forgive us our sins” or “trespasses” or “debts”… “as we forgive our debtors.”

What the New Testament says about forgiveness can be easy to throw around to obligate fellow believers to “just forgive.” For example, Jesus says in Matthew 6:14, “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Or Paul in Colossians 3:13 says, “Forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive.” This can be easily made to sound threatening: “if you don’t forgive, you’re in trouble.”

I’m sure you can see how these verses can land like a ton of bricks on a hurting person who is so overwhelmed that forgiveness feels impossible. It’s like being told to climb Mt. Everest when you’ve just been hit by a car and it broke your leg. It’s hard for the healthy person, but how much more so when you’re injured! But that’s not to lose sight of the fact that with healing and strengthening, someday, the challenge can become possible.

So let’s look for how these can be true without being threatening.

The Futility of Bitterness

So if forgiving means letting go of the debt someone owes me, that means they’ve taken resources from me. When I’d been wronged, my emotional resources had been drained. I’d lost resources of safety, dignity, agency, sanity, and health.

So to be called to forgive meant letting go of the debts owed me. But when I had no resources left, it made sense that I couldn’t handle covering someone else’s debt.

But then I had to wrestle with the futility of bitterness. How can I ever expect anyone to pay back these kind of resources? Why keep wishing, hoping, expecting that a wrongdoer will somehow figure out how to do so?

The question was, how to get those kinds of resources back so that I could forgive?

God as the Source of Resources

Now, let me go back to the Old Testament, because the New Testament authors write with an acute awareness of what the Old Testament says on any given topic. It struck me that the concept of forgiveness is rooted most powerfully and consistently in who God is.

Exodus 34:6-7 says: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…”

So God is a forgiver. He’s the one person who has all the resources necessary to cover what’s been taken.

That was a major revelation for me. The key relationships in which I’d been hurt, and the church and seminary in which I’d been hurt—they couldn’t pay back what felt like it had been stolen from me. But God could.

So in the case of having lost safety, I finally had to come to terms with safety being something I sought from God and actively participated in recovering with him. Those places and people were not in a position to restore the safety that I’d lost. So recovery meant leaving unsafe environments, and creating boundaries in key relationships. And partnering with God to recover safety and… heal.

And then from this place of recovered resources, I’ve experienced the shift toward being able to authentically forgive what’s been taken.

Jesus and Forgiveness

For Jesus to instruct us humans to forgive is a huge calling. It’s basically saying, “Be like God and forgive.” But if Jesus doesn’t “break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick” (Matthew 12:20), he’s not calling us to a knee-jerk reaction that drains all our resources. He’s pointing to the God who has the resources and who we can access to get the resources to forgive.

On the cross, what does Jesus say about forgiveness? “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Interesting to me is that Jesus doesn’t say “I forgive,” but asks God to forgive. As a trauma survivor, this makes me wonder if Jesus—in a position of having let all his resources be taken from him—was also unable to authentically say in that moment that he forgave because he had no resources left.

Before we get concerned that he “should have been able to forgive,” we should realize that traumatized individuals get forced face-to-face with their human limitations, but limitations are not sin. What I hear Jesus doing is committing to forgiveness as the right thing. It’s the destination. But he seems to put it in God’s hands for a moment as he finishes what he came to do, to be totally drained of every resource.

And then… resurrection. In other words… healing. His resources completely restored.

Committing to the Journey

What I’ve been walking with now is committing to the journey of forgiveness, which is a commitment to seek God to restore the resources, a commitment to invite him to heal me, to breathe life into my dry bones, to resurrect me. There’s a reason I’m speaking today while seated in a chair, because I still need a lot of rest.

This journey has also become a commitment to actively participate in restoration. I now want to learn to recognize when I’m feeling wronged and give myself permission to feel anger. I want to learn how to communicate that I’m feeling angry. I want to sit with it instead of being afraid to feel it, to be able to say it out loud to God and trusted people. I want to be able to identify what I feel has been taken, ask God to restore it, and participate in recovering it. These are the activities that have developed out of committing to the journey toward forgiveness.

God Restores Our Fortunes

To finish, let me share this. In the Old Testament, it’s mentioned 29 times that God restores the fortunes of his people, beginning in Deuteronomy 30:3: “Then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you.”

This starts a theme woven into the rest of the Old Testament. God sees exactly what resources have been drained by sin. God has compassion, knowing that no human can do everything right to make up for what’s been lost. God takes it upon himself to restore what’s been lost, and invites his people into participating in that restorative work.

A Closing Prayer

Father God, you’ve called us to be a people who forgive. It’s a calling to be like you. But you don’t mean that to be a burden. Thank you for your tenderness in instructing us to forgive. We need your deep compassion to heal.

We acknowledge how challenging it feels to forgive. Our resources have been drained by a lot of hard things happening in life. It can feel unsafe to forgive because we have to use our struggling resources to cover over what someone else has taken.

God, restore our fortunes. Restore safety. Restore hope and peaceful connection with people. Restore agency to have good boundaries.

Make our bodies and souls safe in your presence, safe to heal. Chaos, be stilled. Disorganization, be organized. Messy knots, be untied. Tightness, be relaxed. Blockages, be released. All of this be done gently with complete safety.

Holy Spirit, breathe increased life into us. Thank you for safety in your presence.

Spirit, you are welcomed in this journey. Restore all we need to be a people who forgive.

All of this for your glory, God, and for our joy.

Amen.