Kathy Troccoli ministers out of her pain and brokenness – which the Lord has healed and set her in a place where she can feel the pain of others and speak to their pain.  Compassion is not something you can generate, or work up, and true compassion comes from familiarity.  The Bible tells us in Isaiah 53 that Christ was familiar with all of our suffering – everything that we could know as suffering – He knew. That’s why His compassion is so strong for His people. He knows their frailties and their weaknesses. But He said He would be strong in our weakness (2 Corinthians 13:4) and He does not lie!

Kathy’s book, “Am I Not Still God?” is written out of her pain.  She says, “there are times in our lives that we feel like we’re on the mountaintop, I call them glimpses of Eden, because we were meant to be in the garden and we’re not in the garden.  But when you’re on the mountaintop, and I have been, you have to expect to not be there for long.  And I love the Lord so much for not lying to us.  He’s so faithful and true.  He said, you’re going to go through it in this life, you’re going to go through it but I will be with you.  I want to say… if you’re on the mountaintop, enjoy it, but most of life goes through those deep, deep places. 

I believe my platform is from those places of suffering and how God met me there.  I realize that I didn’t really want holiness.  I was under the banner of Christianity but the Lord said “I want you to follow me to the higher places,” and I often joked and said holiness cramped my style. I didn’t know if I wanted holiness.  But as I asked God to come into those places where I was making messes… because when we do life through our own grid with our own wisdom and our own grasp on where we think things should be, we’re going to hurt people, we’re going to hurt ourselves.

And when I finally said, break my heart in those places where you need to come in – because the places that I’m occupying are not allowing the Holy Spirit to come in, so how can I be holy in areas of being a great lover of people or being able to give wisdom or being able to comfort people with His perspective.

So I started praying those prayers and also doing my own inventory and repentance knowing that if I do that, it will be the best life I could live and the glory of God will fall on me… and it has, and it will for all of us.  It’s just the way of the Gospel.  The Crucifixion brings the Resurrection …but we don’t necessarily want the passion.  There was a great cost for that stone rolling away.  And sometimes we have to allow God to teach us how to die to ourselves so that we’ll get to those resurrections throughout our lives until we see Him face-to-face.

It’s one thing to say in concept, God will take you through your hard times, the Lord is faithful, …when you hear that you almost want to put your hands on your hips and say… really?  I want to say that all of us have our story and there are many, many, many people that can put their list out there that is much longer than mine, but all I can speak from is my list. All I can speak from is my story.”

Join me next week on my blog, as we share more of the healing ministry of Kathy Troccoli.

Love,