Take His Hand - A Personal Story
​Rylee Morris

The first time I truly encountered the Lord was in February of 2021. I had been really struggling in my marriage and battling my own mind for about 2 years at this point and was constantly at war with the Accuser. I had a daily bombardment of thoughts of worthlessness, inadequacy, and total lack of anything worthy of love. At this time, my husband and I were attending a Mission House of some of our dear friends…. in Socorro, NM and I began sharing the hardships we had been going through with the group. I had been overcome with such grief for years at this point and had been hiding a lot of it from anyone for fear of shame and judgment. I felt weak for sharing that I was in pain and that my marriage was suffering because of the way I had allowed a rampage of the enemy’s lies to infiltrate my mind. It had become unbearable to the point that I knew that if I did not release this fester of the enemy out of my body, it would just continue spiraling, so out come the tears and the confessions. Now nothing that I had been experiencing was new to likely any woman alive, but what should have been a defeatable tick had become a fiery boar that was refusing to allow me any passage to grace for myself, my children, or my spouse. I shared with the Mission House family all of these things and poured out in vulnerable faith that they would not judge me or find me at fault. When my tears stopped and I looked up from my lap where I had been anxiously fiddling with my hands, I was met with loving and graceful eyes from a group of people who all knew the exact feeling I was talking about and the exact things we were struggling with in marriage. Although our circumstances were different, we all knew who that fiery boar was.

Dan and Natalie, the leaders of the Mission House and my dear friends, brought the group together to lay hands on me to pray for this battle that I had been going through. As they prayed and the ladies of the group laid their hands on my shoulders I felt a nudging say to me “hold their hand”. I was sure that I was NOT going to hold “their” hand for fear of seeming too needy and desperate after my already dramatic display of grief (another lie that at the time was whispering to me). This feeling kept nagging and nagging at me until I finally gave in and grabbed one of the ladies' hands. As soon as I took hold of the hand on my shoulder I felt propelled into the prayers being said around me, I felt the washing of forgiveness and truth released upon me and for the first time in a long time I felt freedom from the binds that were interlocking around my heart. I felt loved. At the end of the prayer time I released the hand and looked up after a moment of wiping the tears from my eyes and I apologized and said “whoever’s hand I was holding I am sorry that my hand was so sweaty”, laughing as I said it. This was said in jest of course and I looked to one of the women who I thought was the one whose hand I was grasping and said “was that you?”. She smiled and said “No my hand was on your back”. I looked to the next woman and again “No my hand was on your leg”, this occurred with every other woman in the room until I exclaimed and said “alright c’mon ladies who had their hand right here on my shoulder” as I gestured to my left shoulder. I looked around and no one responded. It suddenly hit me like a train that is not a woman in that room whom I had reached out for. It was the Lord’s hand. He had touched my shoulder. He had collected my tears in His bottle. He had asked me to reach out to His hand.

​Now I want to be clear, I didn’t dream this up, it wasn’t like I felt someone’s hand or like I felt like someone just brushed over my knuckles. I was told to grab a hand that was physically squeezing my shoulder in support and I physically grabbed that hand just as I physically typed out what you are reading here.
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I also want to complete the story. This moment did not eradicate my struggles, but it is a story of victory. When God met me in this very tangible, visceral way, He gave me an ingrained memory, a tool, a gift of His presence that I accessed over and over again in the battles that came afterward. With faith in His presence and with absolute belief of His love for me I slowly began stripping away all of the vines that had been ensnaring me. With the truth of His goodness and His mercy, every battle that came had to cease in His name. God did not simply just wipe away pain from my life and it wasn’t until 2023, 5 years later, that I actually found that I had truly been delivered from the battles that relate to trauma that occurred in 2019. He showed me, by holding His hand, that we are victorious in every battle we face if we would just take hold of His embrace when He calls. This is my testimony of just one of the ways the Lord has worked in my life. He can and will do it for you too. Take his hand.