I was raised in your typical Christian home, church every Sunday, youth group every Wednesday and the occasional attendance at a college bible study held at my home by one of my older brothers. I am the youngest of five, three brothers and a sister. Childhood was amazing, fun and very loud. My family as a whole and all individually are very blessed and gifted in the area of music, be it voice or another type of instrument. My dad always jokes about how he doesn’t know where we all got it from because in his mind, he can’t keep a beat. I grew up use to going to bed with the sound of my brother’s playing their pianos. Yes, more than one, we actually had three in one room at the time. I found that I was unable to sleep without it.
I grew to love music and found a passion and a love for the voice God gave me. At family gathering’s we always seemed to find ourselves back in the living room with the pianos and all the percussion instruments making noise and singing loud worship songs in fellowship together. All those times have to be my favorite memories of growing up and yet it still seems to happen when we all get together.
Since I was little I have had a passion for music, singing in the shopping cart in the grocery store or in my sleep as a child. As I grew older, around 9 years old at a church event I accepted Christ into my heart as my personal savior. I sang every now and then at the church I was attending at the time, The Flipside, and every Wednesday at youth group and at every youth event we had reaching out into the church. I also found myself going after singing at the outreaches the church held for the homeless. I always found myself struggling with the fact that I couldn’t sing more, I wanted to sing at everything. Then, in high school choir, I was around other girls I felt sang much better than I or had a different range than myself so I shied away a little from singing as much and tried to expand my range. As I’ve gotten older I’ve grown much more confident in my voice but still today struggle with comparing my voice to others and over analyzing the quality of my voice at times, picking at it, trying to consistently make it better without really knowing how.
I found myself longing to do what my brother did, play the piano and sing. He then soon went after and received his BA, majoring in music. It never hit me then at the age fourteen, but now at a more recent show my brother played in I realized how much I wanted to study music and how it all would fit in with my ministry. But I knew a college wouldn’t exactly be the place I would learn from. I grew away from the church I was involved in and grew towards another church, one moving in the prophetic, healing and in the Spirit. This all happened in September of 2005, after my cousin–in-law, Jake Hamilton, came back from IHOP-KC and Bethel Church in Redding California with a burning to start a house of prayer in the city we live in, Rancho Cucamonga.
So meeting after meeting at my house we contended for God to bless us with a building and so He did. We then moved out of that one into another in January 2008 that God blessed us with and The Refuge House of Prayer is still growing and growing. I have been apart of this house of prayer since the beginning, singing at every opportunity. I have been one of the prophetic singer’s at RefugeHOP for a year now. I began the internship at Refuge and started leading my own prayer times on the piano but then realized God was calling me out to go and find Him in the secret place and gain His heart. This was hard for me, I didn’t want to leave that place of worship and that spot of leadership I was in. Why go to a different state to find intimacy with Him. “Why not just here God?”, I asked. He was taking me to a different place a different season of my life because at that time I was struggled with relationships. I severed those ties and now I’m in a season of consecration, finding my identity in Christ at this hour. So leaning into Him, I decided to get baptized and come to Missouri. Without His heart and finding my own secret place with Him and spending time in His heart, I wouldn’t be able to fulfill the calling on my life in the way He has planned for me.
Without that true intimacy with Him I wouldn’t sing what is on His heart but what was on mine. I had to humble myself before Him, knowing that in my leaving the place of leadership I was in to come and be in the wilderness with Him, He was truly going to bless me. That is why I came to IHOP-KC for the month of June, to sit in the prayer room crying out day and night, hour upon hour praying for revelation of His love for me. Praying for Him to give me His heart so that I may truly worship and pray the things that are on His heart. I prayed and prayed before coming here, that God would reveal things to me faster than I thought. I have received so much and am a different woman than I was before. I have grown astronomically in these last few weeks, it’s so beautiful.
He is continually filling me with song and music and it just pours out of His heart into me. It’s then I put in onto paper. I have yet put my words to music but long to do so. I have a passion for the piano and pick up things like a sponge its not even funny. I have been practicing the piano with my brother with a book he wrote and have picked up the piano in a month’s time. I cannot read music but know with teaching I will get it in no time. I still am going after playing the piano because it just flows from me. I am not as good as I would like to think I am but am going after it.
My calling is to be a worship leader. I hunger to take people up to heaven with me with the words that come out of my mouth pouring out from the throne of heaven, withholding the beauty and presence of God in a place of worship and prayer. I long to lead others into the throne room with Christ, that they may not hear words from my lips but words from the lips and heart of Christ, unto them. My heart yearns for His heart, yearns to sing praise to Him, day and night. I know that if I continue to press myself upon His heart, He will continue to pour out His beautiful secrets upon me. I know that in this academy I will be challenged and some things may come easier than others for me but I am focused and determined in the end result of this pursuit.
Now as I have come to this place of intimacy with Him, intimacy I go after day and night I am confident in the gifts He has given me, confident that He has called me to a life of prayer, worship and fasting. I’m not taking it lightly but going after His heart violently, that I may fulfill my calling as a worship leader going after intimacy and pursing my destiny.
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