Why Run From Love? ~ Jasmine Esquivel Ep.160

Why run from love? The love of God is so powerful that He meets us in our most painful places. Jasmine Esquivel is a pastor, teacher, and healing minister based in Tucson, Arizona, where she serves at Iglesia Centro de Sanidad. Having experienced both deep disappointment and profound restoration, she carries a passion to help people encounter the love of the Father. Jasmine shares her personal story that is real, raw and deeply vulnerable. In this conversation, you'll hear struggle, tears, surrender and the healing love of God, meeting someone in the middle of deep pain. As you listen, you may hear parts of your own story reflected in hers. Please note this episode is not intended for children, as we do discuss real-life topics, including pregnancy complications and abuse within the church. 

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Transcript

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Jasmine

I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to think. I hadn't prayed in a really long time. Something just broke open, and I felt like this rush, like of love. 

Deborah

Welcome back to living the Reclaim life podcast, where we have honest conversations about healing, hope, identity and the ways that God meets us in the middle of our stories. I'm your host today, Deborah, and I am so grateful that you've joined us before we begin today's episode. We want to take a moment to let you know that Jasmine's story is real, raw and deeply vulnerable. In this conversation, you'll hear struggle, tears, surrender and the healing love of God, meeting someone in the middle of deep pain. As you listen, you may hear parts of your own story reflected in hers. Please note this episode is not intended for children, as we do discuss real life topics including pregnancy complications and abuse within the church. 

Before we get started, we want to thank the sponsors for today's episode, joy in the morning. Joy in the morning exists to support those who are walking through grief by equipping individuals and communities with resources, training and compassionate support so that no one has to navigate grief alone. Be sure to check out their incredible support app designed to help you become the kind of friend that someone who is grieving is truly in need of. Now let's step into this powerful conversation with Jasmine Escobal,

Deborah 1:23

So today, I am so honored to introduce to you Jasmine Escobal. She's a pastor, a teacher. She's a minister based out of Tucson, Arizona, where she served at iglesia centro de sunny back and having walked through deep disappointment and profound restoration, she carries a passion to help people encounter the love of the Father, the healing of Christ and the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. Her ministry is marked ministry is marked by biblical depth and compassion and a deep desire to see lives restored and rebuilt in God. So Jasmine, we are so grateful that you're here. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Jasmine 

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here and grateful that the Lord connected us and helped make all of this happen. 

Deborah

Yes, I will never forget the time that I sat underneath your teaching, and what a blessing it was. My goodness, the way that the love of the father just pours out of you is such a beautiful thing. So I would love to just start here. You gave us a glimpse of your story and your questionnaire that you filled out, and I would like to just hear a little bit about the disappointment in your faith, just wherever you want to start with your story, but just start somewhere there. Okay, so my family is a ministerial family on both sides, so the majority of my aunts and uncles and cousins on my mom's side and my father's side are in ministry. My grandmother's both were in ministry. My maternal grandmother was my first Sunday school teacher, and so, you know, I grew up with my cousins on the worship team. My uncle was our senior pastor, and then also denominational leaders. So they were, they were leaders in the denomination, state, statewide and then nationwide. And so we, I come from real ministry and real ministers, and had seen God move in my whole life. I experienced great power in the church, and all the beautiful things that the church that did. And I knew, you know, I knew the people, sort of the behind the scenes. I grew up in my past. My parents are also pastors, and so I grew up in that environment where it was, you know, very much a church kid, and I was very much a PK and a pastor's teachers and a pastor's cousin and a pastor's granddaughter. And so I had that background. And so the Lord was very real to me, and ministry was also very real to me, but I also experienced a lot of pain in that same environment. So it was this, it was this, you know, the wheat and the tears grow together. I had a very blessed childhood of, you know, being

Unknown 3:26

born and raised in the church, but at the same time, I experienced a lot of disappointment with the church and a lot of pain in the church because I was around only the people from the church. All of my pain had come from church people, because there was, there wasn't anybody else, you know, that's why I was around. And so I experienced a some sexual abuse within the church from the people in the church. And there was a time where my father, he he he fell, and so he backslid and abandoned my mom and my sisters and I, and I had a lot of although he was restored, the Lord brought him back. And it was a powerful testimony that you have a restoration that my family had. I still carried a lot of that pain, and I was, I was unwilling to share. I didn't know how to express all these things that had happened to me in the church, all the pain and the disappointment, you know, that happens, especially when you're in that environment where you're seeing firsthand. You kind of have a place in the church when you're you know your parents are the pastors, or your uncle the pastor, and things like that, and and so it almost you have a sort of target on your back from the enemy, I believe, not from the people, but from the enemy. And so there's these recurring things that happen. And so I didn't have, I didn't know what to do with all that pain, and I hit it. I hit it for a long time, and the my knowledge of the Lord was deep, but I also had really deep, hidden pain.

Unknown 4:38

And because of that, I didn't know where to go with it, because I was in the church environment. I had, I had experienced the presence of God, I was there, and yet I was in so much pain, and there was so much trauma and so many things that happened to me. I was so angry. I remember, I was so angry, and I didn't know what to do with my anger, and I was so broken, and I didn't know what what to do with brokenness. So I spent a lot of years functioning out of a place of routine. I knew what to do. I was comfortable in the church, but I didn't know what to do with the pain. And when you do that, when you hide all of that, there gets there gets a moment. There comes a moment in your life where you can't sustain that anymore, this sort of dual life. And I remember thinking like I'm trying so hard to be good, I'm trying so hard to be good. And my whole Christian life became about being good. I didn't surrender the pain to God, and so I believed I needed to become someone that God could love.

Unknown 5:59

And how could he love me with all that had happened? How could he love me with all the anger that I had and all the rebellion that I had and everything I felt about, you know, everything that had happened to me and how, you know, the Lord had restored my home, my parents, my family. And I was angry about it. Like, how do you be angry about something that the Lord has done? You know, everybody else, sort of around me, was rejoicing in this, you know, miracle of restoration. And I was so angry that he left in the first place. I was so angry that this had happened in the first place. And, you know, I came to a moment where I could no longer sustain being good. And so I thought, you know, I in the church, I grew up here, and I've not, not been able to achieve this goodness. I not become somebody worthy of God's love. And so I decided that I was going to go the other direction. And there was a moment where the pain and the anger and all that turned into rebellion. And I decided that, you know what, I'm going the other direction. I'm going to move away from the Lord, and I'm going to move away from, you know, from from this, from the church environment, as far away as I can get. So I'm going to go live in the world, like the world, and I'm going to be one of them, because this didn't work out for me. Church didn't work out for me. God didn't work out for me. This Christianity didn't work out for me. The Bible didn't work for me. This wasn't for me. I couldn't achieve, you know, this holiness or this life that everybody else around me had. And I just thought, you know, it wasn't for me. And so I deconstructed my faith, and that's like before that word became really popular, but that's really what happened. And so I started sort of medicating my pain and with alcohol and going out and doing everything that, you know, people do in the world. And I was so angry and so hurt that at some point that turned to God, and then I was angry at God, and I was hurt with God, and in my heart, I know that I had no intention of returning to church or to that life ever again. For me, it was like I did that, been there, done that didn't work. I'm going to find my own way. I'm going to do my own thing. I'm going to become really good at being in the world. And that was kind of the direction that my life was going at at the time. So what was your moment that was that aha moment, that that moment that you decided, You know what? Maybe that wasn't the right decision. Maybe that wasn't where I should go, you know, I I would not have returned to church on my own. I had no intentions of doing that. And I always say that I feel like I didn't come back. I felt like God went for me, I didn't return, and it was the Lord that came for me. And I in the midst of that, you know, in the midst of all that, I was getting angrier and angrier, because now you're in the world and you're doing all these things, and it gets worse and worse, and you think it's gonna get better, and there it doesn't. There's nothing out there that's any better. And so I remember, I had been married at the time for about six years, and I remember that, you know, my family would ask me all the time, you know, when are you gonna have a baby? When you have a baby, I would

Unknown 8:40

think I'm not, like, I'm not gonna have a baby. Never gonna have a baby, because my life is a mess. I'm angry. I don't want to I don't even know how to raise a child like because I was raised in the church, and now I wasn't. And there's a part of me that knew that that environment was not an environment to raise a child in, but I also didn't want to come back to church, and so I was in that situation in of my life, and there was a moment where I started having really bad hemorrhaging, and I called my doctor, and she said, You know what I'm doing around in the ER, get down to the ER right now. Let me check you out, see what's going on. When I got there, I found out that I was pregnant. I had taken a pregnancy test just because somebody at work said, Hey, are you pregnant? Because somebody was making some, like, heating up lunch in the lunchroom. And I was really far away, and I was like, wow, I can smell that all the way. They're like, are you pregnant? Only pregnant only pregnant woman smells like that has that sense of smell. And I was like, no way. There's no way I'm pregnant. You know, I've been married for six years. I was definitely not trying to have a baby. And I got home that day, took a pregnancy test, and I it was positive, but I was having hemorrhaging. Immediately after that positive test, I started hemorrhaging. And so that's when I called my doctor, and I said, Hey, you know this is happening. She said, get down to the ER. I get to the ER. They do a blood test. And she's like, You are pregnant, so it's definitely confirmed you're pregnant. She's like, but you do have a lot of bleeding. So we're going to take you back to the surgery Bay, and we're going to do an ultrasound, like, you know, a more in depth ultrasound. She's like, and if there's and if we need to, we will just do the DNC back there. This is kind of an emergency situation. So they took me and they whisked me away into this surgery Bay. The ultrasound tech came in with the equipment. And now, mind you, I have this sort of life, right? Sort of crazy life, and and I I've just found out that I'm pregnant and also misdearing At the same time. So that's a lot of information, yeah, a lot of life changing stuff happening at once, and I didn't know how to feel or what to think. And so the radiology text starts doing the ultrasound, and she puts it up on this screen. It was a screen up there. And she as she's going through and she goes, Look, look, look, do you see right there? And I'm looking at the screen. She thought you see that little flash from gray to black and gray to black? I said, yeah, yeah. She said, there's only one reason for that. So it's a heartbeat. That's the baby's heartbeat. She's like, it's a lie. And I in that moment when she said that, I felt like, like something inside of me broke open, like something just broke open. And I felt like this rush, like, of love, like a dam that was like, you know, that was closed up, like broke and I just felt this way, like I was inundated with love for this little thing that I was seeing on the screen, right? And then she goes, but she's like, I'll be honest with you, it doesn't look good. She's all the baby's a lifestyle, but this doesn't look good, and I'm not supposed to do that. She's like, but I have a couple things that I'm supposed to do. I'm gonna leave the machine on, and I'm gonna leave you, I'm gonna leave you alone. She told me, I'm gonna give you some time alone with your baby, just in case. You know, this is all the time you get and, she walked out of the of that room, and she left me by myself with the little the image of, you know, my baby's heartbeat. And I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to think. I hadn't prayed in a really long time. That wasn't my default. I wasn't, you know, that was not my default anymore. And so I was just looking at this little flashing it looked like a Swedish Fish, this weird looking, you know, little thing in the screen was this little flashing heart. And I began to talk to it, and I remember just saying, Keep going like you're you're doing such a good job. You're still alive. You're doing such a good job.

Unknown 11:57

And keep, just keep going. Just keep going. Just keep fighting like keep keep your heart beating. Your mommy loves you so much, and your mommy's waiting for you. And when I said that, I remember the entire room just wet white, like I was everything around me turned white. I was gone. I was out of that room. I was, I don't know, somewhere else, everything turned white, and it was just the monitor and me and I heard a voice. I heard a voice that came from, from, like, externally, from outside of me. And I heard this voice, and I want to keep I want to be very clear, like exactly the voice and the words that I that I heard, but I remember the Lord. I knew it was the Lord. I knew it was God, and I knew he was speaking to me, and he said, Why are you saying that to that to this baby, like it's so tiny, it's practically nothing. Why you say that? And I couldn't answer, I didn't have an answer for the Lord about why I was saying that, and and like I heard the Lord say, I know right now, he looks like nothing, but he's yours. And you know that one day he'll be a baby in your arms, and one day he'll be a man in the world.

Unknown 13:05

And I felt like the Lord was answering for me. He knew what my heart was and and the Lord told me, I feel the same about you, Jasmine, and I'm saying the same thing to you. He's like, I know right now. He's like, Jasmine, I know right now, you're nothing, and that's how you feel. And the Lord said, but you're mine. So keep going, keep living. Your father loves you, and your father is waiting for you. And in that moment, I understood that the Lord loved me because I was his, and for no other reason, but because I was his. I didn't understand that before that moment, because I had not experienced that. You know, I'm the eldest of five children, and so parental love for me was like conditional, like, you're the oldest, you have to know better. You're the oldest you you know and I'm not. There's nothing wrong with that. That is what it is. You know, that's my assignment, is to be the first born. But I didn't understand that that aspect of the Father's love, but when he told me he's like Jasmine, I feel the same way about you. And I knew what I felt about this child. I knew that even though he was so tiny, I hadn't seen him yet, I didn't know anything about him. I knew in that moment he was everything this child was everything like in that moment, nothing mattered but this baby living like all that mattered was that he was for him to live. All I wanted was him. I didn't care about anything else but about I. All I wanted was this baby. And I understood that in that moment. So it once that I had that moment with the Lord, you know, and my son is 15 now, so he made it. He's 15 years old. He's a freshman in high school, and he's a wonderful, wonderful child. But in that moment, you know, I didn't know it was going to happen, and all that mattered was that this child would live, that the baby would live. And I felt like the Lord called me home with a gift, like he called me home with helping me understand that I was loved just because I was his. I would not have understood that without this experience. And so the Lord helped me be a parent because so that I could understand that he loved me I didn't have I had had great encounters with the anointing. I had seen people healed. I had seen people delivered. I had great encounters with the power of God, but I had never had an encounter with the love of the Father. Yeah, I didn't know that he loved me just because I was his. And I didn't know that I could come in my weakness. I didn't know that I could come in my nothingness, in my brokenness, like this baby right now was struggling to live, right? He was struggling. It was not good. And yet he you know, here he was presented before me, and all I wanted to do was restore him, make sure that he was alive and he was healed. And that was my story. I didn't know what to do. And so I said, Lord, I understand now that that you love me. I came out of that moment. I said, Lord, You love me like you really love me, and you love me right now when I'm the most unlovable, when I least deserve it, you love me so much. And then you gave me this baby, and the Lord healed my son and gave me my son. And when I came to the Lord, I realized, I said, I remember thinking like, what am I doing? I came home after that experience, and I was alone. My husband had gone to work, and I was alone. And I said, you know, what am I doing? I looked at my life like in the apartment that was living in. There was God was nowhere there. And I looked at my life and God had no place in it, because I had, I had kicked him out, and I said, What am I doing? Like I'm running away from love. I'm running away from the only person that has ever actually loved me. I'm running away from the only one that can help me in my pain and the only one that can save me out of this, all of this stuff that I feel. And I went to the Lord that day by myself and knelt down at the bed like I did when I was young, and I said, Lord, I'm right here, and he's I know you said it. You love me, but I don't love me, and I don't love the way this feels, and I don't like my life, and I don't like what I became and what I turn myself into. And I started to just pour all of it out onto the Lord. I told the Lord, I said, I'm so angry about all of this that happened, and I'm so hurt, and I'm so scared that I'm not going to know what to do with my son, and I'm so afraid to raise this baby because I'm broken and I don't know how to live. I don't know what to do. And I was crying out to the Lord, and the Lord came. And that started, like, this process of like, all I know what to call it is deliverance, but it started this process of deliverance where I would go to the Lord and I would say, Hey, I'm really angry, or hey, I'm really hurt about this. And then I started to develop a relationship with the Father where I could go to him and bring him all all my stuff. And I learned what to do with pain, and I learned what to do with suffering, and I learned what to do with anger, and I learned what to do with all of those things and all of our brokenness. And I learned what to do with my sin and my sinful nature and my sinful desire was to bring it to the Lord. And so I started bringing it to the Lord. And this started this process in my life of healing, of deliverance, but more than that, of transformation, yeah, I started to become somebody completely different. I had always thought like that. There were aspects of my personality, you know, that I was kind of fiery, and that I was that sort of person. And it turns out I wasn't that wasn't me at all. It was like this brokenness, but and so the nine months that I was pregnant with my son was were nine months of total healing, total restoration, and then transformation. And the Lord completely changed me. And he completely changed my desires. He completely changed my perspective, like he deconstructed the deconstructionist and then put me back together.

Unknown 18:04

I love that so much, and it's just such a beautiful testimony of what he does this is he does this over and over and over again for us, right? And the fact that this conversation is not one that's very popular out in the world right now, especially in the area of the church, you know, we're we're able to really have this conversation and be truthful about some of the things that that we face in life, and to be able to just lay that open as a testament of what God does, it's just such a beautiful thing. And so I'm curious for you, for some of our listeners that are out there that are feeling maybe the same exact way, maybe they're actually in that moment where they feel like they wouldn't even describe themselves as the prodigal, but maybe they they are the prodigal. What would you tell them?

Unknown 18:45

I would say, Come home. I would say the same thing that the Lord told me. I said, you know, you're doing a good job. You're trying, right? You're trying. Just keep going. Don't give up. Like come home. Your father loves you, and he's waiting for you. Come home. So beautiful. It's so simple too. That's it just, you know, he's not angry with you. He's not upset you didn't you didn't mess up. You're not beyond repair. You're not loved any less, right now than you were when he formed you, and he's waiting for you. He loves you, and he's waiting for you. And you know, when we look at the story of the prodigal son, like there. There's a moment where the thought, where the son comes back. And the scripture says that the father sees him while he was still a ways out, because he was waiting for him. I could, like, almost pictured his father at the window just every day, sitting there waiting for his son to come home. Yeah, and that's the Lord. He's sitting there waiting for his moment that you would soften your heart to him and so he can bring you home. And the scripture says that he, the father, ran out to meet him, and he ran out to go get him. He did. And and I feel like the Lord is doing that. And even through this podcast, it's like the Lord is coming out to meet you. He's the Lord is coming out to come find you. And so, so turn around and I pray. I pray that those parents also that are praying for their children. And you're like, you man, I I see my kids, and I don't see any hope. They're so lost, and they're so rebellious. And, you know, I didn't do the best job as a parent or, or maybe you did, and they still left anyway, like my parents, right? My parents are great, and I left anyway. It was, I think, you know, keep praying. There's this moment that the prodigal son has where it says that he returned to himself, and then he remembered his father's house. And so I pray that this, that that anointing is at rest on this podcast, that anointing that will drive the prodigal to come back to himself and remember his father's house, would rest on this conversation, that you remember, you know, that you return to yourself, to your right mind, and that you remember your father's house, and you say the same thing, like, what am I doing? Like, what am I doing? Why am I out here? Why am I out here? You know, what am I doing? Why am I out here in this wilderness when I can be at my father's house, and I that, that that's what occurs, and that that's what the anointing is, but that's what I would say. Come home, the father's waiting for you. He loves you. He's waiting for you. There's nowhere else to go. Amen. Well, Jasmine, you're such a deep well, oh my goodness, I we could have so many conversations, but I want people to know where to find you. Where can you tell us about your podcast, where they could find you? I just want them to be able to connect with you, and hopefully, actually, I'm hoping that we can have another podcast with you, maybe a couple more, because I You're just like I said, you're just such a deep well, but can you tell them absolutely so you can find us on YouTube, and it's conversations at the cross is the name. We're on Tiktok, we're on YouTube, we're on Facebook, but the title is conversations at the cross. And the, you know, kind of the idea of the podcast is, is deep discipleship. Actually, it's, you know, pastoral care. And so it's a friend and I, and we were, I was, you know, she's part of my church, and so I was discipling her, and she's, we're, that's how I disciples through conversation. She's like, you know, we really should record these and put them out there for the world to see. And so that's where that was birthed. And that's kind of what it is. There are these conversations at the cross of Christ, and we go through pretty deep discipleship. Yes, so beautiful. And I wanted to tell them a little bit more about, like, you know, your ministry too, how you minister to people through through preaching and teaching. Can you tell us just a little bit more about that? Absolutely. So the church that my parents are senior leaders, not the associate pastor. It's called another center of healing. We're actually a bilingual congregation. We're 100% bilingual. Worship is bilingual. All the servants are bilingual. And so I serve there, and I preach and teach there, and then I also teach a class called ministry intensive. So I do a ministry intensive class, and that's for everybody that feels like another mature Christian or they have some brokenness. Because remember I said it took me nine months to walk through my own deliverance, and I really felt like the Lord taught me in that time how to restore a person and how to restore somebody from their foundations. And so before you become before you can minister effectively, you have to be restored fully and then transformed like you have to become the vessel that the Lord has called you to be. And so the ministry intensive class is all about. That is about equipping and readying people for a life of, you know, effective ministry. So we don't have all those things, because if you go into ministry with still some of that, some of those broken foundations, you know, that's why we see a lot of these high level ministers that do great things in the Lord and then they fall because there are still areas of life that of their soul, of their spirit, of other foundations that have not been cared for yet. Wow, so beautiful. Well, I just want to thank you so much for joining us and for this conversation.

Unknown 23:12

It's very crazy to me that the amount of time that's already passed, I'm just so thankful for you. Thank you so much for joining us, and we will have you back soon. Very good. Thank you so much for having me. Have a great time today. God bless you. You.