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When Mississippi Ladies Say Yes: Notes from MS UPCI Ladies Conference
I keep coming home from www.msupci.com/ladies Conference with the same holy ache in my chest.
It is not homesickness. It is gratitude.
For five years now, the beautiful ladies of Mississippi have done something I will never take for granted.
They embraced a northerner. Not simply politely. Not at a distance. They opened their arms, their tables, their prayer lists, and their lives.
So many of you have touched my heart with your kingdom passion and your love for one another. You did not make me earn a seat. You made room.
That is not small. That is Jesus.
Every ladies conference in this district is powerful, and I have come to believe it is not an accident. We are blessed with leadership that prays, fasts, and prepares the atmosphere long before we ever pull onto the campground in Raymond.
By the time we walk into the tabernacle, much of the heavy lifting of spiritual warfare has already been done. The house has been prayed through. The ground has been contended for. The welcome of the Holy Ghost is waiting.
But of course, that does not excuse us from preparing our own hearts.
I believe we receive to the level we have prepared our vessel. If I come distracted, hurried, and half-asleep, I should not be surprised if I leave with only a nice memory.
If I come hungry, repentant, and yielded, Heaven has a way of meeting me there. And even then, God is gracious. He gives us way, way, way more than we ever deserve.
“Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.”
— Ephesians 3:20
Exceedingly. Abundantly. More.
That is the God who met us again this year.
Structure after deliverance
Dr. Cindy Miller spoke into a place many Apostolic women live but rarely name.
She talked a great deal about structure and process as we move toward greater and deeper wholeness.
Her words landed on me like an advocate for the very thing God has been building in my own assignment.
People get saved. They come out of bondage. The chains fall. The Holy Ghost fills. And then, if we are honest, many of us stand in the middle of a brand-new life with yesterday’s tools.
Deliverance gets you out.
Discipleship and wholeness teaching help you live once you are out.
Sister Miller’s ministry has long carried that kind of careful, pastoral wisdom.
She is a professor and department chair of practical theology, a woman with a PhD in Pastoral Care and Counseling, and a voice who has spent years helping Apostolic women think about call, friendship, leadership, and the inner life.
She does not treat the soul as an afterthought. She treats it as something that must be shepherded with both Spirit and structure.
That is not worldly self-help. That is stewardship of the temple.
Salvation is a moment. Wholeness is a walk. And walks need a path.
If you have ever been set free and then quietly wondered, Now how do I actually live this? — you are not faithless.
You are standing at the exact place where coaching, mentoring, and Spirit-led process become a mercy.
A Name in Him
This thread did not start for me at Ladies Conference alone.
When Sister Mandy Holloway and I were together at the Called and Purposed Conference in Philadelphia, Mississippi, she talked to us about understanding our true identity in God — and the unique name in Him that reflects His purpose for us.
She said she understood from God that she was the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
At that conference, I came to understand that my name was BALM.
I had known for a long time that the love of God flowed through me.
People have told me they feel it. I did not always have language for it.
Then the Lord let me see it: I am not just a woman who cares. I am called to be BALM. Healing oil. A presence that soothes what has been raw. A voice that does not merely sense the wound, but stays long enough for the ointment to do its work.
“Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?”
— Jeremiah 8:22
There is a Physician. His name is Jesus. And sometimes He lets His daughters carry the fragrance of what He has already purchased.
I share that carefully, because the point is not my name. The point is that you have one too. God is not random with His daughters. He is intentional. He writes stories on purpose.
A voice that will not let us stay half-asleep
Sister Mandy Holloway told the Mississippi District women that God showed her her true identity was to be a voice crying in the wilderness.
And truly — she is that, and then some.
I will not pretend her preaching is gentle background music. It is not.
Whether you are listening to Mandy Holloway from a pew or sitting across a lunch table, you are left with a choice.
Will you follow hard after Jesus? Or will you drift back into that half-sleep state of mediocrity that feels so familiar and costs us so little?
She said something that struck a chord in me:
‘I am not asking you to go to Uganda or even to the prisons. Just walk across the street and talk to your neighbor.’
She’s so right.
So many I talked to were still pondering that choice days later.
Sister Holloway is all in. The fruit of her yes is not theoretical. She carries a testimony of deliverance from childhood abuse and later from drugs and alcohol.
She preaches weekly in an all-women’s maximum security prison and has watched the Holy Ghost transform lives behind those walls.
She has also preached a crusade in a men’s maximum security prison.
For more than ten years, she and her husband have ministered across the United States and in Uganda through their non-profit Refuge 127 Ministries — a work that has built a school, an orphanage, and two deep-water wells, with hundreds baptized in Jesus’ name and many filled with the Holy Ghost.
That is what a long obedience looks like.
I am not writing this as a brochure.
I am writing it as a witness.
When a woman says yes, and keeps saying yes, Heaven uses her life as a trumpet.
Her ministry site says it plainly: All God wants is your yes.
Healing what has held you back. Growing in your identity in Jesus. Going boldly into what God has called you to do.
Whole. Free. Sent.
If you want to sit with that invitation a little longer, you can find her at www.mandyhollowayministries.com.
I mention it the same way I would mention a well in a dry place — not to parade a person, but to point you toward a voice that is crying, Prepare ye the way of the Lord.
There is a cost to that kind of yes. I think of her 21-day water fast and the way God moved on her Catholic father.
Freedom is never free. But neither is mediocrity. Mediocrity just hides the invoice until later.
Your story has a next chapter.
Here is what I keep hearing when I put the whole weekend together:
Mississippi ladies are not gathering to be entertained.
We are gathering to remember who we are.
We are gathering to say yes again.
We are gathering so that each woman can step into her God-appointed story.
Leadership can prepare the tabernacle.
A preacher can prepare the word.
Only you can prepare your yes.
If the Lord used Ladies Conference to stir something — identity, healing, structure, a neighbor across the street, a name you have been afraid to receive — do not leave it on the campground.
Wholeness is a process. The mirror is not the authority. Speak what God says about you.
If you need a confidential, Christ-centered place to keep walking that out, I would be honored to sit with you.
Sometimes the most spiritual next step is not another altar moment you cannot remember how to live on Monday.
Sometimes it is a conversation, a plan, and a safe place to practice a new way of living.
I am asking you to say yes to the woman God already named. And encourage another to do the same.
God is still making room for your story. Your future is bright. Just keep planting your feet on the floor every day, look heavenward, and say YES, Lord… YES!!!!
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