Hello! My name is Kami. I am the creator of MissionCOLE and your personal coach on the journey. I am sassy, quite tattooed, passionate, and a bit stubborn. I used to run a Chaplain program at a hospital; I have 5 amazing kids; and I am completely and madly in love with my husband of 30 years. I passionately live my life to dismantle the religious spirit (lies, rules, performance) that keep us from living authentic and fully alive! Because of my story, I can no longer settle for a life without grace and unconditional love. I want the real deal – connection and unity with a loving God who provided the answer before we even knew the problem. I want beauty and romance; adventure and miracles. I want to inspire you to go on the journey with me into discovering wholeness in every area of your life! If you would have met me 10 years ago, you would not have recognized me. I was insecure, unhappy, flailing and overwhelmed. Now I am confident, full of life, full of purpose, stunning, sexy, and fun! “How did this happen?” It was a journey – a journey of my heart!
So let me share my story with you. It began as early as I can remember; at just 5 or 6 years old, I remember the deep longing I felt in my heart to be known and to be loved. I wanted to feel God’s pleasure over me and be known by those around me. But the lies of religion attacked me with the poison of performance, conditional salvation, hell’s fire, unworthiness and pain.
As you will see from my story, to some degree, we are all products of the environment that we are born into or brought up in. Our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are shaped by what we are taught, by our experiences, and by how our hearts are affected by them. I was brought up in a very conservative Christian environment where I learned that the world was evil and God was mean and scary. I heard a lot of sermons on “hell, fire, and damnation” and was constantly warned about the sin and evil that resided in our “flesh.” I learned that God was angry and distant and the only way to appease Him was through perfect obedience. My heart wanted so badly to be loved by Him, but I felt like I could never measure up. I was tormented by the thought that unless I BELIEVED all the right things and DID all the right things, I was going to hell.
I was also taught that it was the Church’s job to call out people’s sin. As a young girl, I remember the sadness I felt as accusation, shame, guilt, and condemnation destroyed many lives around me. I witnessed lots of hypocrisy and became very confused about what the “Christian life” was really all about. Out of fear, I figured out how to “play the game” and “put on the face.” I tried to become everything I was told I needed to be and I tried to think the way that I was told to think – but it did not work. My heart and my spirit did not connect to what was going on around me. I tried really hard to turn off my heart (my thoughts, feelings, emotions, passions, and dreams) so that I could “die to myself” and “live for God,” but it only made me more miserable. The scripture in Jeremiah 17:9 that says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” tormented me. How could I so passionately want to be connected to God and in that very same heart be desperately wicked? I ended up with a war going on inside of me – I literally felt like I was going crazy.
As I grew older, the lies and the constant assault on my heart and spirit produced gaping wounds that were left unattended. On the outside, I pretended that all was well, but on the inside, I was a mess. I didn’t trust anyone; not even myself. I felt completely alone, unprotected, and unloved. I lived in fear because I could not be myself – I was without hope and without dreams. Like an abused child, who will often stick up for and protect an abusive parent, my mind tried to accept, justify, and even promote this life and this view of God. It was all that I knew. I tried to persuade my heart and spirit that this was what love looked like, but they did not buy it.
Things did not get any better when I became an adult. Because I had no assurance of salvation and didn’t believe that anyone could love the real me, I struggled with accepting myself as well. Although I had everything going for me – I had a normal childhood, graduated as the Valedictorian of my class, married my high school sweetheart, and had six beautiful children – I was still convinced that God did not like me and was just looking for ways to torture and punish me. So when our 12-year old son, “Cole” was suddenly diagnosed with a very rare, incurable autoimmune disease, I had no problem believing that God was punishing us for some “sin” in our life or trying to develop our character through pain and heartache. We also had many friends, family, and strangers chime in on what they thought was the cause of our pain – until one day, I lost it! I had had enough! Watching my son’s body slowly deteriorate and having yet another person come tell us that they believed the reason our son was sick was because he was too proud (He was a very accomplished student and athlete, like his Dad) – I remember running into the kitchen, throwing pots and pans across the room, and screaming, “If this is how God treats innocent children, I am done with Him!”
But even with all of that scariness – my heart and spirit could not let go of the possibility that maybe what I had been taught about God was not accurate; that maybe an all-knowing, all-powerful God actually had a more victorious plan than what I had been told or experienced; that maybe God was actually a loving Father and cared about our pain. Maybe……
Our son ended up in the hospital, near death twice, sending us on a frantic ride of trying to find God and truth. We eventually ended up at a healing conference in a neighboring state that was full of people who believed God was REALLY BIG and REALLY GOOD! They lived in the tangible victory of the cross! They saw healing all the time and experienced life abundant!! We immediately moved our family to this honor-filled and life-giving community of people! My husband enrolled in their ministry school and brought home a whole new paradigm of God, truth, and life. He would come home every day and tell me how beautiful and amazing I was, even though I was still so messed up. During this time I was still trying to understand who God was, how to please Him, how to earn a healing for our son, and how to feel loved. But eventually, my husband’s words began to sink in and I began to believe that if he could see me as beautiful and amazing, even in the midst of my mess, God surely must be able to see me this way as well. And slowly, my journey toward healing my broken heart began.
Along the way, I took a class called “Redeeming all the Pieces” and for the first time ever, I heard that the pain I felt growing up was real and I was not crazy. As the teacher spoke, her words began to validate my heart and my spirit. And as I drove home from class each week, a waterfall of tears, coupled with Holy Spirit’s presence, would was over me. I also met with a woman who walked me through some other painful memories by asking Jesus where he was during those times. To my surprise, I was able to see Jesus right there with me – crying FOR me! He was not the author or instigator of my pain!
About one year later, our son actually passed away. Never had I thought that I could endure such a tragedy, but in the midst of it all, God and all of His goodness was there. He flooded us with His love and empowered us with His strength. He dumped bucketloads of grace on us; showed us a heavenly way to grieve; gave us visions and dreams of our son in heaven with Jesus; dismantled all the lies and mindsets that we had believed about Him; healed all our pain; redeemed our past; and rewrote our future. He placed me in a hospital, made me the creator of a Chaplain program, declared and manifested the miraculous over us, and hasn’t stopped propelling us forward! We have seen the impossible become possible! It has been the most beautiful, amazing, and healing journey that our family has ever known. 
Our son’s name, “Cole,” actually means “Victory for the People” and I can tell you that he definitely fulfilled and continues to fulfill the destiny of his name. His life and death helped bring us, his family, into a freedom that we never knew was possible. He helped set us free from a life of performance, fear, and lies (religion) into a life of unconditional love, grace, joy, and abundance! Although we were always what you would call “Christians,” we never knew what it actually meant to live FROM the righteousness that Christ gives. We had tried our whole lives to live by a set of rules (religion), but rules will never make you righteous nor will they help you experience God’s unconditional love and grace that all of humanity seeks.
My family and I are convinced that, even to this day, Cole would say to us that he would do it all over again to set his family free. And this is now our life’s passion as well – WE LIVE TO DISMANTLE THE LIES OF RELIGION; to help people connect to Jesus, not religion; to release God’s unconditional love and grace over every individual we encounter; and to see people live fully alive!!!
If my story spoke to you in any way – come join MissionCOLE! Grab on to courage and begin your journey out of religion and into freedom and wholeness.