I want to tell you who I was before I could answer this question.
I was a woman driven by her gift. A woman walking in performance-based identity. A woman who was trying to please God but believed that the gift was what made her valuable to Him. That if she performed well enough, delivered accurately enough, served faithfully enough, she could somehow win her way deeper into His heart.
What I did not know then is what I know now.
I was already His. Completely. Unconditionally. Without the gift, without the performance, without a single word delivered or a single prayer answered.
To God, the gift was never what mattered most.
I did.
I found my identity in what I could do. I allowed the gift to control me. I lost sleep when I did not perform well enough for other people. I fell under pressure. I felt the wave rising and I bent beneath it. I did not understand my true authority or my true power because I had handed other people the right to define it for me.
That woman was busy. That woman was gifted. That woman was exhausted.
And that woman had lost herself completely.
But that did not happen overnight. And it did not happen without help.
There are things that quietly work against prophetic people. Things that do not announce themselves. Things that come slowly, steadily, and by the time you realize what has been happening, you have already lost ground you did not know you were giving up.
Rejection came first. From a young age there were people who decided that nothing good could come from me. And when rejection comes early enough and loud enough it can drown out the voice of God before you ever learn to recognize it. So I performed. I worked harder. I tried to prove them wrong. And in doing so I handed the gift a job it was never meant to carry. I made it responsible for my worth.
Insecurity followed. Because that is what rejection leaves behind. It wraps itself around your identity until you can no longer tell the difference between what God said about you and what people said about you. And insecurity keeps prophetic people small. It makes you shrink in rooms you were called to lead. It makes you apologize for the very gift that was placed inside of you.
Then came isolation. Because when you have been hurt enough times you stop letting people close. You build walls that look like independence. You call it boundaries when really it is self-protection. And slowly, quietly, alone becomes your default.
And underneath all of it was emotional exhaustion. Because prophets are wells. People come constantly for a word, for prayer, for clarity, for covering. And the prophet pours. Every time. For everyone. But nobody checks on the well. Until the well runs dry.
That was the woman I was. Rejected. Insecure. Isolated. Exhausted. Performing for everyone and sustained by no one.
That woman needed an audit.
No human can give you your identity. That comes from the Lord alone.
So when God said pause in the middle of everything I was building, I stopped. And He began to highlight different areas of my life. Not my ministry. Not my platform. My life. He asked me to assess them honestly, without the filter of what I wished they looked like.
What I found changed everything.
When I looked at my shelves I saw everyone except myself. And when I asked myself what I loved to do, everything I named was connected to serving other people. So I asked again.
Who am I? What do I love? What brings me joy that has nothing to do with what I can give?
I had to sit with those questions for a long time before I could answer them.
And underneath the gift, underneath the calling, underneath the performance and the exhaustion and the walls I had built, was a question I had been avoiding for years.
When the dust settles. When the performance stops. When the platform goes quiet and the warfare has done its work.
Who is left standing?
Here is what I have come to know.
The woman left standing is not defined by what she carries. She is defined by who carries her.
She is a woman who understands her identity in Christ. Not in her prophetic gift. Not in her platform. Not in how many people she has helped or how many words she has delivered. In Christ alone.
She is a woman of virtue. A woman of honor. A woman loved by God so completely that the love does not shift when the performance stops.
She is enough. All by herself. Even without the gift.
God is her floor. And her ceiling is unlimited.
She was chosen before the foundations of the earth. Not because of what she would do. Because of who He is.
She is called to soar and to scale. To leap over walls. To run through troops. Not because of the gift she carries but because of the God who backs her.
She does not shake in the face of fear. She does not conform to the world. She does not move at the word of man. She moves at the word of God.
She understands what it means to walk on water. It means keeping her eyes fixed. Not on the waves. Not on the warfare. Not on the voices that told her who she was not. On Him.
She trusts God with every fiber of her being. Because she has learned, sometimes the hard way, that He is the one who opens doors. He is the one who allows the gifts to unfold. He is the one who makes all things possible. Not because she is gifted. But because He is God.
Here is the revelation that changed everything for me.
The gift is not the treasure. The Giver is.
I spent years treating the gift like it was the most important thing about me. Running toward it. Performing in it. Finding my value in it. Measuring myself by how well I carried it.
But the gift is not who I am. The gift is what He placed in me. And it can only be understood, sustained, and stewarded well when I understand that my identity is not found in the gift.
My identity is found in the giver of the gift.
He is the ultimate gift. He is the one who holds all gifts together. He is the one who holds all people together. And He is the one who keeps you standing when everything around you has tried to take you down.
So who is left standing?
Not the woman who performed the best. Not the one who carried the most. Not the one who never broke or never bent.
The one left standing is the one who knows that her identity, her gifting, her calling, and her future can only be found in the one who gave her life.
And that is enough.
Mercy Fakoya (PM)
Prophetic Teacher. Marketplace Strategist. The Praying Prophet.