I walk people from captivity to calling.
My name is Amanda M. Payne.
I'm a registered nurse with a BSN, a doctoral candidate in Lifestyle Medicine, a teacher, a builder, and the mother of five grown children.
But none of that is why you should listen to me.
This is: I know what captivity feels like from the inside, and I know the road out. I've walked it, and I'm still walking it.
Before any of this, I was a nurse.
Nursing taught me to read a body: what's really happening, what it's compensating for, what's about to give out. Most of all, it taught me to notice what the person in front of me wasn't saying, because the chart never tells the whole story and neither does the patient.
Then God gave me eyes for what sits underneath.
So now I look at two things at once: the life, and whatever is standing under it. The job, the marriage, the exhaustion, the money, the pattern that keeps coming back, and the thing underneath it that nobody has ever said out loud.
Most people have been getting help in one of those places while the other went untouched. That isn't a character flaw, and it isn't a lack of effort. It's a missed diagnosis. It's also why the same thing keeps coming back after you were sure you'd dealt with it.
I look at both. Then I deal with both.
I've been married and divorced three times.
I've raised five children through seasons I wouldn't wish on anyone. I've carried trauma, illness, failure, and grief. Some mornings the only thing holding me up was a quiet room, an open Bible, and a God who kept showing up before the sun did.
I'm not writing to you from the far side of all that, healed and finished and impressive.
I'm writing from the middle of a life that is still being restored. That doesn't disqualify me. It's what qualifies me.
There is a scene in Zechariah 3 I keep going back to. A man is standing there in filthy clothes with an accuser at his elbow, and God does not tell him to go clean himself up and come back. God takes the clothes off him and commissions him in the same breath. He was not sent after he got himself together. He was sent while God was getting him together.
So when I tell you He can build something out of whatever you're standing in right now, I'm not guessing. I've watched Him do it.
"The Lord has granted me the opportunity to see God's sons and daughters in the natural and the spiritual, and to then walk with them into healing, restoration, and wholeness in a practical manner, ushering them into the calling He has already set before them."
Read it once and it sounds simple. Read it slowly and every phrase is doing work. Let me walk you through it.
This was given. I didn't earn it, build it, or pick it off a menu. A grant is something you steward, and I mean to steward it well.
Sons and daughters. My prayer community is for women by design. This work isn't.
Both. The nurse and whatever God added to the nurse.
Walk. I don't diagnose you and leave, or speak at you and move on. I walk beside you, at your pace, for as long as it takes.
Three things, in order.
Healing — the wound gets treated.
Restoration — what was taken is given back. Years, relationships, identity, ground.
Wholeness — nothing broken and nothing missing. You stop operating in pieces.
This is the phrase I hold on to hardest. A word you can't live out on a Tuesday isn't finished. Everything I teach comes with steps. If I can't tell you what to do with it Monday morning, I haven't finished teaching it.
Already set. Your calling isn't hidden, and it isn't lost. It's standing right in front of you, and something has been in the way. My work isn't to hand you a calling. It's to walk you into the one that was already there.
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed."
— Luke 4:18Four words in that passage govern everything I do:
People get free.
A broken heart is a real wound and it gets treated.
Sight comes back. You start seeing what you could not see.
The oppressed are set free. Not managed. Released.
If you've read this far, you've already seen the work.
Now the word can mean something, instead of getting in the way.
I am an apostle and a prophet. I am the founder of Acts Alive Ministries.
Here's what those words look like in real life, without all the baggage:
I am sent to build. Not to gather a crowd and preach at it, but to put foundations under people and structures that outlast me. An apostle who builds nothing is just a title.
God shows me things, and He shows them to me for people, not for performance. I do not trade in spectacle. I bring you what I received, tested against Scripture, and then walk it out with you.
I do not repeat other people's notes. What I bring you came out of a quiet room at four in the morning and was tested against the text before it was ever said out loud.
I know the word carries weight. Some of you were hurt by someone who wore it. Some of you have never heard it used well. I'm not asking you to accept a title. I'm asking you to look at the fruit and decide for yourself what it means.
It looks like a lot from the outside. It isn't five businesses. It's five rooms in one house.
The office doesn't come before who you are. If it does, it will consume you. I want you to lead that way too.
I won't hand you a finished product. I'll teach you the steps while I'm walking them myself. You don't need my conclusion. You need to watch me get there.
I'll walk you to the One who can. I can say that honestly, because He's carrying me today, in this cracked vessel, with my weaknesses showing.
If I build you, you'll build the house. If I try to build every system myself, I'll end up a tired woman in an empty room.
Kind truth is how people get free. Staying quiet just leaves you in the dark. If truth spoken in love offends someone, that isn't mine to carry.
What I carry passes on by being near, not by being informed. You can't download it. You have to be close to it.
I keep a Sabbath. I take sabbaticals. I'll tell you to do the same, and I won't applaud you for burning out. Rest isn't a reward for finishing. It's part of the work.
If you want me to come and teach, preach, or consult:
Invite me →Jehovah-Shammah. The LORD is here.