I am so excited!! In just 3 months, my team and I will be spreading Jesus’s love throughout Central America! God has been doing things in my life that I can honestly say I would never in a million years have been able to do if I didn’t have God. The biggest thing has been me sharing my testimony with the folks of my Thursday night bible study group a few weeks ago. It was one of the scariest and most freeing moment of my life. You see, I have a tendency to not share the darker parts of my testimony because being honest with people like that can be unpredictable. Or when I do share it, I only graze the surface of the impact it has on me and play it off in a lighthearted way. My biggest fear with sharing it was not knowing how people were going to look at me when I talked about things that I used to think I would never really heal from. But you have to trust that the people you share with aren’t going to see it as your mistakes, but an example of how the Lord performed a miracle through a person. So I want to share part of my testimony with the people who are supporting me so they not only know who this Jesus guy I keep talking about is but how He saved me from a much different path. It is important to me that people see the darker parts to see just how truly beautiful and limitless His works are. So here I go…
Since the time I was 13, I have struggled with depression and even attempted to take my own life at one point. I have gone down a path so far with a guy that when I finally turned around to get my life to where it needed to be, I didn’t have a clue where I was or who I was anymore. I have struggled with being angry and hurt by an important adult figure in my life for so many years and never said anything because I didn’t have the courage to say the words and let it consume every part of my life. I held onto anger and disappointment and guilt and fear for YEARS. It was what I ate, slept, and breathed. It took me hitting absolute rock bottom to make a change.
Some of you may have heard that I hit a school bus and totaled my car on November 14th, 2017. That was my rockbottom. I couldn’t hide behind anything because people knew and wanted to know about it and if we (my friend Shelby and I) were okay. I had never been through something so traumatic and I struggled with PTSD. A few days after the accident Shelby and I were talking about it and I didn’t understand any of it. I didn’t understand why there were no broken bones or no serious injuries. When Shelby said that God was protecting us she had said it like it was so plain and obvious. I began to think more on the accident and what it all meant and I just kept feeling so guilty for my friend who was missing class and missing out on trips with her ODS group because of her concussion. As a few weeks passed, the guilt was crushing me. I knew that everything was all my fault and I wanted to take my own life again, but as I was laying in my bed in the dark feeling empty and crying as I decided on how many of the oxy pills I wanted to take, I passed out. The next morning I woke up and felt like a shell with nothing inside and I knew that I had to change something. I could not continue on anymore the way I was. What I learned was the reason we were able to make it out of that both physically and mentally was because we had been protected by someone. Someone who could perform miracles. Someone who loved us enough to give up their only son to let us be the first born. Someone who knew us inside and out. That someone is God.
Something God spoke to me this past weekend when Tim Ewing was sharing was that even though the members in the crowd that were just dehumanizing and degrading Jesus is John 18:28-19:16, He loved them. He wasn’t mad at them. He knew what they would do to Him, yet He still died for them. God could have plucked Jesus up out of that situation, yet Jesus was brutally tortured for hours and then was put on a cross with nails in his hands and also in his feet to prolong his death even further. Jesus was a man completely without sin his entire life and that especially included his thoughts while people were torturing Him for speaking the truth. He did not have one hateful thought toward those people.
Thinking about how He died makes my body physically hurt. And thinking about why He died reminds me of all those sinful and selfish things I have done that He loved me for and saved me from. When He saved me, He knew it would take over a year for me to finally let go of the person I would use to not have to deal with the difficult things. He knew that it would take me even longer to forgive the person who hurt me so deeply and for so many years. He knew every time I would doubt in His ability to heal and work through me. But He still chased me down and wanted me. He needed me here and needed me to be broken to build me up with a new foundation. All I had to do was say, “Lord, I submit to you my will.”
Something that I always think about when someone says that they don’t believe in God because of all the bad things in life is that God can only work in your life and protect you if you let Him. How can you expect your broken bone to heal if you don’t go seek out a doctor to fix it? Now this doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen to Christians because they happen all the time, but it does mean that you won’t be alone. You’ll know that you the Lord right there with you and that you’ll see your loved ones again soon. You’ll know that no matter how many times you stumble or how big you sin is, if you have a hungry spirit for His love then you will have a spot in heaven where you get to be with God all the time.
I hope with me sharing my coming to Jesus story that some people read it and think a little more on it. If it were not for His divine intervention, I would have successfully killed myself at 13 or went through with overdosing on heavy pain medication in my dorm room or worse. In reading this, I want you to know that no one knew that part of my coming to Jesus story until now. Everyone knew about how I realized God protected Shelby and I, but no one knew that He saved my life twice. It’s never going to be easy talking about the time where I wanted to end it all and really meant it, but I know that God can take brokenness aside and make it beautiful. I pray that you read this and hear how completely broken I was, you see the truth, and you want it for yourself. When you look at me you see the broken shell of a person that God picked up and made whole and I know He wants more than anything to do it to you and the people He will put in my life while I am in Central America. The Lord just wants the world to know that even though we can never be perfect, we are completely and totally loved by Him. That we can do the worst sin imaginable, yet he still loves us and will never be mad at us. I pray that if you already know the Lord then you go share it with the people in your life and that if you don’t know this then you seek it. Either from me or someone else close to you, but that you go and search for at least more information because God will call your heart when it’s ready. It took mine 19 years for mine to be ready and I have faith that yours is getting ready too.
