This week my ministry asked me to reach out to you all and ask if anyone could send in their testimony. Just a one page story of your life. They are going to translate it into Romanian and then use it as an evangelism tool so show people different ways the Lord uses us. If you would like to help my ministry with this feel free to send you testimony to [email protected]
I have decided that if I’m asking you all to share you testimony with the world than I should share mine with you all. So here is my story.
My story starts before I was born with my mother’s pregnancy with me. When my parents found out they were pregnant with me it was unexpected to say the least. But my parents were excited to accept this gift from God. Shortly thereafter my mother started having some complications with her pregnancy and ended up spending the last 5 months of her pregnancy on bed rest! The first doctor wanted my parents to abort me because there was only a 10% survival chance. My parents didn’t like this so they changed hospitals and doctors. The new doctor they got believed she was sent from God to be our doctor and gave my parents some hope that I would live.
As you can tell I did live and I became a miracle baby. So many different people prayed for me before I was even here. So, it’s also no surprise that I grew up in the church. I was born into a Christian family that attended church every week, if not multiple times a week. I accepted Jesus into my heart and got baptized when I was 6. And from then on I have been trying to live my life like Christ. But as you can imagine it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
For a better part of my life I have struggled with acceptance. Felling accepted in my family, in my church, and with my peers. Being the youngest of 4 children and there being a large age gap between the oldest and me I always felt like I had to vie for everyone’s attention. My siblings always called me a showoff because whenever their friends would come around I would show them all of the “cool” tricks I knew.
When I was 10 my grandfather died. He was the first family member I had ever lost in my life. He had been sick for most of my life so losing him was just weird because we had been expecting it for a while. Didn’t make it any less hard just different. Also at this point my oldest two siblings moved to college.
The next year we moved from Missouri to Kansas. This move was really hard on me because I was raised as a Mizzou fan and we moved to Jayhawk nation. But this move was also good for my family because it was the first time in a while where my dad coached high school football, taught high school history, and we lived in the same place. So even though I was having to make new friends and adjust to life in Kansas I was able to do so with my family by my side.
At the end of 5th grade I was diagnosed with a learning disorder called phonemic awareness. Basically, I couldn’t read. I was in 5th grade with a 1st grade reading level. I was made fun of because of it and this only added to my struggles of feeling accepted. So, I went to a learning center over the summer and spent a lot of time with teachers learning how to teach my brain to read. As you can image I hated to read but once I learned how to read I fell in love with reading. You probably wondering why this is included in my testimony…well my love for reading also introduced me into a whole world of pornography that I was not prepared for.
For a better part of my teenage years I struggled with pornography and masturbation. I battled with the Lord over it for quite a few years. The devil does a really great job of making you feel alone in your sin. So naturally I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about this. It also didn’t help that my father was the head football coach and taught in my high school, so from as early as middle school the boys in my school were too afraid to talk to me. This only added to my acceptance issues. A lot of my peers started dating and here I was with no boys that liked me. Then my other grandfather died very unexpectedly. This was extremely hard for me since I felt like he was one of the few people in my family that accepted me. He had time for me and was always willing to hang out with me. It was really easy to deal with the rejection and disappointment with my secret sin that no one had to know about. It wasn’t until I went to college and truly started following the Lord did I get set free from it. My freshman year of college for the first time in my life I started reading the bible, worshiping, hearing God’s voice, and living a life filled with the Holy Spirit.
Now this doesn’t mean I was never tempted or ever struggled with it, it just means that for the first time I understood what 1 Corithians 10:13 meant. God will give you a way out of temptation. This was also the first time in life I realized that I was accepted into God’s family. That I was a part of a royal priesthood, a holy nation (1 Peter 2:9).
From my sophomore year- junior year of college I went through a lot of crap. To start off with my God-Mother Rita died. She was huge part of my life and my family. When she died it was really hard on my family. Then I injured my ankle and knee really badly. That took 6 months to recover from. Then I was asked to step down from the leadership team of my college ministry. And that was the last nail in the coffin. I felt totally and utterly alone. All of the wonderful things that I learned my freshman year of college left me. I started running from God because to me it didn’t seem like he cared about me very much since he left all of these things happen to me. I stopped attending church and fell back into pornography and masturbation.
At the start of my senior year I knew that I didn’t want to keep living like this so I made a commitment to myself that I would attend something religious at least once a week. Whether that was church, a bible study, or worship session I knew that for me to get right with God that I was going to need a church community that encouraged me to pursue the lord. And you want to know the beautiful thing about the Lord is that as I started attending different religious things each week, I could see how God had never stopped loving me over the past year when I felt alone. It was really cool to look back at different things that had happened over the year and see how God was loving me. Whether that was blessing me with an internship at a Christian company or giving me friends that encouraged me to follow the Lord or a family that was constantly pursing the Lord I suddenly realized that I wasn’t alone. That my family accepted me and that for the first time in my life I found peers that loved and supported me!
I graduated college with a degree in social work. Attended a semester of grad school and failed out. The day I found out that I didn’t pass my class I got accepted to the World Race and I then started pursing this journey.
If you would like to hear more about my journey to the Race or more about my testimony feel free to reach out. I love talking about my story. Shame has no place in this song, and the only way to keep it that way is to keep talking about it (John 1:5). Also if this story touched your heart and you want to support me on this journey feel free to click the donate now button at the top!
Also don’t forget to email in your own testimony!!
