Finding My Way

Author Incite:

If God had not allowed me to have the life I have led, I would have never known how lucky I am. I would have never known how amazing and fulfilling His Grace truly is.

And most importantly, I would not be able to share my story with others.

It is my truest hope that my story will inspire you to have a relationship with the Lord if you do not. And if you do, take the time to evaluate and consider if you are still moving forward or just standing still.

May God Bless you either way

All my life I have always been what I and most other people would consider to be a very strong person, and for most of my life I have taken full credit for that. It was not until God opened the eye of my heart that I started to realize all the strength and times I had made it through had nothing at all to do with me, and everything to do with Him!

My relationship and walk with the Lord has been an extraordinarily long and complex one to say the least. But my biggest revelation came to me at a time in my life when I didn’t even think I needed one. I was happy in my life, work was good, my family was well, and I loved my Church. I’d been with my Church for almost four years and felt that I had grown abundantly in my faith. I thought I was right where I needed to be and moving in the right direction.

But I could not have been more wrong! My wake-up call came to me on June 25, 2019, when a car wreck nearly claimed my life, and by all accounts, should have. More than a few people have asked me how I survived after seeing the wreckage. The only answer I have is that God saved my life that day! But this experience has not been without its lessons and spiritual growth. Though God saved my life that day, I did not walk away unharmed. Two of my children who were in the car with me walked away without any injury, while I had to be cut from the vehicle. The days that followed this traumatic experience were filled with a lot of physical pain and struggle but also came revelation.

It is my truest belief that even though God saved my life that day, he allowed me to become physically broken in order to give me that revelation. Now this may seem like a harsh way to look at it but looking back I know there were many times that he nudged me, and I simply did not listen. Think about it, how often do we get comfortable with our place in life, and ignore the directions and nudges from God, simply because we don’t want change. I was no different, I prayed more times than I can count for God to help me grow and be the example he wanted me to be for my family and others. I often wondered if I was on the right path, yet when I felt a gentle tug on my heart to go this way or that, I always had a reason not to follow it. I had gotten entirely too comfortable with myself and stopped moving forward. When I got hurt, I spent two long weeks in the hospital, and with the injuries I had, all that time was spent in bed. With me unable to get around it gave me plenty of time to think, and more importantly I had plenty of time to listen. I spent a lot of time praying and reflecting on my life.

As far back as I can remember, my life is filled with one bad memory after another. From an alcoholic father to a mother who didn’t have a clue how to take care of herself let alone anyone else. I am the only child that my parents had together, and I can only say that I fully believe God had a plan when he brought my parents together, because the reality is that my parents should never have been together let alone parents. My mother was raised Southern Baptist and my father Roman Catholic. Now I know you must be thinking that you can’t get much more opposite than that. And you might also think that I would have grown up with a great deal of God’s word in my life, but it was quite the opposite. I had almost none of God’s word before me. It was not until my parents finally divorced when I was seven years old, that a family member started taking me to church every week, and for four years I was in church and Bible school every single week. I was like a sponge and soaked up everything. I did not yet know at the time how important it was, because at age eleven circumstances no longer allowed me to attend church.

So for the next 15 years I would live my life in and of the world. I would make one bad choice after another, which would lead me down a life path of destruction. Though I did not know it then, I was ever searching for something to fill the hole that I had created in myself and my life. Now you might think as I once did, how could I have possibly created that hole? I was just a child and had no control, but, and that is a big but, I had been given a foundation, and I knew well right from wrong.

God never once in my life ever made a single terrible thing happen to me. But rather many terrible things have happened in my life because of my own choices, and the things I tried to fill that hole with.

I spent two long years watching my parents fail at trying to make a relationship work for the second time that was just not meant to be. Looking back, I think my parents were the only ones that couldn’t see how bad they were for each other. And when I turned 13 my parents split for the second time and my father left. I was given the choice to go or stay with my mother. At that age I had no idea that my mother was not capable of taking care of herself, let alone a child. All I knew is that my father had no plan or idea where he was going, and I was not ready to leave my grandparents and the only place I had ever known. Once my father was gone it didn’t take long for the home dynamic to change. I never knew what it was like to have an involved loving father, but he did at least financially provide. My mother on the other hand was not good with money nor being a provider. I took my first job when I was 13 to help my mom, and over the next three years I would work around school and sometimes instead of school to help take care of both of us.

We moved about a dozen times over those three years, staying with various friends and even a homeless shelter at one point. Because the dynamic of the relationship with my mother was so out of whack our roles were quite reversed. So, this meant I had no real supervision or guidance. I just lived life according to what I thought I wanted, what I thought made me happy, and what felt good. Little did I know that the void I was trying to fill with worldly things was a God shaped hole, and it was like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. No matter how much crap I tried to stuff in there, nothing fit. I started smoking cigarettes and marijuana at age 14 and then drinking alcohol at 15. I always hung out with people much older than I was, and people I really had no business being around. At age 14 I lost my virginity to my 18-year-old boyfriend who raped me. And because I had strayed so far from God, I didn’t have the good sense to end the relationship. And I would spend the next several years allowing myself to be used by men because I had lost any self-worth that I might have once had.

I was almost 16 years old when my mom met and moved us in with my stepdad and his entire family (Which consisted of something like 15 to 20 people at any given time). However It was at this point that I no longer had to take full care of her. So, when I turned 16, I dropped out of school and moved out. For a year I lived with friends, worked full-time, and continued to live a sinful life. Then, just before I turned 17, circumstances again arose where I was faced with the choice to leave or stay. This time I made the decision to leave. I thought that if I had a fresh start in a new place, I could make a better life for myself. It did not occur to me at the time, it was me that needed changing not necessarily my place of residence. But nonetheless a week later I turned 17, I loaded a bus in Michigan, and 18 hours later I arrived in Tennessee. So here I was in a brand-new place just knowing that my life was going to be better.

But the reality was I had not changed, so the way I made choices have not changed. I’ve heard it said the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing the same way over and over and expecting a different outcome.” Well, that was me. So again, I was staying with other people, and my life was going nowhere. A month of one bad decision after another would pass, and then all the sudden it happened, I met a man who I would decide to share my life with.  How wonderful it is to fall in love, but the reality is when we are so young, we lack the life experience to really know what love is, and to recognize toxic relationships before they damage us. And honestly, I never really had an example of a good and healthy relationship to draw from. People often ask how did I fall in love in the first place if it was such a bad relationship. Well, like most things it did not start out that way, by the time it turned bad I was already on the hook and vested. I had this diluted idea that if I loved hard enough and stuck it out long enough everything would get better and be okay. But of course, as many of us learn the hard way, that is rarely the case. So, after six long years, most of which were filled with infidelity and abuse, I made the hardest decision I had ever made in my life, I walked away from my marriage and started over yet again. I had one biological child at the time who was not even two years old yet.

I have often heard about people staying in a relationship because of children, but I was quite the opposite. I left for my daughter. Our children learn what they see, and I wanted my daughter to have a better example of a relationship and how she deserves to be treated one day. I truly believed that I was doing the righteous thing, but in reality, it made no difference, simply because I still had not changed. So here I was yet again in a new set of circumstances yet making the same type of bad choices that had become so normal for me. So of course, my life did exactly what it had always done, reflecting all of the bad choices I was making. For the next three years I would dig myself into such a hole that there did not seem to be any chance of a light at the end of the tunnel. By no one’s fault but my own I found myself facing a significant amount of jail time. Then, something amazing happened, though I would not know it at the time. God put a man in my path that would play a huge part in my journey back to Him. I met a Preacher’s son who saw me for more then I saw in myself. This man introduced me to a life and family dynamic that I never thought I could ever have.

I then found myself back in church, though I had no interest in being there or having a relationship with the Lord at the time, it certainly didn’t stop the Holy Spirit from doing what it does. As time went on and I was exposed to the Word more and more, my heart began to change. I could feel the spirit working in me and I could see change in myself. It would be easy to say that I just became a Christian and everything was good from there. But that could not be further from the truth. At the end of the day, we still have free will and it all comes down to choice. I had just begun my journey, and then the church had to close its doors. At the time I did not know how much I really needed church and everything that comes with it. Absent that influence I again began to allow the world to influence me. This resulted in me again drifting away from the Lord and going back to my old ways. Absent the Lord, I nearly cost myself everything that I now hold dear, and I nearly destroyed my family. It was then that I began to seek Christ again. It was then that I realized if left to my own devices I would surely destroy all that was good in my life. This is not to say that I did not continue to procrastinate because of fear. Having a multitude of bad experiences with Godless churches and Christ-less self-proclaimed Christians made me very leery of looking for a new church.

I started with what was familiar, and I visited a church with a neighbor friend. Though this church was not the one which would profoundly change me, it did open a door. The amazing people within that building gave me renewed faith that I would find what I needed. Two weeks later I attended service at another local church. I didn’t know when I walked through the door for the first time it would be the first day of change that I would never see coming. My heart pounded with nervousness and fear as I reached for the door, but the very moment I opened that door everything changed. The very first face that I laid eyes on was that of one of the Godliest women I have ever known. Though she has since gone to be with the Lord; on that day she was very much present, and the smile and love that shown on her face when she saw me reached right through me and touched my heart. This amazing lady had known my family for many years and her Jesus shining through was all it took to calm every nerve and fear that I had. From there it was like coming home after a long stressful day at work, somehow, I just knew this was where I belonged. And most every Sunday from then on, my children and I have been there. Most of my life I was always a back-pew kind of person, but that has not been the case for many years now. My first day there, I sat in the second pew from the front with that wonderful lady, and my family has been sitting in that same place ever since.

So now, here we are, I was back in church and changed my life, but it wasn’t that simple this time either. For some people there is a single instance or event that they can pinpoint in which they received their salvation. For me, that is very much not the case. I have always been a very stubborn person who doesn’t like the idea of not being in control of myself or my life. So this idea that I was supposed to let go and let God, and give up control, and furthermore that I was supposed to leave all my sins at the foot of the cross and no longer persecute myself for them, was and still is sometimes a hard truth to swallow. Like many others I’m sure, I have always been my own worst critic. I have always struggled with being able to forgive myself even if I was forgiven by others. I never felt like I was worthy of forgiveness. I thought that I must always suffer for my sins, in part because I knew that no matter what I did I would continue to sin. So, in my logic I did not deserve anything less than my misery. I carried this logic for a very long time, yet I continued to attend church and weekly Bible study. I participated and learned which led to a great deal of growth.

I think one of the most important lessons I have learned has been that often times Christian’s place too much emphasis on details. I don’t know who first said it, but the devil really is in the details. When Jesus walked this earth, he wasn’t worried about the 613 laws the Jewish leaders wanted everyone to follow, but rather he was concerned with the heart and soul of man. So my lesson here was how am I supposed to learn to love my enemy if I am to busy fighting with fellow Christians about the details, and how am I supposed to teach my children to be better if I cannot accept other children of God simply because they have different ideas than I do. At the end of it all, the Bible does not say anything about denomination or sect. The truth of it is simple, we are either a believer or we are not, and we either have a relationship with Christ or we don’t. Now that is not to say that we do not backslide and make mistakes, we are after all only human. However, we must always remember that being “only human” is not an excuse or a pass not to try. The fact is we are sinners, and we are not worthy, but is that not the point? If we were anything other than what we are, what would it have mattered that Jesus died for us? It is important that we own our sins, not for them to control us, but so that we may lay them at the feet of Jesus and never look back. For if we do not allow Jesus to take them, what then are we saying? That His sacrifice was not good enough? I think of it like this, if the life of the only sinless, blameless, and perfect being to ever walk this earth isn’t enough to pay the price for my Sins then we are all doomed.

The main life lesson, if nothing else I hope that you can take away from my story is this. If you are unhappy with your life, if you are unfulfilled, if you are searching and do not know where to go next; maybe it is time to look in the mirror. CHOICE is our biggest opportunity, and how you choose to use that is up to you. Only you can decide what kind of person you are, if you are not happy, and nothing else seems to be working, maybe it is time to make the CHOICE to change, YOU instead of your circumstances. ~God Bless~