My story is a true testament to God's grace. I'm so thankful when I look back and see how he has been at work in my life.
I asked God to live in my heart when I was 6 years old. I was blessed to
grow up with Christian parents and an amazing church family. My parents were
faithful in attending church. My mom was also faithful in having her quiet
times in the morning and modeling repentance constantly. She even had my
siblings and I do a mother’s day out program where we picked a mom to go help
during the summer so that we could see other parents sinning and repenting.
When I was 13, I was in a car accident with my mom and 12
year old sister, Rachael. Rachael was killed on impact. Losing my sister was
traumatic. This was the first point in my life where I really remember
struggling with my faith. During high school, I looked to other things like
relationships and food to find comfort and identity. At the end of high school,
God began opening my eyes to recognize my idols and stripped me of a bad
relationship I was in. I clung tightly to that relationship and it was hard to
let it go. However, God was gracious by providing me with many other great
relationships with Christian friends and another great church family when I
went to college. In college I was struggling a lot with how to forgive myself
for past sins. I didn’t really know what it meant to live by grace and not by
works.
During the summer after my sophomore year of college, I
interned at a church in Bay St Louis, MS and did hurricane relief work. It was
a place of brokenness. The town, church facilities, and people living there
were all hurting. Their philosophy was that it is okay to not be okay. That was
a new concept for me. Being from the South, everyone is okay if you ask them--I
was taken aback when people in MS actually responded with anything that was
honest. They were being real and that scared me because I knew what my real
self was like and I wasn't okay with showing it. We were also encouraged/forced
to bring our grievances against others out into the open (they called it
“festivus” in case you’re a Seinfeld fan). Even if you were good at pretending
that you were okay, we were working and living in such close quarters that you
were bound to be confronted about something. It was revitalizing to have people
know your faults, even confront you about them, and experience grace and
forgiveness from them instead of trying to hide your faults and pretend that
you are fine. We were constantly being confronted with our sins then the
gospel. It was incredible—I don’t really know how else to describe it. That
summer was the first time that I felt myself let go of the sins from my past
and move on. I felt so free.
During college, I lost a couple of other friends as well.
One friend committed suicide and another friend was taken in a car accident.
Losing so many people close to me has been something that I continue to
struggle with. Since so much in my life was out of my control, I’ve tried that
much harder to control things. I worry about a lot of things instead of
trusting God to take care of it and use it for His glory. I am constantly
working to hand things over to Him and it terrifies me. God is gracious though
and continues to provide what is best for me even when I don’t know what it is.
I see this in how he has saved me from past relationships, how he brought me to
live in New Orleans when I didn’t want to, in providing my current job when I
didn’t even want to work in a charter school, and how he is providing
everything I need in order to start foster parenting.
God is good all the time!
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