Rescued: My Testimony

Here is my testimony that I gave at worship last night...

Some say that you can see inside someone’s soul when you look into their eyes. I’ve thought about this quote and often wondered if people can see inside my soul. Can they see all of the pain and hurt that I have dealt with throughout my life?

As a child, I was abused by multiple family members. I literally had to fight for my life from the age of 3. When I was a teenager, I was neglected and eventually became homeless, living in numerous homes of friends. I lost my oldest brother, who was a drug addict and dealer, to suicide when I was a senior in high school. I grew up in a family ravaged by drugs and alcohol. I have been hospitalized ten times. Many of you may remember last semester, when I was hospitalized four times. I have most recently been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Where does God come into all of these struggles? Where does He come into all of the pain I’ve endured?

The answer is that God is redeeming me every single day. He is opening my heart up and helping me move forward each and every day. He is healing me in ways I never expected were possible. I would not have the strength to get through each day if it were not for him. God has brought hope into my life when I have felt the most hopeless. Thanks to Him, I graduated at the top of my class in college and am set to graduate with my Masters this December. People have told me that I should not even be able to function, and yet, I am beating the odds and moving towards what God has planned for me.

I want to end with a story of something that happened when I was six years old because I think it illustrates something very powerful that I’ve seen evident in my life, especially this past year.

There had been a car accident up the street from my childhood home. My brothers went up the street to check on what was happening and my mother left me alone in the house. Soon after she left, I saw smoke on the ceiling. My mind and body turned on survival mode and I went to the front door. It was locked and I couldn’t reach the door handle anyway. I went on the deck out back but there were no stairs to go down. I then realized that if I wanted to survive, I had to go into the kitchen, the worst room in the house because my mom had left the stove on. By that time, smoke was all throughout the home, but I went into the kitchen, found a trash can, tipped it over, stood on top of it and called 911.

The firefighters told my mother that if I had called any later, I might have died.

I tell this story because sometimes we have to go through the most difficult storms and fight the hardest fights in order to move forward and to see how deep, how wide , how long, and how high God’s love really is for us. There are no words to describe what it was like to be rescued from that fire by the firefighters. God rescues us as well. God has rescued me from a lot.

 It is through the grace of God that we move forward through our struggles.