I am a product of a broken home. My parents divorced when I was ten and afterwards my sisters and I were thrown into a very unreal word of my father's other life. Women and sex, cursing and neglect became realities for us. We saw first hand the person who we knew as Dad had become something ugly, unloving, obsessed with women and pleasure and totally unrecognizable as the father we had grown up knowing. So when my mother met and got engaged to her high school sweetheart, I was ecstatic! I would have probably moved anywhere, just to forget that my father didn't love me, that women objectified themselves for acceptance and that my life was a total lie. I packed and moved as happily as any person I could have imagined! I was willing to make this new shot at life work and that meant I was able to start over.
I quickly became a different girl, without a past! I introduced my new step-dad as my father and it was the closest to the truth I had felt was real in my entire life! He actually cared about me, my sisters and my mom. I took his name as my own and enjoyed him teaching me how to drive, buying me my first car, taking me to pick out my prom dress, meeting my boyfriends, and doing all those things that my father had never had the inclination or the ability to do.
It was during this time (around my 15th birthday) that my father was brought up on charges and his lawyer was incarcerated. He avoided jail time by turning states-evidence and testifying against his own lawyer and then only spent time in a half way house. I learned at this time that my family was infamous in our hometown for the exploits of my father and I retreated more and more into this facade of a life outside of anything ugly. Very few of my friends even knew my parents had divorced and I don't recall anyone outside of our immediate family unit ever seeing my real father. He had been forced because of legal troubles to stop visiting much and eventually when I turned 18 I was no longer legally forced to visit him, but still my life wasn't perfect.
While in my junior year of high school my two best friends were facing a hard time. One's very close family friend was dying of cancer and the other was going through a very messy divorce with her parents for the same reasons my own parents had divorced. Neither of my two close friends knew anything of my past, I never spoke to anyone about my life before California unless it was simply a passing mention of growing up in Alaska. I was forced by these two girls to prove that my life hadn't actually been sugar plums and roses. This dredge was horribly humiliating for me. I hated the things I found that I had buried so deeply after all those years. I hated the fear that festered, the bitterness and resentment that simmered away happily inside my grudge-filled soul. I found that my dark past wasn't only the fault of someone else, but I had fed and fostered a mean and ugly person that now hid inside of me.
I didn't know why, but my only thought of escape for this angry and selfish girl inside could possibly be the bible. Where that thought came from I don't know, there wasn't anyone telling me this truth, but still it was there. I started going to church alone on Sundays, when my parents traveled to the local catholic mass where my step-father worshipped. I began also reading the bible alone and found a verse in John 14..."Peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you, I do not give as the world gives, do not let your heart be troubled and do not be afraid." At the time, I felt this was meant just for me at this low moment of fear and anger. I attended a service shortly afterwards where the pastor preached on "who is the Lord of your life?" I was struck suddenly for the first time and actually remember hearing and ingesting a sermon. "If you are a husband is it your wife? If you are a mom is it your children? If you are a business man is it your job? Or maybe is it you?" I looked inside and I just knew that I had followed only and always myself! Wham! It felt like a punch to the stomach! I was my own King! I didn't follow God! I had exalted myself High above where any normal human being should reside and I followed devotedly!
I went home that morning intent on prayerfully "fixing" myself and my obvious affront to the Lord. I knelt down to pray and began by telling God how I had always been a christian! I laugh now thinking about how that must have sounded to the Lord! I had this overwhelming sense at the time the Lord asked me "Will you really try to lie to the King of the universe?" I was stunned. I instantly knew my life had never aligned with His own and trusted in Christ at that moment. I confessed my sin of idolatry and sought his peace in the problems of my past.
At that time I struggled to follow the Lord in private, because growing up Presbyterian I had always thought that faith was between a person and God, only! It took me two years to really speak with anyone about what had happened that morning in April 1999. It was then that I began to actually own up to following Christ and felt confident in following Him openly. It was then at college in 2001 I actually stood up for the first time in the cause of Christ and am thankful that I was given the strength at that moment to do so. Looking back at that time, hard as it was, humbling and humiliating as it was, I see now the workings of the woman I was to become. I see the preparation for the life I have led in the last decade.
Then in 1999, following Christ meant an assention to truths about Christ, and issue of Lordship, authority, study, and prayer. Today, in 2012, it means all those things and many more too. It means faith when faith is not strong. It means grace when sin overflows. It means trust in the midst of hardship. I view the cost now more then I did then but I also know that at the moment back all those years ago (and it hasn't really been many years) my life took a turn. My life went from one that desired only it's own glory to one submitting itself eternally under the authority and goodness of another! I am so thankful that these things worked together to draw me forth into a new life.
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