I used to think that growing up in a stable, Christ-centered home would surely make for a boring “testimony”. After all, the many jaw-dropping, heart-wrenching stories I had heard at youth retreats were from people who had grown up in abusive homes, often surrounded by drugs and poverty, and who had experienced horrific things during their childhood.
That stuff made for fabulous “look what God did in my life” stories.
But mine? Mine was doomed to be blah. Something to the effect of: born, lived, married, multiplied, died. Happily in Christian family. The end.
Boy, was I mistaken.
While I do indeed have fond memories of my childhood, it astounds me how the negative memories have clouded out much of the positive. It’s heart-breaking really, considering my parents did a stunning job with what they had {and we continue to marvel at their parenting and grand-parenting as they grow older and wiser}.
I could never understand why ages 8 – 15 held so much inexplicable shame and insecurity for me. There are crystal clear snapshots in my memory of the “health” folders I created by clipping articles out of magazines {“jump rope 100 cycles per day”, “eat a cup of carrots”, and other activities that promised me the pretty, skinny appearance I ached for}. My endless pursuit of perfection began at the impressionable age of 10. I wasn’t even chubby, I was “muscular”. But observing the battle my mom had waged against the bulge, and seeing the similarity in our body shapes, set into motion a fear-driven obsession with health and weight-loss before I had even reached my teens.
I remember day-dreaming regularly about being at school {during 7th grade} on the playground and, with the sultry ease of a Charlie’s Angel, unzipping my spectacled, short-haired, awkward outer appearance and revealing a long-haired, beautiful babe beneath, wowing the crowd around me and winning the hearts of the adoring boys.
“Insecure” was my middle name.
I struggle to recall much of my adolescent years. It’s as though I have mentally blocked massive chunks out. This grieves me more than I can even begin to express. Where did it go? Who was I? What was I like as a child? What went so horribly wrong?
What is, sadly, burned into my memory is a series of events and choices that went something like this…
I was “date” raped shortly after I turned 15 by the brother of a friend I never saw again. It wasn’t a date by any means {in fact I had a crush on his brother}, but September 15th, 1996 is certainly a date burned into my memory.
Rather than hate boys, I chose the opposite route. My method of coping was to throw myself at any guy who offered me anything remotely resembling “love”. Years of promiscuity ensued, leaving me feeling dirty, worthless and empty.
That same year I started shoplifting. It started small, with a chapstick, and went on to include daily “fixes” of clothing, make-up and CDs.
Getting things for “free” became an addiction with such a powerful high that making the choice to stop years later was excruciatingly hard.
While I hadn’t made a rebellious decision to walk away from God, I was sure He had walked away from me. I was sure His arm of grace and forgiveness was just a little too short to reach me. While I went through seasons of doing “religious” things out of a sense of duty, an authentic, unpretentious relationship with Jesus was something I just didn’t know much about.
Appearing to follow him on the outside, I felt an unworthy traitor on the inside. I got good at leading a double life. Church on Sunday in effort to please my parents. The bar most other nights in an attempt to satisfy my aching need to be loved {just in case you’re attempting to do the math…my sister and I were bar hopping at the tender age of 15. We looked older and age-confirmation just wasn’t done in Namibia when we were growing up}.
God got my attention when I was 18 {after my family moved to the States}, when a 2.5 year relationship, that had recently turned into an engagement, abruptly ended. I was completely and utterly crushed.
I wept and slept. Not able to get out of bed for days. The only man I thought would ever want me, had rejected me. Just like all the others. I was positive I would die of a broken heart. Not because this guy was so amazing…but because I was convinced he was the only one who would ever want to marry me. I was used goods. Thoroughly used, horribly broken goods.
But God was at work behind the scenes…the very week my life {as I had known it} was shattered to pieces, the women’s group from our church was heading down to South Carolina for a women’s conference. I was desperate enough to accept their invitation, and so would begin the rescue mission…the slow process of God woo-ing my heart back to his and restoring my broken identity.
Fast forward 3 years.
3 years of celibacy. 3 years without stealing. 3 years of digging everything I was into the faithful God who had gently, lovingly drawn me out from the depths of my pit. 3 years of the slow rebuilding of my value, the reestablishing of my worth, and the relocating of my identity. But still, 3 years of keeping dark, painful secrets.
I was working in Christian radio and had met the man of my dreams. He was more than I had prayed for…and I was shooting high those days, encouraged by the Godly women around me to not settle for anything less than what God had for me. And the only way I felt I would ever win him over would be to sweetly present him with the “good” me parts, vowing never to mention any details that would indicate there was ever a “bad” me. I told him I was date raped. ‘Not a virgin…sorry”. But that was where I chose to stop, hoping the lack of disclosure would simply allow it to drift off into a past I was never planning on revisiting. I hoped that would work as an explanation for any possible baggage I might come with. But it doesn’t work that way, does it?
Allow me to say this: keeping secrets from your spouse is like burying skeletons in your back yard and never expecting their eerie presence to effect your relationship.
Fear of him finding out the truth about me…and the rejection that was sure to accompany it…was like a 1000 pound weight I wore daily around my neck. I was living a lie to the only man I wanted to grow old with.
What a farce, I was. It was suffocating and disabling. But I held to my vow, terrified of what the truth might do to “us”.
2 months before our wedding I attended a conference in New York. Because I was representing the radio station I worked for, I was in the front row. A woman {Pam Stenzel} was speaking about purity and the need to have an open relationship with your future spouse. She urged the audience to realize the importance of living with full disclosure.
I wanted to vomit.
But as I sat there, in a sick state of shock, God started to press on my heart that it was now or never. The exact words that pounded my heart were: “you’re being faced with the opportunity of a lifetime…but you have to act within the lifetime of this opportunity”. I knew I needed to speak to my fiancé, and tell him the truth about my past, but I dreaded life without him. I made a deal with God {go ahead…laugh out loud}. I decided if I could speak to this woman in person, and she told me to do it, I would. I was sure it wouldn’t happen as there were hundreds of people in line, waiting to pray with her and her ministry team. So I lingered strategically outside. Safely away from the entrance of the tent. This is where God got sneaky. I turned around to walk away, with a false sense of resolution, and there she was. Right in front of me. {gulp}. I poured out my heart in a hot mess of shame and relief. This was the first time I had ever shared anything about my past with anyone. She echoed what I sensed in my heart. I needed to lay all my cards on the table, and be brutally honest {without sharing unnecessary details} with the man I was about to commit my future to. He deserved to know.
I arrived home from New York late the next day, and sat waiting in his apartment. I so desperately wanted the earth to swallow me up. Fear wrecked me. To this day – as a 29 year old mother of 2, with 7 years of marriage under my belt – the only time I have felt more terrified and gut-wrenchingly heart-sick than this, was when we stood staring behind a pane of glass at our newborn son, as the PICU team worked to save his life just last year.
The following 5 hours involved more tears and snot and carpet time than I had ever known. I poured it all out, not able to make eye-contact for the filth I was sure had manifested on my face. I returned his ring and left him in agonized shock as I lay in the fetal position on his bathroom floor. I have no concept of time. Nor does he. It could have been half an hour…or 2.
Eventually he came. He picked me up off the floor and forced me to make eye contact, holding my face in his hands.
Right there and then, he got down on his knee…now fully aware of all the ugliness and sin that had threatened to devour me from the inside out…and asked me to be his wife. Again.
I’m sure heaven touched earth in the early hours of that morning. Never before had I experienced God’s extravagant grace and unconditional love like I did through that boy, now my husband, in that moment.
That is what true love looks like. It knows you completely, inside and out, past and present, good and horrific…and wants you anyway. {If you didn’t think my husband was a rockstar before reading this…you can’t help but think that now, eh?}
My life changed drastically that day. It was the culmination of mercy and love and grace and healing and redemption, poured into my heart through the one God had created to walk alongside me for the rest of our earthly lives, and I had never felt so free.
I shared my “story” with my parents the very next day. More tears, more snot. Then with my younger sisters. Then with the women’s group. Eventually, at a purity conference.
God has been so faithful in taking the broken shards of my life and turning them into a mosaic of His grace.
And He’s far from finished.
2 weeks before we got married, I got horribly sick. 2 rounds of antibiotics didn’t touch what was wrecking my body. As I searched online for something that could help me decipher what was ailing me, one thing in particular kept coming up over and over again. Symptoms I had been experiencing that I didn’t even realize were anything other than achy feet and a dampened immune system. Something I had feared for years seemed to be catching up with me. HIV. I was convinced I had discovered the problem. Me. It had always been me. And as devastating as the discovery was, it was no wonder. My train wreck of a life was finally going to crash. I was sure this was God’s way of punishing me for the reckless way I had given myself away, time and time again. I started to distance myself from the idea of marrying this wonderful man. I fell right back into the fear I had lived in for so long. I was convinced AIDS was my lot. I disserved to die a lonely death. And on it went.
My mind was going wild. After praying about it together and deciding it would be wise for me to get tested, I went in for proof of my death sentence.
But God had other plans. No disease. Nothing.
And just days before we got married, all symptoms were gone. What a powerful reminder of how easily I could fall back into a shame-based mindset if I didn’t choose to fight for my freedom. Where my mind goes, my heart will soon follow.
We tied the knot on a beautiful Fall afternoon in October, healthy and whole.
As we forged on in life together, God continued to refine us and bring baggage to the surface. I remember a few years ago I started to sense the need to make right some of the wrongs I had committed. I’ll never forget the day I went to apologize to the manager of a book store {while my husband sat waiting in the car}, 10 years after stealing several CDs from his store. We had come to know this man well during that time, both in a professional sense {while I had worked in radio} and in a personal sense {we had invited him to our wedding}. Despite my plan to offer to pay for what I had taken, I had clear images of me being escorted away by the police. Comical now that I’m married to “the police”.
While it was terrifying and tear-filled, it was also incredibly redemptive and deeply healing. The store manager hugged me and cried with me as I confessed what I had done. It was beautiful and I’m so thankful I acted on that still, small hunch. God is just cool like that.
*Almost 7 years ago I had the opportunity to take my husband to South Africa and Namibia for 5 weeks, in celebration of our 3rd anniversary, to meet my extended family and to show-off my gorgeous home countries. It was absolutely fantastic.
On our final night in South Africa, we were wrapping up our time with my parent’s best friends when I sensed an urgency to spend some time in prayer with the wife. I was still dealing with a lot of insecurity and shame from my past and really felt her ministry of inner healing would play a part in this final step towards total freedom. She heads up the Theophostic ministry {a spiritually focused version of psychotherapy} in her area.
I am so very thankful we made time to do this, despite not wanting to spend my final hours as a blubbering mess. What was revealed during this time was the missing piece of the puzzle.
In later sharing details of what came up during that ministry session {after having blocked it out completely as a young child} with my older sister and parents, the pieces started to fall together. My sister and I {at age 4 and 5} had been repeatedly molested by one of the men who worked on the grounds of the girl’s hostel we had lived at for many years {my dad was vice principle of the school}.
As devastating of a discovery as it was, and as much as I wrestled with the terminology of being someone who’d been “abused”, everything suddenly made sense. The hyper-sexualized childhood we’d had {in private play and as sisters}, and the ease with which we had shifted into promiscuity, reeked of a childhood blemished by abuse.
The very next day we flew out to Namibia to wrap up our vacation and spent a morning walking around the hostel – hand in hand – where the years of abuse had taken place. It was surreal. It was hard to process. But it was incredibly healing.
What spectacular timing this had all been.
As I started to pour over the Adult Survivors of Child Abuse materials, it all started to make sense. The intense feelings of shame…the source of which I could never quite put my finger on – the paralyzing insecurity and feelings of worthlessness I had dragged around with me as a preteen and well into my early 20s. Now I understood.
Talk about a breakthrough. And to be able to share these revelations and profound steps towards healing with my hubby meant the world to me. I finally had closure.
And God, in His sweetness, brought new life out of this precious time: we found out we were expecting our first child shortly after we returned from Namibia. Our little African souvenir.
We named her Alathea Grace. Alathea is Greek for truth. She’s the fruit of an experience drenched in truth and seasoned with grace.
A beautiful representation of God’s ability to bring joy and new life out of our pain.
You’ll find this story of God’s extravagant grace in even greater detail in my book, XES.
