My Story
Before you read this, please know that I don’t want to bond with you over trauma. I want to bond with you over God.
The aim of this testimony is not to prove how much I have endured, to explain myself, or to earn credibility through pain. My hope is simpler and far more serious than that: that you would see the character of God as revealed through my life. I want you to notice where He stepped in and what kind of God He proved Himself to be there.
I didn’t grow up rejecting God. I grew up trying very hard to be acceptable to Him.
Somewhere along the way, I learned how to be impressive. How to be useful. How to keep things emotionally smooth. Obedience felt safest when it was visible and affirmed. My faithfulness earned my belonging. I believed God loved me, but I wasn’t quite sure He would remain patient with me if I stopped being impressive.
That belief didn’t come from nowhere.
There were wounds I did not yet know how to name. I experienced sexual abuse as a child. I was stalked more than once. Rumors damaged my reputation. There were moments when men in positions of spiritual authority crossed lines, and I was blamed for being a temptation rather than protected as a daughter of the church. Slowly, I learned that attention could be dangerous, that approval was fragile, and that belonging could disappear without warning.
So I adapted.
I learned how to read rooms, regulate emotions, and stay agreeable, desirable, and safe. Faithfulness became something I performed. Obedience became something I used to hold my life together. For a time, this worked. It gave me structure. It gave me belonging. It gave me a sense of control.
Until it didn’t.
When obedience stopped guaranteeing approval and I could no longer manage outcomes, what surfaced wasn’t rebellion. It was grief. Grief for the identity I had built and the belonging it once secured. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t useful or impressive. If I wasn’t affirmed.
That is where God interrupted me. Not with condemnation. Not with urgency. But with a mercy that refused to rush me.
God knew who He was making long before I learned how
to live with it.
When everything familiar collapsed, He didn’t offer me a better strategy. He gave me a new name. His. An identity I neither earned nor could maintain by effort. What I know now (what I stake my life on) is this: God’s mercy is new every day. It does not thin with time. It does not grow impatient. It waits. And it holds you long after approval fades.
That is who He has proven Himself to be.
God continued this work in quiet, ordinary ways. One of them, through my husband.
He did not rescue me, and he did not replace what God was doing. But he named something true about me that I had never learned to receive. He saw me as capable. Thoughtful. Intelligent. Not impressive for approval’s sake, but grounded. He did not need me to be smaller to be faithful, or simpler to be safe. He welcomed my questions and did not flinch at my depth.
Loving him, and being loved by him, became one of the places God’s patient work continued. Not because marriage fixed me, but because it exposed how much of my identity had been built on being seen instead of being known. My husband did not give me my identity, but he walked with me while God did.
In light of all this, God showed me something else that hurt in the depths of my soul. The ring of truth that still haunts to this day. I am painfully average. Yes, somehow, that turned out to be the best thing for me.
I learned that I did not need to be important to the world in order to be important to the King. That conviction settled slowly but unmistakably in April of 2023. God was gentle, but He was clear. I could not handle the spotlight. I had made it my god. And in His kindness, He took it away.
What He gave me instead was a truer purpose. Not a stage. Not visibility. Not applause. But shoulders for others to stand on. God showed me that my work was never meant to be about being seen. It was meant to be about steadying others. About training women to live for His approval rather than man’s. About helping them grow roots in Scripture deep enough to stand when no one is watching.
That is who I am becoming.
And that is who I hope to be for you.