Beauty from Ashes: my story {part 1}

A friend of mine once told me that God is sassy. Confused on what she meant by that, I asked her to it explain more. She explained to me that God is sassy because He is always doing the least expected thing we could imagine. Like when we think we have everything planned, He looks at us and says, "Ha! Watch this!" Then totally changes everything. Not in an angry way, but just to remind us who ultimately is in control and that His plan is best.

I am pretty sure my story is a complete testimony to that fact that God indeed is sassy because He alone could have written and redeemed a story like this. I could have never imagined this.

A huge part, if not all of my story is because of the Church and the people in it.

The church drove me from Jesus but also has helped carry me back to the cross.

It's been the reason I have anxiety that I still struggle with weekly, but it's also where I have found healing. Because of everything I have been through, I stand in complete awe of how He has been so faithful in my life, and how He has brought beauty from ashes. Sharing my story has been on my heart recently, and so today I will share part 1.

I grew up in a Christian home, with two incredible parents and six siblings. All of us are homeschooled and have been ever since we were young. Along with growing up in the church, I've always been around Christianity and hearing about Jesus and the Bible. To me, being a Christian was just something you did. If you prayed the prayer, read your Bible, went to church..etc. you were a "good Christian."  I was all based on works and doing the right things. Then if you did all the right things, you would go to heaven. When I got to middle school, a lot of things changed in my life. I started to realize that there might be more to Christianity, that there might be more to this than what I had grown up thinking. I started realizing that there was something missing, but I just couldn't quite put my finger on what exactly it was. As this was all taking place, there were a quite a few people in my life, that I had known since I was young, that really hurt me emotionally and mentally. I felt unwanted and out of place, which is hard to feel like that anywhere but it is especially hard feeling like that in the church. It caused a lot of anxiety, and going to Church became something I dreaded every week because the feeling of rejection was just too much to bear.

The summer of my 7th-grade year, I took my first trip to Africa to go get my 3 sisters from Ethiopia with my mom and sister. I knew that Africa would be different, I knew there was poverty and that it was going to be rough. I had seen the pictures, I knew the stories, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw with my own eyes. It was a really hard trip, yet amazing getting to bring my sisters home. When I returned, I really struggled with what missionaries and travelers call, "reverse culture shock." I felt guilty, I got to come to my nice home in America while I left 43 other orphans in an orphanage in east Africa, who had no families or homes to call their own. They had no hope, they were the least of the least, vulnerable and destitute. To me, it seemed as if they were forgotten by the world and by God. Everything I had learned in church about how God is loving and how He takes care of His children seemed to contradict everything I had just witnessed. I didn't share what I was struggling with, with really anyone-it was too hard to put into words. So I walked with it alone, the great weight of guilt and the questioning thought, did God really love His people. In the midst of the hard times, God was always providing for my needs, even when I couldn't see it. All through middle school, I had an absolutely incredible youth pastor, and he and his wife loved me and my family so well. They were the two people in the church who I was comfortable with and knew that if I ever needed anything they would be there for me. They loved me for who I was, and not what I such be. To be honest, they were the reason I came to church throughout middle school. For so long I had wanted to give up and to be done with church forever but those two people showed me what the Church as a whole is supposed to be, a loving family.  As I went farther along in middle school, I grew more quiet and insecure, my anxiety got worse and I would do anything to not have to go to church. Even with my youth pastor and his wife there, it got to the point where I just couldn't do it. Every week there was the fear of being hurt again. I was always dreading Sundays and Wednesdays. I held people at arm's length for fear that they would hurt me. By 8th grade, I was at the end of my rope when it came to church, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I finally came to the point where I decided that if this is what Christianity was, I didn’t want it. If being a part of a church meant being hurt by others than I wanted to stay as far away as possible.

This started one of the hardest seasons I’ve ever walked through. It’s hard to even now to talk about it, even after three years since it’s happened.  It was a season of still working to make myself look good to everyone around me, to be the good daughter and the perfect "Christian". But then constantly feeling as if I was failing. I felt unworthy, broken, and stuck in the cycle of trying to pick myself back up again once I had messed up. To me, it felt as if God had left me because I couldn’t meet the standards, so I pushed religion, God, and church away harder.   I had this void inside of me that I just couldn’t seem to fill. A desire to be loved and accepted for who I was,  but I wasn’t brave enough to put the cover down, so I continued. I tried to keep a smile on, and to try and believe the fact that I was fine, but on the inside,  I was exhausted and broken. Little did I know, is that one thing I pushed away for so long, was the only thing that would fill the hole I had. My life seemed to be falling apart, and I couldn't hold together all the broken pieces. I didn't feel like God was there, He wasn't close or coming to help me in my time of need. In fact, it felt like as time went on and things got worse the farther God got. It was around January of 2015 that I just gave up. I gave up even trying to believe that He had a plan, that He was watching out for me, and that He even cared.

After a couple months of this dark season that never seemed to end, my family started attending a new church. It was the third church we had been at in 14 months, which wasn't really helping my outlook on the church. I would not let myself enjoy it and I would make myself hate it, and for awhile I truly did. But as time went on, I started to feel a little more at home. The only way I could describe it is that it felt like a Church. Everyone was so accepting and wanted to make me and my family feel so welcomed. It was something I had never experienced before. We had been attending this church for a few weeks when my mom decided it would be a great idea for me and my sister to try the youth ministry. They were having an event, and it was the perfect time to go visit and check it out. Let's just say... I had a very different option than my mother. I was not as enthusiastic about letting the thing that had hurt me so much in the past back into my life again. A few hours before the event, I came to my mom in tears because I was so nervous and so stressed about it. It just so happened that the next morning I was having oral surgery to have 8 teeth taken out. She asked which one I was more nervous about, surgery or going to the youth event. My answer,

"Trying a new youth group."

So after an unsuccessful attempt to convince my mom to not make us go, my sister and I walked into the student center. It was full of people, and I was so overwhelmed by everything. But again, God provided for what I needed even when I wasn't looking for it. He provided friends who me and my sister hadn't seen in years who just happened to attend that campus and that sat with us in the service so we wouldn't sit alone. He provided leaders who sought us out and made us feel at home, welcomed, and loved. Everyone we met went out of their way to make sure we knew they were happy to have us here. I remember going home that night just so in shock over how a bunch of people could love two strangers so well. It truly blew my mind, I had never experienced anything like this before. That was March 31st, 2015, almost two years ago.

As the days past, I actually started to look forward to attending a regular high school service after spring break. A few weeks later my sister and I went back to try it again, I was still unsure about it all but not unwilling to try it again. God had slowly but surely started working in my heart to calm fears and to overwhelm me with peace over the break. I had prepared myself before coming that no one would talk to us, that my sister and I wouldn't meet girls our age, and basically that everything would go horribly and completely wrong. But to my surprise, it didn't. People actually remembered us and welcomed us even more than they did the first time we came. We met the youth pastor that night, and he introduced us to our group leaders and girls our age. He personally made sure we were taken care of and helped us get plugged in. I walked away that night even more overwhelmed by the way complete strangers loved people so well and did everything in their power to help us feel welcome and at home. It intrigued me, there was obviously something different about these people, but I just couldn't put my finger on what that was quite yet. So the weeks turned to months and my sister and I kept going back. I actually started to look forward to Wednesday and Sunday nights again for the first time in a really really long time, actually, for the first time ever. It felt like a family, and you could not help but want to go back and spend more time with them. As I went back more and more, God slowly and subtly started taking down the walls I had built between us over the past years.

By summer, I was involved in helping out in the middle school ministry and wouldn't miss Wednesday night service for anything.  I actually was the one to ask my parents if I could go with our youth ministry to their week-long summer camp in July, which was a big first for me. I had never been to any camp before with any youth ministry I had been a part of, and certainly not with people I had just met not even 4 months earlier. I had no idea what all God was planning when I decided to go to camp. It was really my first step I was taking in choosing to draw closer to God after everything I had walked through. Through that one little yes and step of faith, He used it to completely turn my world upside down.