Before I surrendered to Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior, my life was consumed by depression, thoughts of suicide, and an addiction to cutting. One night I cried out to Him for salvation, and His perfect love washed over me in a torrential downpour of grace, and He set me free.
A year and a half after Jesus delivered me from my darkness and destruction and gave me eternal life, I fell into gross sin. I believed that I was completely worthless and beyond redemption. I believed that I had also broken God’s love for me as I held the shattered remnants of my relationships and identity and hope in my trembling hands stained with sin, guilt, and shame, and gave in to the lies screaming that I had been abandoned.
Desperate for anyone to prove that I was still worthy of love and to numb the screaming pain, I sought comfort in a guy I barely knew, who violently stole something from me that I can never physically regain. The rape sent me spiraling desperately into deeper addiction, indescribable shame, anger towards God, and desperate self-destruction as I believed more than ever before that I had been forsaken and was no longer loved.
My deepest shame and greatest fear came from a lie that told me that God purposefully wanted me to be abused as punishment for my sin, and that I was completely abandoned.
Over the past few years, God has poured out beautiful redemption and glorious restoration into my life, and shattered my chains once more. He has delivered me from the lies of the enemy and is opening my eyes to all the ways that He faithfully loved and pursued me in my greatest darkness and deepest brokenness. He has set my life ablaze with a passion to minister to victims of sex trafficking and share the Gospel that saved my life. He has opened my eyes to see that He is not a cruel taskmaster but a beautiful, loving, merciful Father, who longs to lavish perfect love, extravagant mercy, and relentless grace upon you and transform your ashes into beauty. He has flooded my darkness with His Light, and filled me with a burning desire to go into the darkest places of the earth and spread the Light that rescued me.
Like Genesis 50:20 says, what the enemy meant for evil, God is using for good. His love has made me beautiful and worthy and free from shame. He longs to do the same for you. He has a purpose for you that is only found through a personal love relationship with Him. “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, ‘whoever believes in Him will not be put to shame.'” – Romans 10:9-10
