My Testimony

Yesterday I posted a picture of myself from college.  At first I thought, boy does she have great skin.  And I was bummed.  Then I remembered what life was like when that picture was taken - around 19 or 20.  My goodness, my life was a mess.  I would much rather have the wrinkles and aging skin with this wonderful life now, than have that wonderful young skin and be so unhappy.

A lot of my Facebook friends have known me for a long time, but most of you who read this blog don't know what my life was like back then.  One of you even asked why I was so unhappy back then.  So, I thought about writing about it on here.  The truth is, it's really my testimony.  So, here we go!

When I was 14 or 15, I knew I was a believer.  I knew I believed Jesus Christ was my Savior.  I knew he was God's Son and I knew His dying on a cross is the reason I get to go to heaven.  I believed.  I accepted.  I was thankful.  I was baptized.

But, I had low self esteem, as most kids do around that age, and Christ wasn't my center and focus.  Pleasing my friends, trying to be popular, that sort of thing meant more to me.  So, I went through high school with great parents, an annoying little sister (if you think 15 is hard, having a 12 year old sister is hard - when popularity is your focus).  We lived in a small house, the smallest of my friends, but no one seemed to care or notice, so that wasn't a big deal.  We came from military housing, so it was the nicest house we had ever lived in.  School came fairly easy to me, and the classes that were difficult were still passable.  I had a decent GPA and college was the next step.

I had a boyfriend at 14 and 15 - we dated for about a year - I can't even remember how long now.  Greg was a few years older than me and he was the perfect first boyfriend.  It was puppy love for sure.  He was so kind to me, and his family was too.  He was so super good looking, and even though he was older than me, he never pressured me to do anything physical I wasn't comfortable with.  He was a good guy and it meant a lot to me that he knew he wasn't going to get anywhere with me.  After we broke up (who knows why), I didn't have any other boyfriends for a while.  (A year or two with no boyfriends is a long time in high school.)  :-)

By 17, I was a senior in high school and working as a high school work study at a wonderful job that had promise to pay for my college and set me up with a career.  This opportunity is why my dad retired here.  This opportunity was huge, and I was there.  Good decisions and work (not really hard work yet) had brought me here (not to mention the Lord's providential hand, of course), so I was doing really well for myself.  (Oh yes!  I was taking acting classes too and had a commercial under my belt.)

17 is when I started dating a boy, James, from church.  We fell for each other pretty quickly and got serious about each other quickly.  It was not puppy love (at least not for me).  It was the real thing.  We started making plans to keep each other in our lives and eventually get married.  He made a lot of promises and I started making bad decisions.  It wouldn't honor my husband to talk about the details, but I made decisions that I knew were wrong, but wanted to anyway.

Two years into our relationship, I found myself completely addicted to James.  I loved him so much - he was my everything.  I didn't have any friends, I didn't have any hobbies, I didn't make any decisions that didn't involve me spending all my time and energy being with him.  So, by the time he transferred from the college we were both attending to a new college several states away, I was devastated.  And several months after his move, he broke up with me.

I had nothing.  (Don't get me wrong, I was still living at home with my parents.  I still had a sister who grew out of her annoying little sister ways.  I still had my good job.  I still was going to college.)  But I had no friends, no boyfriend, and I lost my first love.  I don't think I will ever fully get over it.  I still am not over it now.  Anyone who has ever been divorced knows what I mean.  I cried every day for two years straight.  I experienced all stages of grief (I found the angry/bitter one to be the most pleasant and stayed there for a long time.  I hated ALL men.)

When he was gone, I felt very empty.  I gave everything I had to James.  My mind, my body, my soul was his.  It was gone.  I was in a pit of depression so deep I had suicidal thoughts and developed an eating disorder.  My parents didn't know what to do with me, so they really just gave me space and didn't try to fix me.  They were there for me, but let me just process it the only way I knew how.  I probably could have used some meds, but giving me time and space was so great.  I remember taking only 2 classes that semester, doing poorly, and they were super easy.  My parents never gave me a hard time about it.  To this day I am grateful for them not yelling at me and saying, "snap out of it!"  It wouldn't have worked.  I would have felt like they weren't there for me after all.

Then James got engaged.  We dated for 2 years, but he found someone so quickly after we broke up that he got engaged just 6 months later.  I remember my dad sitting me down and telling me the news.  He let me just break down and cry even more.

I talked to friends who said, "I saw you in the car the other day."  I said, "cool!  Where were you?  Did you wave?"  They would say, "um, you were crying so I didn't wave."  I walked around in a fog and honestly don't remember much from those 2 years.

I went through feelings of rejection, betrayal, confusion, feeling foolish, regret, and the list goes on and on and on.  It was the worst time of my life.  It was 100% the definition of brokenness.  But, I decided to do something about it.  I remembered learning in church that "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so."  I bet, even though I was a broken gross person with too many sins to count, I bet I could figure out some way for Him to love me eventually.  I knew he was the perfect partner to fill the deep, deep hole inside me.  My heart was in a billion pieces, and I knew Jesus knew how to mold it to be whole again.  So, I spent time getting to know Him.  I spent a LONG time working through Him on forgiveness.  After He forgave me, I worked a long time on forgiving myself.  I fell in love with Him.  At 19, I rededicated my life to him.  Or maybe I truthfully gave it to Him 100% for the first time.  It took years, but I became a whole person again, filled with the Holy Spirit.  I would walk around my college campus just praying and living for Christ.  I imagined walking with him, hand in hand.  We would walk and talk (pray), I shared everything with Him.  And I found myself coming out of my pit.  Little by little, I was emerging.  I was in a bubble - going through the motions at work and school - with my heart, mind, body, and soul focused on Jesus.  I spent my days feeling alone with Jesus, working super hard at college (which was much more difficult than high school!), AND working at work.  (Hence the reason I said that girl's life stunk on Facebook!  She worked so hard and was working on becoming less of a shell of a broken mess.)

On a retreat with my college Christian group, God led me to a verse (for the first time in my life).  I was just sitting and praying and crying (which I did often), and he opened my Bible to 2 Corinthians 5:17 and had me read it over and over.  "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:  The old has gone, the new is here!"  Oh my.  He really meant it.  Did you see that exclamation mark? That was for me!  I felt so gross and yucky with a terrible past, but God said the old was gone.

Gone.

And I believed him.  I've never known God to lie once.

But life isn't without consequences.  As friend after friend got married and I was a bridesmaid yet again, I began to think I wouldn't ever find anyone who was a wonderful Christian man who could forgive my past.  I prayed for my husband for years (bless his final exams, bless his day, keep him safe where he's driving today, etc.), hoping he would come, however long it took for him to find me.  After 2 years of crying daily and misery and eventual renewal, I began to wonder if I would ever get a date again!

Being an absolute mess, I can see how I would not have been good for anyone, and 'some guy' out there would not have been good for me.  I promised myself that whenever God would allow that special guy to come along, I would take it S.L.O.W.L.Y.  I would keep Jesus as my #1 boyfriend and this person would just have to be okay with that.

Meanwhile, after being dumped by someone I loved very much, after foolishly removing my heart from Jesus' protective hands and placing it in a young man's hands (who didn't treat it well in the end), and coming to Christ, my entire personality shifted.  I was no longer shy.  I was no longer quiet.  I didn't have low self esteem anymore.  I wasn't dependent anymore (not even in a "we do everything together" cutesy kind of way).  I was actually a different person.  If I took a personality test at 18, then another one at 22, you would think it was taken by two different people.  Not much was the same.  People who knew me through that process said it was jarring for my actions/feelings/thoughts to completely change.

As a junior in college, I met Michael at church.  He was INSANELY good looking, and knew all the answers in Sunday school.  I found myself very drawn to a person who knew the Bible so well.  (Not to mention his uncanny likeness for Mark Tremonti from Creed, who I found super attractive.)  :-)  As he kept coming to church, knowing all those answers, I kept hoping he would ask me out.  How did he know all those answers?  I thought teenagers and young adults just cared about partying and getting laid.  How did he have time to know so much about God?  Eventually, we as a class (we were all friends outside of church too), got together in groups to play cards, watch the Super Bowl, watch movies, etc.  Then I started planning these parties only if Michael would say he could come first.  (He didn't know this, of course.)  Eventually, he asked me out!

We fell in love CRAZY fast.  I promised myself I would take things super slowly with the next person I was in a relationship with, so I was taken by surprise.  Michael had firm convictions on not sleeping with anyone before marriage (which was a relief), and we didn't, but our emotions went from 0 to wanting to get married very quickly.

He called me wonderful and perfect and amazing and he said he never met anyone like me.  The whole time I kept thinking, if you only knew....

As we got serious enough to start talking about marriage, I had to tell him.  I couldn't let him make a big decision like who he would marry and not know the truth about my past.  So, I told him.

It.  Was.  Horrible.

I was crying, he was crying.  He left the room.  I let him stay gone for a long time (it may have been 10 minutes, but it felt like forever).  When I found him, he was just sitting alone.  Later he told me he was praying.  Later he said he was debating leaving me.  Later he told me he very nearly did.  He very nearly walked out of the house and never looked back.

I asked him to talk to me.  Tell me what to do.  He said he wanted to hear every single detail.  Once.  Then he never wanted to talk about it again.

So we did.  We talked about every single detail.

He never called me perfect again.

He was certainly right not to.  And that's okay.  I bet he didn't even realize he stopped.  It's okay.

We spent a month in the Word together, working on a couples Bible study and came to decide together that this was something we could get past and he was in this relationship for the long haul.  6 months after our first date, he proposed.  To his non-perfect girl.  And I was elated.  2 months after that we were married.

I had only lived my life devoted to Christ for about 3 years and had SO MUCH to learn, but these years later, I'm so much further in my Christian walk and so much happier in my fabulous, secure marriage.  Life isn't perfect and these last 12 years have had many ups and many downs, but the ups are worth the downs.

And the whole time, Jesus has never stopped being my #1 boyfriend.