I was born to teenage parents who both came from broken, dysfunctional homes. By the age of six, I was sexually abused by a close friend of mine. I was confused, and all I knew at the time was that I wasn’t the same. An immediate family member was verbally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically abusive to me. Physical pain is terrible, but it eventually fades. It was the things she said that cut me to the core. Over time this ruined my perception of myself, and I learned to hate myself.
I always knew of God, my mom talked about Him a lot, but I didn’t trust her. Before I came to Mercy, my relationship with God was one-sided. I loved Him because I heard of how He saved other people, but I thought He would never give me the time of day. I would constantly pray to Him to save me from my situation, save me from myself, and take my life away because it wasn’t worth living.
I was at the worst point in my life when I found out about Mercy. I lost my job of over a year, I wasn’t in college, got sexually assaulted again, and started to suffer from hallucinations. I felt like a failure. I cried out to God as I felt my mind begin to slip away. I knew deep down that there was more for me, I knew there was a life I was supposed to live, and He was the only one who could give it to me.
While I was watching a Joyce Meyers sermon, I heard Nancy Alcorn speak. She talked about Mercy Multiplied. She said it was a place where women could go to work on getting freedom from abuse, addiction, disorders, etc. It sounded like a dream, and once I heard it was free-of-charge, I knew it wasn’t a dream. It was God. The God who I thought didn’t even hear my cry had set before me life. I applied to Mercy, and something changed on the inside. Even as my circumstances at home seemed to worsen, I had hope on the inside.
Soon, I entered the doors of Mercy. I was eager to let go and let God change me from the inside out. My journey began as I readied myself to get to know God and His character. I came to Mercy unable to feel certain emotions after years of suppression. I didn’t know God or who He was outside of what other people told me. I’d sit in class at Mercy and absorb everything I heard. In every book that I read, I took a plethora of notes. I wanted to learn. I didn’t know how to pray, and I didn’t know how to hear from God. Reading the Bible was a complicated task at first. I would start and stop often because I didn’t fully understand what I was reading. I knew I had to love it to try to understand it. Slowly I fell in love with the Word of God, and after lots of prayers for godly wisdom, I began to understand the Word. God’s still small voice became detectable, and His Holy Spirit began to move in me.
My counselor asked me to write a list of all the hurts I’ve experienced in chronological order and ask where God was during those times. She then told me a story of a man walking on the beach with God, two pairs of footprints in the sand indicated God’s presence. The man eventually went through a tough season of his life, and only one pair of footprints remained. He felt God had left him and searched for answers. God revealed those footprints in the sand wasn’t the man walking alone, but that they were His. God carried the man through, but the man mistook it as abandonment. One thing I’ve learned towards the end of my journey is that we may not always feel God’s presence, but He’s always there. God was there for me, carrying me through every heartache and every trauma. God has set me free!