Be inspired

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I was 17 years old. It was the summer before my senior year of high school.

 

I remember opening throbbing eyes and the disorientation of seeing the ceiling of my living room at home. I was on the couch, and my mom was kneeling on the floor beside me, arms folded on the cushion by my side, her head leaning wearily facedown from praying for me all night.

 

I groaned and rolled off the couch, crawled to the bathroom on hands and knees to be sick... and found another reason to be sick in addition to the after-effects from the liquor I had blacked out from consuming the night before.

 

After the date-rape situation came to light, my heart went cold towards God.

I had been betrayed, taken advantage of, by a sober “friend”.

 

But really. Like most hearts that choose to turn to ice and stone… this was only the final “click” of the turning away from God that I’d been doing for years, one “degree” at at time.

 

I wanted what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted… I wanted to feel loved, happy, in control. My feelings were the dictators I kept bowing down to, my eyes getting lower and lower, off Jesus. Click, click, click.

 

Time continued and I graduated, somehow, and moved away from my family and everyone I knew. I drank, did drugs, slept around, got pregnant, had an abortion, became obsessed with death and self-harm, and went deeper into the downward spiral of substance abuse and unhealthy relationships.

 

I was making $1,500 dollars per day as a professional model… and month by month went deeper in debt.

Then, I got pregnant again… and scheduled another abortion.

 

But God.

 

The story is too long to share here -- but He intervened in truly miraculous ways, and I ended up deciding to keep the baby. I named her Selah, which means “a pregnant pause” or “a musical interlude” or “so be it, as the LORD wills”. She is now 10 years old, and has been impacting lives for Jesus in incredible ways since she was a baby.

 

In the 3 ½ years I was a single mom I trained and became a pro-life speaker, taught classes on abortion and the resources available to women in crisis pregnancy situations, and became a peer-counsellor at the local pregnancy resource center. Through sharing the truth of Jesus’ unconditional love over and over and over with women of all backgrounds in all kinds of broken situations, I was healed more and more deeply in the process as well. Because Jesus was faithfully present every step of the way. And it is His presence that heals and redeems.

 

In the years since God has helped me learn to hear Him through prayer (I wrote a short, free eBook about this awesome gift of learning to listen and receive from God in prayer -- He has much to share with you!).

 

He has given me a loving husband who adopted my oldest daughter. We have three more daughters together, and our first son is due to arrive in about 6 weeks! For the past year we have been caring for my husband’s father full-time, because he has advanced Alzheimer’s and dementia.

 

Knowing how to receive from God has been a critical lifeline in so many seasons of my life -- including a year and a half ago when the sexual abuse of one of my little girls came to light.

 

It is His love that makes it worth it to get up every day. And it is only by being in His presence that we become more like Him. Only because of His great power and love, my husband and I are not suffocating from bitterness and unforgiveness but we are able to extend Jesus’ love in the most ugly, devastating circumstances to most hardened, unrepentant people. We have been ugly, devastating, hardened, and unrepentant people.

We know what God can do with any soul.

 

I will never get over the awesome love of Jesus.
He calls us all. He loves us all.

And He is passionate about you.

 

No matter where you are, or what you’ve done, or what you’ve thought about doing.

Where there’s a shadow -- there’s always a Light.

And the darkness cannot overcome Him.

 

You, beloved, are called…

Come as you are.

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