The Broken Years God Didn't Waste Podcast #5

This is part 2 of my story. Part one can be heard on Podcast Episode #4 "The Life Behind the Name."

The purpose for sharing my story, is to reach other's who have been hurt like I was, to give them hope for healing and wholeness. 

Jesus can take our brokenness and make something beautiful. 

YES, it is possible to become completely whole and healed. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello. Welcome to the Never Nothing, Never Nobody Podcast. This is a place for those who have felt unloved, felt like they were nothing and nobody. To learn the truth about who they really are and who God created them to be. This is a place to find hope for healing, to end your search for significance, and to find the truth that you are never nothing and never nobody. Hello and welcome to the Never Nothing, Never Nobody Podcast. This is part two of my story. I don't remember how long I didn't speak to God. I remained checked out from my friends and my life for at least a year. I was working in Christian retail at the time, and I found myself surrounded by co-workers who had been wounded in the same way I had been. They'd been violated, had their innocence stolen, been left in pain and hiding away from the world. I don't remember telling any of them what was going on with me, but I must have, for they all shared their stories with me over the next several months of my life. I cared about them and I cared about their stories. Eight out of ten employees where I worked had been violated like I had been. Except in my mind, all of them had had it worse. I marveled at the fact that they still had their faith intact, and they were sharing their stories with me. I listened as they shared what they'd been through and where they were at the time. One of them told me of not only being physically healed from what had happened to her, but emotionally and spiritually healed as well. And God did something really special for her. He sent her a very patient and godly man to come alongside her in her healing journey, and he worked for a very long time to earn her trust. I remember this gave me some hope. It sparked in me a secret hope that maybe one day God could do the same for me. I had stopped going to counseling, it wasn't helping. She kept trying to push meds on me. I focused on finishing college and moving forward with my life. I still considered myself a Christian, but I didn't open my Bible and I didn't go to church. I graduated college and had my first quote unquote grown-up job. At this time in my life, my mother had finally left my stepfather and she began dating a man who was no better than any of the men before. He too was an alcoholic, he too was a womanizer, he too cheated on her. My mom dated this man for several months. One night I came home from a either a friend's house or a night class, I don't remember which, and I found her curled up on the floor of her room, having attempted to kill herself drinking a bottle of wine and taking every single pill she had, and she had a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medicines. The reason she had tried to kill herself that night and was in such a state when I arrived home was this man whom she had fallen for had broken up with her and told her she was impossible to love, and since she was impossible to love, life wasn't worth living anymore. I point blank asked her Well what about my love? I love you, Mom. Isn't that enough? Her lack of response told me everything I needed to know. My love was not enough to make her want to live. Once again, I didn't measure up. Once again, I wasn't good enough. Once again, I was nothing and nobody. I wasn't even worth my mother wanting to live. My mother's doctors wanted her committed, but she refused to essentially move into the hospital and live there for a time. But she did agree to a one-year intensive program where she would spend her entire day having therapy and group sessions and one-on-one sessions. In my last year of college and into my first year of a working adult, I became my mother's caretaker. I lost my mother, the woman I had admired, the woman I thought was superwoman, the woman I thought could handle anything. My favorite person in the entire world was gone. I was left with a shell of a woman that didn't even closely resemble my mother. I did my best to take care of her for about two years. It took a toll on me being my mother's caregiver. My best friend from preschool bought a house around this time and asked me to move in with her. I moved out and stopped being my mom's caretaker. I joined the women's Bible study in the summer of tw 2002. They were doing a Bible study called Lord Heal My Hearts. It's a Bible study by K. Arthur. Within a few weeks of this Bible study beginning at my church, I had a strange accident at work. I was returning from lunch break one day and heading towards the ladies' room, and my elbow hit the cubicle of my boss's office. The pain radiated up my arm, and as I pushed open the door to exit the office, I thought to myself, that wasn't funny. That hurt. And then I turned to the right to into the ladies' room, and as I opened the door, I completely blacked out, fell completely forward and landed straight on my forehead. I heard the loud pop as I landed on the ground, and I could hear all the commotion all around me, all the women freaking out and call 911 and trying to help me come to. They would ask me questions and it would take my brain longer to s get it said than it was to think it. I could think it, but there was a delay in my responses. For the next several months I was homebound. I would try to get up from the couch or my bed and I would get vertigo. The world would start spinning. I needed wall to hold on to or a walking stick to hold on to to keep me upright. So I mostly just laid still to keep the world from spinning around. It took a long time for them to come up with any kind of connection between hitting my elbow and blacking out. So they finally just gave me a vague diagnosis, if you will, of vasovagal syncope, but some people also call it vasovagal syncope. So this is what they decided had happened to me. Well, during this time, I obviously couldn't go anywhere, I couldn't drive, I couldn't go to work, I couldn't go to church, I was stuck at home, just God and me, and so God finally had me all to himself to finally deal with what I had shut down from. So this began my twenty plus year journey of getting my hurts healed. Not just the physical ones, but also the ones in my mind, the ones in my soul, and the ones that wounded my spirit. There's a verse in Jeremiah chapter 17, verse 14 that says, Lord, heal my hurts and they shall be healed. This was the foundational verse for this Bible study, in which for the first time ever, I really met head on what had happened to me at four and a half years old. And I brought God into that pain, I brought God into those memories, and I shared every thought and every feeling I had about it, and then God shared with me his thoughts and his feelings towards it. I was wrong. He didn't just sit there and watch. His heart broke, and he cried at that boy's choice to hurt me in order to satiate his own selfish needs. Lord Heal My Hurts was the first Bible study God used to really start cleaning out the deep wounds that had festered and grown toxic within me. After this Bible study, he led me through several others, ones like Victory Over Darkness and The Bondage Breaker by Neil T. Anderson. In it there's some powerful verses that state who I am because of who Jesus is. And every one of those statements God used to battle the lies that the enemy had planted in my heart and in my mind because of my childhood. God also used the book Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer to help me with battling the lies that I had believed. And one Bible study that really helped me out was a Bible study on anger by John and Lisa Bevere. They taught me how to stop where my hurt began. So if somebody said something that triggered something inside me, whether it was their tone of voice or their choice of word, I learned through their Bible study how to stop, think about why I just got upset and got hurt, and be able to follow that back to the original hurt where I felt that same way because they were connected. Had I not had the earlier hurt, what was said or the way in which it was said would not have hurt me. And that was a very beneficial Bible study, which I highly recommend. After doing all these different Bible studies and God teaching me truths of his word and truth about what had happened, and truth about who I really was, God led me to a pastor who had been over the Deaf Church and a couple other ministries at my church who was involved in what's called deliverance ministry. This is kind of a controversial ministry within the church, because there are many who believe that if you are a Christian that you can't have demons. Um there's an argument about what it means to be demonized or demon-possessed or demon-oppressed. Um there's all kinds of divisions, but in the Bible, anytime they talked about a person who had a demon, the word was demonized, which simply meant to be afflicted by a demon. They weren't necessarily possessed by anything. And certainly as a Christian who has Jesus in their heart and the Holy Spirit living within them, can never be possessed by any other spirit. Well, this ministry um is a special ministry because it kicks out those spiritual entities that are tied to those wounds, things the devil uses to stir us all back up. There's a spiritual component to it, not just a psychological component to it. And since God had come and taught me truth that had begun to heal me, I was able to go through deliverance ministry to have these things removed from my life so that they were no longer an issue for me. So anger was the first one to go. There was a a fearful one that had to go. There was um some mocking, jeering thing that had to go, and the spirits that had convinced me that I had been built wrong, that God should have made me a boy were gone. And yes, in my case I know for a fact those were lies from the devil. The devil is the father of lies. There is no truth in him. When he lies he lies from his own resources. There are spiritual forces at work all around us, whether you believe it or not. They are there. I personally have been tormented by several of them. And it was most certainly a demonic influence that spoke to me telling me that I should have been born a boy, that I couldn't possibly be a girl, that I was born into the wrong family, that God had made a mistake. And the way that they came into my life to lie to me was through the abuse I went through, through the mean words, through the physical acts of violation. I became a tomboy to toughen myself up. I was pretty convinced of it. I tried to be like a boy. I remember one time standing up trying to pee like a boy, my mom came in, smacked me on my butt, said you sit down, you're born a girl, you're a girl, and girls sit down to use a restroom. I thank God for that. I was only drawn to boy things, I hate girly things. I associated being sexually abused with having been the fruit fruit girl wearing dresses and being a cute little girl. Had I not been all girlied up, it wouldn't have happened, or so I thought. I have come to learn that couldn't be further from the truth because a lot of boys and young men have suffered the same kinds of things. God had never intended for me to be a boy. He always intended me to be a girl because that's exactly who he knit and formed together in my mother's womb. He put in me everything I was gonna need for life to do and be who he created me to be. God used those Bible studies and deliverance ministry to set me free from these lies I had believed about myself and about my life. Several months later, God said it was time to move. I finally had the opportunity to move to the mountains where my heart had wanted to live for many years. So after twenty-five years of life in Florida, it was time for me to go on to the next chapter in my life. This isn't the end of my story, this is the end of this part. The best part is yet to come. Right now I want to pray for those who have believed the kinds of lies I have in their life and need to be set free. Lord Jesus, touch the hearts and minds of the people listening who have listened to the lies of the devil for far too long. I pray you speak the truth through their hearts, break the hold of the lies, and set them free in your mighty name, Jesus. Amen.