What God's Awesome Grace Can Do: Here's My Testimony

My grace story is my testimony. It’s a testimony of what Jesus can do, how He can take someone’s mess and turn it into a beautiful message. It’s a message of radical love and radical empathy.

My life has been made up of a million little testimonies. I just didn’t acknowledge God in them throughout my whole life. Instead, I chalked them up to a million little coincidences and brushed them off. But the closer I get to Him, the more He opens my eyes to His presence.

This was a rescue I didn’t deserve.

I loved Jesus at a young age.

I guess I’ll start by saying that I grew up in a Christian household for much of my life. When I was little, we went to church every Sunday. We had gospel music playing in the background of everything the four of us did inside our adorable 2-bedroom house on Middletown Ave.

I got saved when I was about five years old at my grandmother’s house. I told them I wanted to accept Jesus into my heart, but that I wasn’t ready to go to Heaven yet. They laughed. And while I laugh about it now, I throw my hands in the air and praise God for speaking His love into me at such a young age. I understood that Jesus could live in my heart and wasn’t restricted to one single place.

Things changed as I got older. I changed.

As the years went by, things changed, we moved, and the atmosphere shifted. I don’t know when exactly it started. I just know that at some point, we stopped going to church, we started going through a lot of familial struggles, and my innocence poured and continued to pour out of me– I lost it in the corners of the world:

In my late teenage years, I lost my virginity in an unfortunate and tragic way. After that, I gave my body away every chance I got because I thought that was where my self-worth was. I hated myself. I also struggled with eating disorders and other toxic behaviors.

depressed girl staring out window in the dark

Anxiety and depression set in at a young age,

And I struggled with them even through my early twenties. I surrounded myself with people who dragged me deeper and deeper into the darkness– until eventually, I found myself with almost no relationship with my family, and living in a large apartment with an abusive boyfriend who was in a band with his family. They would reminisce about all the bad things they did, brag about how they sold their souls to the devil, and they’d get high almost every night. This was what I called my “family.”

My weekends were filled with loud rock shows, drugs, fights, and a lot of alcohol. But, imagine: through all of this, I was praying to God at night. I don’t even know how to process that. How did I expect to truly communicate with my Heavenly Father in that condition, willingly seeking all the things of the world but expecting, what? I was living in sin, married to the world, and had lost all sense of who I was. I was breaking His heart.

The morning I’ll never forget.

One night, when things had been as worse off than they’d ever been, that boyfriend locked me in the passenger seat of his car and high-tailed it through town. He flew through stop-lights and swerved so hard I hit my head on the glass window next to me while he yelled he wasn’t afraid to kill us both, and that he could if he wanted to.

This felt like the pinnacle of all my worst decisions, and that they could actually kill me. It didn’t occur to me even then, though, that I needed to ask Christ back into my life. What I needed was a new life.

I remember just being huddled in a ball the whole drive; I remember ending up at a bar and while he went in to get a drink, I stayed in the car and stared pulled the passenger mirror down just to stare at myself; with eyeliner running down my puffy face, I could barely recognize the person there.

The next morning, I was working at the office at Southern. Half-way through the my shift, a man came in and introduced himself as Maverick.

The following is the journal entry I still have saved to my computer from the day I met Maverick, dated 2/9/18:

Today the most amazing thing happened to me while working within the offices at Southern CT State University. He came up to me where my office was and said that he felt that God had urged him to go inside and meet me, that he felt I was struggling with something terrible. I am. It was a message, and the message was that God is going to take me where I need to go. That He is still with me, and though I’ve fallen off the wagon a bit, He keeps pulling me back and getting back up. He said, “God just loves you so much.” He said he had felt a strong pull that he just needed to come in and talk to me. I told him I was a Christian, but I don’t feel like one. Although, I want to.

He gave me a Psalm, and then we prayed together. We hugged and he brought me to tears. It’s all I’ve needed; it’s all I needed today, and it’s all I’ve needed for years now. I know who I am. And I’m not being who I am. But I want to.

His name was Maverick, & I hope to see him again.

If he exists.

I thought about where I am, I thought about who I am, I thought about how the night before I had told [him] I wish that I had killed myself, and I begged for my mother to listen to me, but she stopped answering because she became angry at what I had to say. The night before Maverick happened, I had said I felt like I had no one. And I felt that way, until now.

I am still shaking. I’m still at a loss for words. The Lord works in great, mysterious ways.

God chased me down and didn’t give up on me.

I think about him a lot. Maverick.

A few weeks ago, my pastor’s wife discovered for me that the biblical meaning of the name Maverick is “valiant hero.” It’s a variation of the Hebrew word, ‘maḇərīq’, which means ‘shiny’ or ‘brilliant’.

I think the reason I wrote, “If he exists” is because a part of me wondered or thought he was an angel– not that that means he wouldn’t exist; I understand the function of angels much more now than I did then– but after I searched the Southern database for a student or professor named “Maverick” and came up with nothing, after searching for him on Facebook, after waiting months for him to wander back into that office to follow up with me or something… nothing.

If there were any explanation, it would be that he was an angel, but definitely sent by God, definitely a hero in my life; maybe, definitely, a reason I’m even alive today.

After that, I wrestled with the Lord for another two years, working through feelings of regret, loss, inadequacy, sporadically coming to church, reciting old prayers from my childhood, opening my Bible and trying to understand it, closing it and letting it gather dust on my shelf…

In 2020, Covid hit.

I was in another toxic relationship, and we got locked in together for a while when it felt like the world had shut down. It brought all the darkness within our relationship out into the light, and little by little I realized I couldn’t stay. The shut-down was a blessing for me in that way, at least.

My lies were exposed.

I finally ended that and told myself I was fine being single for a while, that I needed to “figure things out.”

My grandmother died a couple weeks later. She was one of the biggest influences on my faith as a child, and one of my biggest fans and supporters for following my God-given gift of being a writer.

I was quarantined alone in my studio apartment, single for the first time in nine years, and jobless. I’d thought I’d hit rock bottom years before, but I think this was a godly rock bottom. This was the first time everything in my life went silent: all my excuses, distractions, toxic habits, my impulse to overwork and pack my days so I didn’t have time to talk to God; it all came crashing down on me.

God started waking me up.

One night, after a drawn-out anxiety attack, I reached for my phone, and a Youtube preacher popped up. I fell asleep in peace that night while listening to a sermon on God’s plans.

A few nights later, I finally pulled my dusty KJV Bible off the shelf next to my bed– three years in that apartment, my Bible was right by my side, and this was the first time I’d opened it. I just started reading– I don’t remember where. But I started reading and couldn’t stop. I started praying and talking to God, asking for forgiveness, direction, for Him to just come back into my heart and change me.

I spent weeks just reading my Bible from the time I woke up, to the time I went to bed.

My desires slowly started to change. I’d go out a few nights to hang out with old friends, try to spark up some semblance of a social life. But I just didn’t, “fit”, anymore.

One night, I went to a bonfire with some people I’d known almost my whole life. They started passing around weed. When a friend was about to pass it to me, she was reluctant. “Are you sure you want it? I don’t want you to… feel left out. But… don’t feel like you have to.” The response caught me off guard. I think now I was starting to look different, act different, I’d changed. I gradually stopped engaging in certain social interactions and found myself cancelling plans just so I could be at home with my God.

In my closeness with Him, I found something else…

Months later, I was watching a live stream of a local church I’d attended on and off as a child.

There was another guy on that livestream, though, that I knew from back when I was with that old abusive boyfriend. We hadn’t spoken a word to each other in those days, but we’d always seen each other in passing. He messaged me when he saw I was on the livestream. And the first day we were able to go back to church in person, he and I met at the altar and cried on each other’s shoulders– no words, just tears. No, “Hi, how are you?” No, “hey, it’s been a while…

Afterwards, we walked out together and made plans to get dinner that week.

That guy is now my husband. That church is where we got baptized together, engaged, and married. That’s our church family now.

That story is my testimony now.

I fall in love with Jesus a little more every day, in the big moments and in the mundane. I fall in love with Him every time I share my grace story because I almost just can’t believe what He’s done. He took this broken shell of a girl trapped inside a prison she let them build around her and chased her down, broke her out, and brought her back home.

My pastor put it beautifully a few weeks ago: God literally plucked me out of the darkness and into the light. This is my testimony.

And I believe He’ll do it again. I believe, He is already doing it. And I want to be in the middle of that. I want to help share others’ testimonies in new, creative ways, and I want to see testimonies turn into holy meetings. I want to hear all about the light other women have found and how it started. I’ve said it this way: One person’s deliverance is another’s introduction to Christ.

Never be afraid to share your testimony of what God’s done. No one is ever too lost for God to find. No one is ever too far gone– I certainly thought I was, but God showed me I was worth saving. He showed me we are all worth saving.