His Love Found Me

Hi! I just felt it on my heart to share my testimony.

Yahuah is good all the time, and all the time Yahuah is good. I don’t want to let any more time pass without putting out my full testimony.

It is my prayer that this helps someone out there.

As a child, my parents were together on and off until their divorce. My parents weren’t always so present with me. Growing up, I was singled out from amongst my siblings as the black sheep. This left me lonely.

At that time, spent a lot of time alone looking out the window of the room I shared with my sister. I would watch the other children on our street play. While looking out the window, I would do different things, such as reading a book, doing homework, or just daydreaming. The most important thing I did while watching other children play was read my Bible and pray to Yah that sometime later in the future I would be happy.

I didn’t believe I could be happy then. My family moved every couple of years, and sometimes my father and half-sibling would move with us. Other times, it would just be my mom, one other sibling, and me. It remained like this until I reached about the age of 8. My parents stayed together until I was 11. I was always seeing happiness as a distant destination.

One day, after a painful family dispute, I realized that, regardless of my parents’ behaviors, I had (and still have) a Father who loves me and cares for me. It was imperative in that moment that I start to carry myself like I believed it. The dysfunction at home was tough, but I tried really hard to be the change I wanted to see without saying anything at all that might come off as disrespectful.

At the time, my parents’ relationship was falling apart, and I was leaning deeper into my relationship with my Heavenly Father. The Holy Spirit comforted me and didn’t leave me. I was telling Him all the business. My parents used to say, “What happens in the house stays in the house.” The yelling, arguments, verbal and emotional abuse that shouldn’t have happened were all consistent prayer topics. Tip-toeing around the emotional highs and lows of adults was a devastating blow to my childhood wonder.

As an adult, I can take a step back and realize that both of my parents had things to work on. Yet, I tell myself that they tried their best. Around age 12, my parents were also giving me self-help books. I would come to take this to mean they couldn’t help me, so I ought to figure out how to help myself.

I quickly realized that I couldn’t leave my sibling behind and began sharing with her what I was learning in the Bible and self-help books.

So much of what I was learning about womanhood, the Holy Spirit was teaching me. I was observing the women around me as well as taking into consideration scriptures on women, as well as self-help books about women. I quickly came to realize that I was learning outdated lessons in comparison to my peers. That made me stand out. Later on, I would come to find out that what you struggle with ends up being your greatest calling.

This is kind of a sidenote, but in the Barbie movie, they pose a really good question, which is ”What are women made for?” As I struggled between my heart and my head, I internally struggled with that question too. I watched my friends have their mothers to rely on, and although I couldn’t rely on my mother very much, it made me question. How do I find my way in this world?

As I contemplated that question amongst my peers, I started to realize so many of the girls I was around were asking themselves that too. They always seem to get the impression that I had it down since I had spent so much time studying etiquette, manners, and social graces from self-help books. That couldn’t be any further from the truth. I was struggling just as much as they were, but it seemed that I wasn’t struggling in some of the same areas that they were.

I often had friends come to me for advice on how to relate to other people. At the time, my advice always seemed like an open door for them that they had never noticed before.

Even though my friends found my advice helpful and often came back for more advice, I found myself having difficulty in my friendships with other women.

Fast-forward to 2018. I was just graduating high school, and I picked up a sudden fascination with women’s health, maternal health, and women’s mental health, everything that had to do with how to navigate womanhood in this world. At the time, I thought I was just studying it because it was a new interest, and it felt like a way to almost see myself through a different lens. That same year, I started university, and at university, I started to kind of uncover what I felt like my purpose was. I met a girl who, like many of the girls I’ve met before. Wanted to one day be a wife and be a mom to the love of her life. I think we all know this story. It’s like a little girl’s daydream and a fairytale. A dream about their wedding…. I think, though, that the girl that I met in college was so different because it was the first time that I was able to openly have a conversation about womanhood and not feel judged or have her judge me.

With both of us being social science majors, we often discussed how society perceives women, and if that’s different from the way that women perceive each other or even themselves, I think the biggest thing that we struggled with was how does any of this lead to a woman living their dream life and at the pinnacle point in our lives could we really not have it all? I can’t say that we solved any of those existential questions, but having someone to bounce ideas off of helped us solidify our paths in life. For her, she knew that she absolutely didn’t wanna pay bills, regardless of her job or how many degrees she planned on getting, and she started mapping out life plans to get her that soft lifestyle not long after we graduated college. She had met a man who paid for everything and adored her completely. I, on the other hand, switched studies, but also found someone who was really supportive. It made me start to question why some women are taught how to be a wife, and then other women are taught to never trust a man and get it on their own.

With a lot of self-reflection, Bible study, and prayer. Yah helped me conclude that sometimes our interactions with other people are based on fear. Sometimes it isn’t even a fear that we’ve learned within our own lifetime, and sometimes fears can be handed down.

Being a child of divorce, I never thought that anyone would love me. Somewhere along the line, both of my parents told me that I was unlovable, too. As a child, I didn’t realize it was them projecting.

Yah absolutely redeemed my story as I walked with Him. He redeemed my worth by letting me know that He loved me and how precious I am to Him. As I grew closer to my Father, I started to say and pray, “Dear Father, help me to want whatever you want for me.” I didn’t know what I was saying because I just wanted to be about my Father’s business, whatever it was, I was gonna do it.

I used to tell my mother, whatever it is that is in the Bible that’s in scripture that Yah said I can have, that’s what I want. I meant that with my whole heart.

Eventually, I think Yah gave me the desires of my heart only because I put Him first and because my desires really and truly became His desires for me. When I started to make a list of what I wanted out of a partner, the only two things on my list were that I wanted Him to love Yah and to be nice to me. If this gives you any indication of how poorly I thought of myself, I didn’t even expect my own husband to love me. I was just simply grateful that Yah did.

I feel like I’m getting a little bit long-winded, but I say all this to say that Yah will absolutely take a woman who is neglected or has lost hope for life and give her a life and a life more abundantly. I have personally found with many of the women I have met that a simple perspective change would’ve opened up their world, and the hope that comes from our savior about our future gives a certain stability, I believe, that all of us desire. We can all find provision, security, and affection from our Heavenly Father.