I love looking back at the 19 years of my life.  It is helping me to grow closer to the Lord.  But at the same time when I look back I see what a horrible life that I had.  Let me explain to you what I mean.  When I was two years old my biological mother and father divorced.  I remember nothing about him and I still don’t know who he is.  Shortly there after she married my first step-dad.  He was okay to begin with.  He seemed to love me, my older sister and younger brother.  But that front wore off after a couple of months.  He was an alcoholic and wasn’t afraid to hit on us kids.  My most vivid memory of him was when I was about 4 or 5 years old.  He was getting ready for work and he was looking for his work boots.  Well I had apparently gotten in his way.  So he picked me up and threw me across the room and started swearing up a storm and yelling at me telling me how much he hated me and how I was the worst child ever.  The sad part about this was my biological mother just sat there and did nothing what-so-ever to protect me in front of him.  He left for work angry and I just sat there on the floor where I had landed crying, feeling like I was really the horrible child that he said I was.  I wasn’t the only one who was being abused in my family though, my older sister was also being hit on all the time.  We were like his punching bags and my biological mother and my younger brother were his prized possessions.  When I was nine my biological mother found out that he was cheating on her with our neighbors wife.  So one day when he was at work she packed up us kids and a few of our favorite items and we left.  Us kids went to spend the summer with our grandparents in the lower part of the lower peninsula of Michigan.  I had never really been to a city before and was loving it more than anything.  That summer was the best one I had ever had at that point of my life.  I was spending time with people who loved me and protected me much more than anyone ever had.  When the summer ended we went back to up to the country.  My biological mother was living with my first step-dad’s best friend.  bio-mom and step-dad number one were almost completely divorced and she was pregnant with the new guys baby.  Shortly after the divorce was finalized she married the man who became step-dad number two.   He was the dream dad… to begin with.  He would buy us kids gifts, and he was really nice.  But as I soon realized it was all to good to be true.  Step-dad number two was also an abusive man, but in a different form.  He was sexually abusive to me and my sister.  I was growing up not truly knowing what it was like to have a really family.  I mean I saw my friends’ families, and they didn’t do the type of things that mine did.  On September 10, 2002 at 8pm DHS shows up at our front door.  I was terrified, I didn’t know why they were there.  My bio-mom always told me that they were bad people who destroyed families.  It was so scary, I was being asked all of these questions and I couldn’t answer any of them, I was too scared and confused.  Well needless to say I was placed into foster care that same night.  I went to so many court hearings, having to testify against the man who I had once called my dad.  My biological mother lost her parental rights, no wait that is incorrect, she had a choice, her children or the man that had harmed her children.  She chose the man.  I was adopted by the family that I was staying with, which happened to be my first foster home.  Everything was GREAT!  My new family was huge and had so many kids for me to play with.  My father was a Pastor of this tiny church, which is were I first really heard about Jesus, and my mom was (and still is) amazing!  But as I should have known when something is going as wonderful as my new life was, something was going to go wrong.  Which it did.  I soon found out that my dad was having an affair with this girl who could have been his daughter.  So he moved to Georgia the summer of 2004, planning to start a business and then have all of us move down there with him to start a new life.  Again, it never happened.  The girl that he cheated with moved with him. Father’s day of 2006 he told my mom that he wanted a divorce and that as soon as he could he was filing and taking as many of us kids as he could.  Well my mom wasn’t going to let him take us kids and filed before he could.  The divorce was finalized May 21, 2007.  It was so hard for me to grasp.  I was a fairly new Christian, and I couldn’t understand why God would allow so much pain and trouble in my life.  I went the next couple of years really relenting God and my father.  Then at the end of 2008 I found out that I had a STAPH infection on the bottom of my right foot.  It was so bad that I had to have two different PICC lines for about 4 months.  It was pretty bad, because that was my last year of high school. April of 2009 I was finally declared healthy and that I no longer had an infection, but my immune system was so low that I had to be careful, but I was healthy again so the world couldn’t stop me from being free from the bond of my bed.  I graduated June 14th 2009.  I was accepted to Oakland University in Rochester, MI and life was looking up.  But I still wasn’t grasping God, and my life was starting to show it. My first year of college was really hard on me.  I was away from my mom and I was living with my brother.  He was always working so I was pretty much on my own, and I liked it that way.  I could listen to what I wanted to listen to and live the life I wanted to .  Well, my brother was monitoring me when I didn’t know it and was really concerned about me.  He got me going back to church regularly.   I even started going to the young adults group.  God was really speaking to me and changing me so much.  But even now I have such a hard time really doing what God wants me to do.  I just need prayer that God will continue to work with me, that I will learn to believe that He took me through all the horrible things in my life to help me in the future… because right now, I don’t really see why it all happened to me…

So I admit that I didn’t want to call my own mother on mothers day. Why? Because I had fallen in love with someone that ended up turning into a business partner with her. Needless to say I made a choice with my future children in mind and stopped talking to her. Regardless of this, my emotions for her never stopped and I still love her. I wish to God that things would be different. But they are not, so I didn’t call my mother I only texted her “Happy Mothers Day!” because talking to my own mother would remind me too much of that girl. And on top of that, I didn’t want to hear her name mentioned by my mother. This is sad and it angers me because it is not fair to my own mother to have to be shunned by her own son all because of another woman.

Not raised in the church, but here I am.

See, I know that I would have found my way to Christ no matter where I had been born or what my circumstances may have been. The pull towards God has always been strong in me… even if that pull came in the form of cold doubt and relentless questioning.

My parents are individualists. They never would have pushed the force-feeding tubes down my throat that they had pushed down theirs… They asked me at about age 12 if I would like going to church, and I said yes. We found one we all really liked. Great children’s ministry, even though I was at that awkward age where I was too old for doing the cute dances in Sunday school but not yet old enough for Youth.

I decided to get confirmed and Baptized, without really understanding what that meant. Does this mean I’m a Christian now? I would have told anybody that I was a Christian. What else was there to be? On that Sunday morning when I was 13, I had water sprinkled on my forehead and I was presented to the congregation as a member of the church. A Christian.

But Confirmation did not answer my questions. Wesley was interesting, but how was I supposed to know that God even exists? My church had an interesting way of avoiding conflict by glazing over the touchy subjects. My pastor refused to admit that hell is a real place. Why should it be? People don’t like thinking about eternal suffering.

In a struggle for identity and purpose, I slipped into a short-lived phase of wearing black fishnets on my arms and covering my jeans in safety pins during middle school. My parents? They were fine with it. Mom took me to Hot Topic to buy me buckled gloves and Dad took me to more rock concerts than I can remember. This was no rebellion. I had nothing to rebel against, I simply desired to be more “me” than I knew how to be.

When I was finally old enough for youth (praise the day!) I made a friend who had answers that this church was unwilling to answer. He had a different background, and could back up everything he was saying. I asked the toughest questions I could think of, and his answers were equally as solid. After finally understanding what Christianity really means, (and lashing out when he told me very straightforwardly that I was not a Christian), I finally gave my life over to Christ in December of 2005. I stopped dressing myself in clothes indicative of one desperate for attention, and got onto the business of building a relationship with God. Finally I was starting to become “me” without even having to try. I just let God shape me.

I joined a new church… one that taught Scripture without apologizing for it or sugar-coating reality. I was Baptized in early 2009 (actually Baptized, knowing fully what it means), and have been a dedicated member ever since.

Now… I’m in college.

There have been seasons in my life when I would have run away from my God if I could.  I have experienced much hurt; abuse, betrayal…the list is long.  But I fear if I  share in my list, all of my hurts,  I might not include (((your))) hurts, confusion, anger, and you might feel excluded and that this God is not for you.  I so long for you to come to believe that this God wants for you to experience a loving, vibrant, passionate relationship with Himself;  that you might someday believe that it can be…Jesus and you…passionately in love….His and your own personal, beautiful love  story

During those seasons when I try to flee from Him, I see in the dance of Charlie and Meryl something so beautiful.  For as the lovely Meryl  is fleeing from Charlie He is running after her and  He catches her from behind and holds her…oh, so lovingly, gently and tenderly.

And that is what my Jesus does with me.  When I run from Him, He runs after me and catches me from behind lovingly, gently and tenderly.  And I have found that…when everything falls apart, He is yet…holding me.

And This Song is Proven Once More in My Own Journey With Him