I’ve held off writing my story for so long because I just couldn’t think of the perfect words or way to write it. I couldn’t figure out the best way to communicate it all to someone who might not know me, but in doing that, I’ve given in to delaying my obedience.
So here we go. Buckle up for the long haul. I’ve taken out plenty of details, some because they simply can’t fit and some because I don’t feel led to share with the world (at least yet).
As the saying goes, to make a long story short… or at least I’ll try!
(Update- I decided to make a Part 1 and 2 to this for the sake of it getting too long, I’ll link to Part 2 when it’s done!).
Disclaimer: Obviously this story is personal for me, so I’d appreciate your kindness. If you’ve found yourself here and you don’t believe in God but you’re curious about my story, you’re welcome here too!
My Earliest Years
I grew up in a legalistic (rules-oriented) church and home environment. My earliest memories involve my family and I always being at the church, several times per week and learning Bible verses, playing Bible trivia and going to Sunday school or children’s church.
I had all of this head knowledge, but I’d never learned the most important part of it all: the relationship with God. That there was so much more. God felt like a distant sky god who was just waiting for me to mess it all up and toss me aside as irredeemable.
I didn’t realize that He wanted a relationship with me that was closer than any earthly relationship I had or would ever have. I wasn’t taught how to talk to Him, how much He loved me and cared about me.
My relationships weren’t a really good example of that kind of healthy, vulnerable relationship that God wanted with me. My family didn’t talk much about love or feelings, outside of the occasional I love you that somehow felt forced. I don’t remember having a safe environment or adult figure to process my thoughts or feelings with. Everything I said might be invalidated swiftly or I might find myself as the subject of jokes, judgment, or sarcasm (never to be forgotten).
What I remember so often is feeling this deep sense of loneliness. I didn’t feel like I belonged at home, school or anywhere. I felt alone, misunderstood and rejected for who I was. I didn’t even know who I was.
I learned early on to stay quiet, stay out of the way, and to stay in people’s good graces (aka, to people please).
Finding Validation in the Wrong Places Years
I spent years searching for anything to fill the emptiness or lack of meaning inside of me. I never felt like I was enough. I never felt worthy of love. I remember wanting to be deeply loved and fully known. I was desperate to find a fix for why I felt so alone in the world.
I noticed early on that doing well in school made me feel worthy and it also came with attention. It gave me small forms of validation, of feeling like my life was worthwhile or that I was good at something. Being a perfectionist didn’t help my cause.
Getting attention from men also became a kind of drug to me, but especially from the men I couldn’t have or the ones who weren’t good for me.
During high school, I developed an interest in emotionally unavailable men. I got involved with a guy that I knew was bad for me. He even told me he wasn’t looking for a relationship upfront, but I still fell hard and hoped I could change his mind. Needless to say, I didn’t. And the end of that led to the beginning of a really bad cycle that would get out of control. I got involved with another guy with a very similar ending, leaving me even more messed up than before.
These non-relationships fed into more hurt and brokenness and only confirmed my deepest fears that I wasn’t worthy. That men would always leave, that I would never be enough to make a man stay.
Couple this inner brokenness with the fact that, by the time I graduated high school and was heading to college, I wanted nothing to do with church anymore. I had witnessed plenty of bad Christian examples in my life and didn’t have the desire to live with all of the rules and religion. I wanted to be able to freely chase after things that I had constantly been told not to do and see if they led to feeling satisfied or fulfilled.
My Running Away Years
During college, I met a lot of friends, went out and drank almost every night, and lost myself seeking out men to desire me to somehow prove to myself that men did want me. After suffering at the belief that I wasn’t worthy with some of those unhealthy relationships in high school, I had gotten to a place where it felt like I was proving to others and myself that I was worthy.
The problem with this proving game is that the more I tried to prove, the further and further into brokenness I slipped. The more I hurt others and I let others hurt me. The more I put myself in bad situations and stopped making choices that were best for me.
By the grace of God, I believe that He protected me from so much worse that could have happened when I put myself in these positions. To this day, I’m so grateful that even though I was choosing all of the wrong things and making terrible decisions, He never left me on my own.
And while my days at this big University could have a much longer section of my story, the parts I remember the most involve feeling deeply lost and empty. From the outside, I had everything that I thought was supposed to make you happy or at least make you feel like you were living life to the fullest. Yet after most nights I remember feeling so hungover and wondering if life would always feel so pointless and empty. Was this all there was to life? Surely there had to be more.
After a few months of this, only into my first semester, I managed to get mono. And while that mono was the worst kind imaginable (and has left several lingering symptoms to this day), that mono kind of wrecked my life for the better.
God didn’t give me mono, but I can say He definitely used it. It was a wake up call. I had a lot of time to myself in my dorm room. Suddenly I had to sit with my thoughts and the broken cycle I found myself in, the emptiness I felt about my current lifestyle.
For the first time in a long time, I felt like God was trying to get my attention. I suddenly felt this strong desire to learn more about Him and get closer to Him and go deeper in my faith. I don’t remember anything specifically happening, but I do remember something that confirmed God’s closeness to me personally. And once I felt that, there was no turning back. I was on a mission to know more, to experience more of whatever that was.
I felt a desire to transfer to a Christian university. Which was funny because I had always sworn to myself and others that I would never, under any circumstance, go to a Christian college and live in a bubble (lesson learned: never tell God never).
Building a Stronger Foundation Years
And then the next thing I knew I was moving my life all over again to a small city in Florida knowing absolutely no one. But it didn’t matter, because I was hungry to know more.
I started diving into books in the library about God. For the first time in my life, I wanted to learn more about Him without being told to do it, without it being part of a program.
I had so many questions, and I was looking to find answers. The things I’d never been able to ask growing up. The answers that you were just supposed to somehow “know” intuitively or by faith, or at least that’s how it felt. God was giving me the chance to wrestle through my questions – the scary ones, the small ones, and everything in between.
Some of my questions were answered, while others couldn’t be. That was a difficult concept for me to come to terms with. I liked having the answers, I liked knowing why things were the way they were. It made me feel like I knew I was making the right choice. But some of the answers I was searching for could be boiled down to one concept: faith.
And to a girl with a logic-oriented brain, these questions and their lack of answers definitely left a big gaping hole for cynicism. How convenient that some of Christianity’s questions couldn’t be answered and that the only thing you could do was rely on faith. That’s what cults thrived on, right?!
And yet, in my search for more answers, there was a personal nature to God that I began to experience. A real relationship with Him. Something I had never known or understood in the past. Something I didn’t even know existed growing up. But that something was the something that made it all worthwhile.
A close, personal relationship with a God who truly cared about me and everything in my life. Who understood me more than anyone else. Who loved me unconditionally and had been with me my whole life and even chased after me the years I ran from Him.
Which left me with so many other questions: Why would anybody want the religion but not the relationship? How come no one had ever told me that this was possible? How could anyone ever keep this to themselves?
As my love for God grew, I slowly allowed Him to change more and more of my life. From reading more of the Bible, having long conversations about God with friends, and even changing the things I did.
But my faith was young. Even though it was a huge part of my life, it wasn’t a total surrender of it. Looking back, I realize how little of my life I was willing to hand over to God – I still wanted control over most of it.
Heartbreak
A few months into my first semester, I met a guy who wanted to be more than friends. Initially I wasn’t interested in dating him and couldn’t envision a relationship with him, but I also knew that my track record of picking men was awful. Maybe dating this Christian guy wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
We dated for almost 2 years and while we did care for each other, things weren’t great. We fought almost everyday. I was in no place to be in a relationship, and I don’t think he was either. But sometimes staying in something you’ve invested so much time and energy into feels safer than leaving it all with the risk of starting over or not finding anything better.
About 1.5 years into dating, I found out he had an unhealthy porn addiction. One day, I discovered he had been secretly doing things that were more violating to me than I can describe with words. I am currently choosing to leave those details out.
I felt betrayed, disgusted, isolated. He was supposed to be the good Christian guy who said he loved me, so why did he end up being worse than the other men I had been with? I felt so much shame from what he did, yet it wasn’t my fault. And those familiar feelings of worthlessness bubbled up inside of me again.
I should have broken up with him after this, but I didn’t – this still remains one of my biggest regrets. I tried to pretend it didn’t happen as best I could. But what was worse than the betrayal was feeling so alone in it.
I only got the courage to tell one friend. I never spoke about it after that. It would be years until I talked about it again or worked to try and heal from it.
(Note: I don’t really like talking about this, but I do it because talking about it this past year has finally brought me freedom from it. And because I no longer have to sit in it all alone.)
Grieving and Rebuilding
This same guy broke up with me at the beginning of our senior year of college. I was devastated. Not only was I grieving the loss of someone I thought was my best friend and partner for life, I was also grieving my future with him.
Those were some of the darkest moments of my life up to that point. You think you’ve known grief until you get to the next event in your life where the grief feels almost like it will overwhelm you.
All I could do during those moments was pour my heart into journals and prayers to God, listen to worship music, and just try to show up for the day. God sustained me through these dark times, He gave me the strength to keep showing up and trying when all felt hopeless. The darkest times of my life became the place where I would grow the closest to God and feel His presence the most I ever had.
I prayed to God that He would bring him back into my life pretty often. I’m so grateful to a God who sees infinitely more than me and who doesn’t answer my prayers when I think I know what’s best.
I also prayed the prayer (you might be familiar with it). The prayer that asked God to not let me date another wrong person again because my heart had been through too much. I couldn’t handle another heartbreak, I think the next would possibly be the end of me.
What’s amazing is that God placed someone who had been through a similar breakup to me in my life the year before. And while it didn’t heal the heartbreak, it gave me someone who I could talk to, who could empathize with me. And what’s even more amazing is that God allowed me to be this person to other women who would experience the same thing I went through after me.
Not only this but following that period in my life, I found that I flourished. I started to find who I was in this season. I became more social and made new friends and plans for the future. I actually ended up having one of the best years at my college that year. I’m not sure if it was necessary to go through the breakup to become this version of myself, but if it was, I’d do it all over again.
That was one of those experiences I think defines you – a horrible, heartbreaking experience that is almost evidence to yourself in the future that if you can make it through that, you can make it through anything. God slowly rebuilt me, and He didn’t just rebuild me back to the same I’d been before, He rebuilt me into a far more beautiful version than I ever could have imagined.
From the incidents mentioned with my ex, I wish I could say that all of it just melted away when God rebuilt me. It didn’t. Truthfully, I wouldn’t get the right kind of help or healing from this for many years. It impacted how I saw men, prevented me from getting close to another man for years, left me feeling like I would be someone that men always left or only saw in a physical way.
The truth is, I’m not sure that I’ll ever really forget this incident and some of the others I’ve been through in my life. One thing I do know is this: I can trust that God will guide, restore, and help me find redemption in this. Does it make it go away? No, as much as I wish it would. The scars are there but I still believe that God brings beauty from ashes, and I trust that He will from this the same way He has from other moments in my life.
If you made it this far, thank you! I hope my story so far either showed you how much God can change someone’s life for the better and/or I hope that maybe it gave you hope for your own story.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of my story. I’ll share more of my post college and 20’s years as well as where I am today (which is a night and day difference)!
-Marissa
