Alicia’s Story

I was lucky to grow up with parents who know and follow Jesus.  Faith was always an important part of our family.  I remember my dad reading Bible stories aloud to us before breakfast when I was little and praying as a family before bed each night.  As a young child, I had a strong belief that God was real and that He loved me.  And I had wanted to follow and obey Him.  As I grew older, though, conflicts arose in my soul.  I began to want other things more than God – basic teenager things like being popular and having a boyfriend.  Things that now, as a wife and a mother, seem pretty insignificant and certainly had no hope of bringing me any real happiness.  But years ago the desire for them was so strong and so real, it was absolutely consuming.  Often I found myself compromising what I knew God wanted for me in order to have that stuff.  And then I started to have the sense that God was angry with me and that His love and patience would expire pretty soon.  I walked around for years with a heavy weight of guilt and shame hung around my head.  During high school, I tried to appease God by continuing to go to church and being involved with my church’s youth group.  But my heart was divided.  I still wanted boys and the right friends more than I wanted God.

When I got to college, I had the sense that I had to make a choice.  It was either all God or all the other stuff I’d been chasing for happiness.  I chose the other stuff.  I turned my back on God completely.   It started out fun.  I stuffed down the guilt and had a blast getting drunk with my sorority sisters on the weekends (and the occasional weeknight).  I started dating a new guy who was funny and cute and seemed to make me happy.  But the fun didn’t last long.  My boyfriend had some serious problems with alcohol, drugs, and depression.  We dated for most of my freshmen and sophomore years at college.  And during that time I felt this kind of darkness and helplessness begin to surround me.  Try as I might, I couldn’t help my boyfriend.  He got worse and worse.  And he started to take his anger and unhappiness out on me.  He was never physically abusive, but he was manipulative and emotionally abusive to me.  I tried to break up with him several times, but he threatened suicide if I did.  And so I stayed.  I felt trapped.  And tired.  And I felt alone.  I didn’t want to tell my family because it would mean revealing the kind of life I’d been leading to them.  And I certainly didn’t feel I could turn to God.  He seemed distant and angry.

Finally after two years, I hit a breaking point.  It happened one night when my boyfriend and I had fight.  I again threatened to leave him and he took out a razor and began to cut his arms.  I now understand that he was “cutting”, not actually trying to take his life, but back then I’d never heard to anyone cutting before and so I assumed he was starting to slit his wrists to kill himself.  It really scared me.  And it seemed really cruel that he would do it in front of me to try and punish me for hurting him.  I decided to leave him.  It seemed like the most selfish decision I had ever made.  I really thought that he might be dead within a week, but I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I went home that night and called a suicide hotline to talk with someone about what I’d experienced.  And I called a family member of his to tell them about my fears of what would happen to him.  Thankfully, he didn’t take his life.

After that relationship ended, I felt relieved and ready to start over.  I still didn’t want to turn to God, though.  I thought my chances with Him were over.  I understood how He could forgive people who had never known much about Him…but me?  I had known about God.  I had known – and believed – that He reached out to humanity by becoming one of us in Jesus Christ.  And that Jesus suffered and died on a cross to take our place and pay the death penalty that our sin had earned us before God.  And that for those who turn to God from themselves and place their faith in Christ and what He did for them on that cross, they are reconciled to God.  Forgiven, made clean, and get a relationship with Him for eternity.  I had known.  And I had rejected it.  I didn’t think there was any forgiveness for me.

But I was lonely and desperate for something.  So when a friend invited me to a weekend Christian women’s conference in October of my junior year, I reluctantly went.  I’ll never forget what happened there.  The first speaker at the conference was a woman named Sheila and she talked about God’s unbelievable love.  As I listened to her, my heart began to ache for the unconditional love that she said Jesus offered.  At the end of her talk, she had every woman put their hand on their face and say out loud, “Which girl does Jesus love?  This girl.”  It might sound cheesy, but man, was it powerful.  As I spoke those words, something happened in my heart.  I had the most REAL sense that this love was for me too!  That Jesus still loved THIS girl.  In spite of all the things I had wanted more than him for so many years.  In spite of all my selfish decisions.   In spite of everything, He still loved me and wanted me.  I wept.  There at this conference, surrounded by tons of people I didn’t know, I just stood there and wept for sheer joy.  And I decided that night that if Jesus really loved me like that, then I would give Him my whole life.  I turned my back on the other things that I had wanted for so long and I turned my face toward my God.

I can’t honestly say that I still don’t wrestle with wanting other things more than I want God.  I battle it daily.  But I do have the strong belief that Jesus will bring me more happiness than anything else in life ever will.

 

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