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Though I was not raised knowing God at home, God has been close to me in my life.
My grandmother rediscovered her Catholic faith in her later years, and she shared it with me when I was very young. Sometimes she brought me to visit a church near her home. We would often pray the rosary together, and often her television was on EWTN. As I got older, she would sometimes leave the Bible open for me to a page with a passage pertinent to what we were speaking about earlier that day. She taught me the Chaplet of St. Michael and introduced me to the lives of the saints.
I prayed a lot growing up. Even when I was very young, I was fascinated by the beauty of God’s creation. I had an immense feeling of awe and wonder at it, and I could feel the presence of God through His work. A rainbow, the rain falling through the rays of sunshine, the clap of thunder in the morning as I was waking up, filled me with amazement.
However, over the course of my childhood and adolescence, I experienced a great many traumatic, life-altering experiences. These things hurt me a lot and confused my understanding of love and of how to relate to people, and I was not thinking clearly. I rationalized, and in my mind, I minimized the effect these experiences were having on me.
Then when I was fifteen, I was assaulted close to home. My skull was shattered and a piece of broken bone caused a bleed in my brain. I spent three months in a coma and six more paralyzed.
During that time, I felt God’s presence like at no other time in my life and this included several powerful encounters with him.
(Despite the seriousness of this injury, it did not affect me as severely as the abuse I endured. The assault happened only once but the abuse—emotional, physical, and sexual—happened over and over.)
After I regained consciousness, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome), and I had to relearn everything, even breathing and swallowing.
Moreover, because I had experienced trauma so early in my life, I did not develop the tools to function in and navigate life effectively. Instead, I learned unhealthy coping mechanisms and patterns of thought and behavior.
I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for a third of my life and struggled with my self-image, shame, and many other negative feelings. I often physically wounded myself as a way to distract from my emotions, which were so powerful.
In spite of all of this, I was very motivated in my recovery, and I healed well enough to go back to high school. But later, when I went to college, I was again defeated by my emotions. I was having difficulty sleeping, walking, and in my studies.
One night, I went to a little church nearby. It was closed but I fell down on a bench out back where I just wept and prayed. It was about three in the morning. Later that night, weeping in my bed, I begged God to help me. A couple days later, a friend at school gave me a little book on the Gospel and invited me to his church. I read through the entire book that night.
Then, still struggling, I was baptized into the Baptist Church. Following this, I continued to struggle.
In 2012, I had a revelation. I was awoken to the impact of what my abusers had done to me. I regained my drive for spirituality. I started a personal quest to comprehend the suffering I had endured.
I started reading literature from different faiths. But it wasn’t until I started reading the New Testament that I had an overwhelming experience.
One night, after reading something from the Book of Acts, I lay down and turned off the light to go to sleep. All of a sudden, I saw waves of bright light. I felt incredibly peaceful.
I remember thinking about a lot of really horrible things that had happened to me, one thing in particular. I processed the memory, allowing myself to sit in it, feeling the feelings.
There, in the darkness of my room, I thought about some bad things that I also had done. I then felt great guilt.
I was surprised so I turned the light on. The lights in my vision were still passing in front of me. They seemed to become brighter with the light on in the room.
Then suddenly my mouth started moving and I was speaking in what seemed like a foreign language. This was deliberate and thought-through, but it was not intentional. I spoke silently so as not to disturb anyone in the house. I had never heard of the gift of tongues.
After that, I started doing things to help myself. I started going to the gym and eating healthier. I lost about eighty pounds. I went to a monastery for a week and while there, I quit smoking. (I had tried before, but without success.) I felt strongly moved to talk about what had happened to me as a child. And I was healed of my despair, depression, and desire to hurt myself.
Now Christ is helping me to forgive the things that were done to me and to leave judgement to the Father.
I started to go to a Catholic Church on Sundays. I went but could not receive Communion because I was not Catholic. I reached out to a Christian community on Facebook at my campus.
There I was invited to many different evangelical functions and was assured I was being prayed for. I spent a lot of time alone. I would often retreat to a stairwell or secluded place to spend time with Scripture or in prayer. I attended a non-denominational church on a weekly basis for about three years.
At this church, I developed lasting relationships and was given the grace to build for myself a firm foundation in my interior faith based on the Scripture, especially the Gospel.
But I could not escape a persistent longing in my heart, which seemed unquenchable. My heart thirsted for something that I could not explain but that I knew existed. Then one day I remembered my grandmother and what I experienced of the Catholic faith with her. I discovered that I was longing for the sacraments.
Shortly after, I joined the RCIA program. There I discovered a great love for the Blessed Virgin Mary and learned to accept her as my spiritual mother. I was received into the Church and made my First Communion with reverence and joy. I began attending Holy Mass and praying the full twenty decades of the rosary daily. At my parish church, I was a weekday lector for nearly a year. My Catholic faith has become a great passion and treasure in my life.
And now, God has given me the great grace and blessing to be a part of the Madonna House community as a guest.
In Christ, I have found meaning, hope in the future, and faith to recognize that what I have been through is not in vain. These painful experiences are not the final word nor do they define who I am. I would be nothing without the grace and love of God.
Through all my life, God has been holding my hand. He literally raised me from the dead. If you take anything away from this story of my life, take from it the evidence of the unimaginable goodness and joy and love of our beautiful, holy and truly awesome God.
Our God is an incredible Father. Where there is hurt, God is present, graces are present. God sees our tears and wants so much for our joy. Jesus is with us. He leads us through our hurts, our fears, our deepest shames. He is always with us. We always have the choice to be grateful and to choose life!
