My Testimony

Hidden In God exits because there was a time in my life that I was in a deep darkness and I was unhappy with myself, with my life and the direction I was headed in. I was screaming on the inside and rebelling on the outside. Depression had take a hold of my very existence and I was on a downward spiral.

At the age of nineteen I had my first born. As a christian teenager I had made the biggest mistake I could have and I had had a child out of wedlock. Because I knew that it was wrong I felt that his father and I should have been married. So there went my second mistake. I pursued what I though would correct my mistake and did what I thought would be good. I continued to date and live with his father until one day we were married. There were many signs that this was not for me but I was determined to make things right and have a full family, husband, wife and child.

Because I settled for this man, I allowed him to habitually mistreat me and still I stayed. A year after we married, sickness set in and it changed my life drastically and our second child was born. Because of the illness and mistreatment I sunk even lower. I was embarrassed by both my husband’s outside dealings as well as what the illness was doing to my body. I started caring less and less about the way that I looked and felt about myself. I had already grown up the super skinny kid that got made fun of from elementary though high school. In high school my best friend was larger than me and our peers made jokes calling us before and after crack. I was the result of what was considered a crackheads look after they had been on drugs and she was the good look before drugs.

It was a horrible feeling every time they said it and the entire class would laugh. So I carried around this hatred of my own body an wished I were someone different. As I got sicker and had to be cut on more and more without a cure for the disease, I became hopeless. I was visiting the hospital monthly for years and constantly being told that there was no cure and I’d have to live this way for the rest of my life. There was no encouragement insight. No one around me understood my pain and they couldn’t help me. I had no where to turn but up. I cried out to God because that was the last thing I knew to do. I had given up. I thought if He can’t fix it then only death could.

Within a few years of turning my life over things began to change and eventually my life had turned around 180 degrees. The darkness has turned into light and the hopelessness into hope and joy. But still I had a long road ahead of me. After my last round of surgeries, 3 within a four month period the last one happened in February of 2010 (a total of 8 major surgeries in 10 years), I was on the road to recovery, not just psychically but emotionally, mentally and spiritually. It took a year and a half for the wounds of the last surgeries to heal.

During all of this healing there was another battle that had entered my life. I’d become increasingly self conscious of my body. I have major scars and I wanted to keep the secret of my battles and the scars I had gained hidden from the world. Only those close to me knew about them and I was still embarrassed for even them to see them. I didn’t even want to look in the mirror and see them myself. By then I was now a divorced mother of three and I could only think how people would stare and point at me, not knowing what I had suffered through and having a man who could accept the hideousness that was now my scars was most certainly out of the question.

But I am an overcomer and if I claim to be as such that means overcoming all of the obstacles that attempt to paralyze me with fear, doubt and unbelief. How do I do that? Deep prayer and complete faith. It wasn’t until I decided to cut my hair back in 2013 and go natural that I began to embrace who I was. If I could cut off all of the long hair I’d had almost my entire life, make it threw divorce after 13 years of marriage, trust God to provide my needs as a single mother with a high school education and heal from an incurable disease by defeating depression and stress, then I could most certainly with the help of God embrace and love myself.

I was now on my way. It has still been a slow but steady road to embracing, loving and believing in myself but today I will take the final step by sharing my story of why with you today. Through my struggles I vow to be a support to women like me. To encourage, inspire and uplift all that I come in contact with be it face-to-face, social media or my blogs. To be an example that shows “You can live through it and rise!”

“Wear your scars proudly!” They are a part of what makes you…YOU!

“Wear your confidence!” You were not created to have a spirit of fear but of power, love and a sound mind.