My Testimony

How I became a Christian and how I started living for Christ, are two very different stories.

I became a Christian one Sunday afternoon, after church, when I was seven. I asked God to come into my heart as I accepted Him as my Lord and Savior, standing in my backyard, hands folded, and head bowed.

Fast forward thirteen years, and the Lord graciously decided to stop me in my tracks and radically change my perspective on life.

As one does in their teenage and college years, I strayed from the truth. I lived in darkness, knowing He was the light but refusing to embrace it because what the world was offering seemed much more satisfying, at least in the moment.

And while partying, late nights, and boys might be seen as typical for a twenty-year-old girl in the midst of college, I realized one day that there was a much deeper issue at the root. I wasn’t just becoming unsatisfied, but I was slowly becoming corrupted to the point where I couldn’t tell which direction was light and which direction was darkness.

Everything was daunting and I felt like a little girl who one day looked up and realized she was lost and alone in the woods.

Satan began to chain me down to my past, my choices, and my worries. Things I had struggled with my entire life, anxiety being the main one, were quickly being pinned against me and I found myself in a very dark season.

Satan used all these choices, my past, and my weaknesses, to bury me in anxious living. My anxiety disorder became increasingly suffocating and affected me so deeply that for months it made it hard to sleep, difficult to eat, and left me feeling imprisoned to a life I didn't know I was bargaining for.

I became accustomed to regular panic attacks and having to call my parents to rescue me from restaurant bathrooms and grocery store aisles. Nowhere was safe for me, and I was living captive by my anxiety and panic. It seemed like there was no light at the end of the tunnel for me, and absolutely no hope in sight.

I began to diligently confide in a counselor who started helping me confront my anxiety and panic attacks. However, even then, I could barely get through a session without getting panic attacks and drowning in my mental health. It became a fight that I wasn’t equipped to handle on my own, the chains were too heavy, and I was too weak.

One evening, I found myself flipping through Psalms in the Bible, hoping to find something I could grasp onto amid my weakness.

This is when I began finding many verses that spoke to my soul and could give me a glimpse of hope. These verses, along with the belief that the Lord was near, slowly began shifting things inside me.

When I would wake up in the middle of the night in panic, I would turn a lamp on at 4 am and open my Bible to find a Psalms that could help me hold on a little longer. I started to realize that I could find strength to fight this battle with help from the Lord, and not on my own.

In bathrooms, classrooms, restaurants, and grocery stores, with friends, when driving, in waking, and in resting, I called on Him, to deliver me from the captive chains that bonded me to this anxiety and panic.

It wasn’t any one day that changed me, but over the course of the next several months, He challenged me. God gave me opportunities to help me grow, the space to heal, the love to confide in, and the forgiveness to overcome everything that had once defined me. I saw Him opening doors, giving me courage, and equipping me with the strength to fight the battles with Christ alone.

In May of 2022, I could not walk three blocks to class, on the University of Tennessee campus, without feeling the weight of uncontrollable anxiety forcing me into panic attacks. This feeling was looming and I couldn’t step out of my house without being under attack and in panic and distress.

However, a year later in May 2023, I walked out my door, got on a plane, and flew across the world, to Israel.

This was one of the most challenging doors He had ever opened for me. I felt nervous, I felt scared, and I thought if I could barely take myself down the road how am I supposed to go ACROSS THE WORLD?

He freed me, He empowered me, and He challenged me to do the impossible, knowing with Him, it was possible (Matthew 19:26).

My family and I were incredibly fortunate and went to Israel that May. The Lord showed me that not only could I overcome my chains, my weaknesses, my past, my failures, and my traumas, but that on the other side of my “yes,” there was so much more to LIFE waiting for me.

Life was not over, it actually was just beginning. On that trip, I truly gave my life to the Lord and was baptized in the Jordan River (see pictures below!)

My testimony is a deeply personal and rocky story that reminds me of how lost I was and how vulnerable that led me to become in the hands of Satan, drowning in my own weakness.

Yet the Lord had other plans, He called me higher, and He used my struggles to paint a picture far greater than I could have ever imagined.

Today, I choose to live in the freedom He gave me, I choose to live out the radical love he showed me through hardships and surrendering my life to redemption.

I feel the Lord is continuing to call me higher, to share the LOVE and the gospel that saves and frees me every day.

The Lord works in wonderful and mysterious ways, and it is no coincidence that He now is calling me once again to go across the world, to train and share His powerful presence and spread the gospel in the nations. In the incredible journey I am embarking on, I choose to live in His radical love and not in the fear that once bonded me.

It is hard for me to put such a powerful story into words, but I know that if He can radically change my life, He can change anyone’s.