When Grace Brought Me Home
There was a time when I thought the only way to survive was to stay small — to hide, to pretend, to be perfect enough that no one would see how broken I really was.
I wore religion like armor. I used Scripture like a mask. I smiled in sanctuaries where my heart was bleeding.
I didn’t understand grace. I only understood guilt.
I thought holiness meant hiding your wounds and pretending they’d never happened.
And when my marriage fell apart — when everything I thought was safe began to crumble under the weight of sin that wasn’t even mine — I carried the shame anyway.
Because when the Church rejected me, I assumed God had too.
They didn’t just whisper; they withdrew.
And the message that rang louder than any sermon was clear: “You are unclean. You are not welcome here.”
So, I built my walls higher.
I told myself I didn’t need people.
But isolation became its own kind of hell.
And somewhere in all that silence, fear slipped in.
When Fear Becomes Faith
Fear is clever. It doesn’t arrive with fangs; it arrives with logic.
It tells you you’re just being careful. That you’re just protecting yourself. That you’re just being “wise.”
But what fear really does is teach you to worship safety instead of surrender.
And when you worship safety, the enemy doesn’t have to destroy you — he just has to keep you quiet.
Fear convinced me that if people ever saw the truth about me — the trauma, the mistakes, the desperate ways I tried to survive — they’d turn away.
So I hid it. All of it.
I tried to manage life on my own.
But the more I tried to survive the trauma, the more trauma I created.
Every time I lied to protect myself, I lost a piece of peace.
Every time I controlled something out of fear, I hurt someone who didn’t deserve it.
I made choices that were messy.
I said things I regret.
I hurt the person who helped me heal, because fear taught me to expect abandonment and to cause it first.
My survival instincts became my sin, and my sin became my shame.
I kept thinking if I could just do better, serve more, love harder — maybe I could prove to God that I wasn’t as bad as I felt.
But it was never about proving. It was always about believing.
And I didn’t. I couldn’t.
The Week That Changed Everything
Then, God — in His mercy — sent someone into my life who wouldn’t let me hide.
They weren’t perfect. Neither was I.
But they carried light. Real light. And it scared me.
We spent a week talking about spiritual gifts.
I didn’t want to hear it. Gifts were for the pure. For the confident. For the people who hadn’t messed up their lives.
But they spoke to me about how the Holy Spirit doesn’t choose based on performance, but on purpose.
They told me God uses the broken because only broken things can leak light.
They told me the cracks are where His power shines through.
I wanted to believe them. But deep down, I still thought: Not me. I’ve made too many mistakes.
Two Weeks Later: When Heaven Interrupted
Two weeks later, that same person invited me to a new church.
I almost said no. I’d had enough of churches. Enough of being stared at, enough of being the cautionary tale.
But I went. And when I walked through the doors, something inside me shifted.
The presence of God hit me before the people did.
No one looked away. No one whispered. No one asked about my past.
And then the sermon began — on spiritual gifts.
The same thing we had spent the past two weeks talking about.
I cried like a child. Because I knew that was God.
That was Him saying, “You see? You are not forgotten. You are exactly where I want you.”
That day, I realized something holy:
I was not bad — I was broken.
And God does His best work with broken things.
“There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them.”
— 1 Corinthians 12:4
The very traits I thought made me a problem — my empathy, my passion, my deep feeling — were not symptoms of my pain; they were seeds of my calling.
And without that person and that church, I might never have believed it.
When Love Met Fear
But I didn’t know how to handle love.
I didn’t know how to trust safety when it finally showed up.
Fear doesn’t leave just because faith enters the room.
It lingers, testing every corner, whispering every doubt.
And it told me, “If they ever really see who you are, they’ll leave you too.”
So, I lied. I hid. I panicked.
I tried to control what God had given me instead of surrendering it.
And in doing so, I hurt the very person who had shown me His love most clearly.
That’s the thing about trauma — it doesn’t just wound you; it teaches you to wound others out of fear.
And fear became my downfall.
The dishonesty that came from fear became the crack through which the enemy crawled in and twisted everything holy into hurt.
The Enemy’s Distortion
The enemy is patient. He studies your scars until he knows exactly how to press them.
He doesn’t tempt you with what you hate; he tempts you with what you fear losing.
He took my love and made it anxious.
He took my faith and made it conditional.
He took my compassion and made it codependent.
And just like that, the thing God had begun to build through healing and friendship began to crumble.
I tried to save it, but you can’t fight spiritual battles with fleshly weapons.
The enemy distorted what God had started, and I let him — because I was still letting fear speak louder than truth.
When it all fell apart, I thought the story was over.
But it wasn’t. God was still writing.
The Collision of Brokenness and Grace
It took me losing that person — the one who taught me about gifts, who believed in my calling — to finally see that God had been after my heart all along.
I used to think that person saved me.
But now I understand: God used them to awaken me.
Their brokenness healed me because they turned to God in their pain, and I saw what that looked like — raw, real, and redeemed.
We both were broken. We both needed grace.
And even though it ended painfully, I know now that God’s fingerprints were on it.
He used their cracks to reveal mine.
He used our love to reveal His.
The Launch of My Surrender
So today, I launch my surrender.
Today, I choose truth over pretense.
I choose faith over fear.
I choose forgiveness over bitterness.
I choose God over guilt.
This is the beginning of my courage.
I will no longer hide behind shame.
I will no longer pretend to be someone who hasn’t been through hell and come out holy.
And yes — I still worry sometimes that someone will find out something about my past.
That they’ll see the wrong version of me and assume that’s who I still am.
I still get afraid that I’ll represent God poorly, that I’ll fail Him again.
But I’m learning that fear is not a prophecy — it’s a prison.
And Jesus came to open every locked door.
Because here’s the truth that both my Bible and that church confirmed:
God uses the broken.
He always has.
Jesus didn’t come to recruit the righteous — He came to restore the ruined.
He sat with adulterers, touched lepers, forgave thieves, and washed the feet of those who would betray Him.
And if He can use them, He can use me too.
My past is no longer my story — it’s my testimony.
It’s not who I am; it’s proof of who He is.
The Theology of Fear and Forgiveness
Fear may still knock, but it no longer gets to come in.
Because every time it does, I answer with forgiveness.
Forgiveness closes every window the enemy tries to crawl through.
I’ve had to forgive the Church that shunned me, my husband who hurt me, the person who left me, and the woman in the mirror who did what she had to do to survive.
And forgiveness doesn’t make me weak — it makes me whole.
It reminds me that the same God who forgave me calls me to mirror that mercy.
“For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.”
— Matthew 6:14
Every time I forgive, I reclaim the ground that fear tried to steal.
Every time I confess instead of hide, I silence the enemy.
Every time I tell the truth, I remind hell that honesty belongs to Heaven.
A Heart of Flesh
God promised,
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.”
— Ezekiel 36:26
And He has.
This heart still trembles, still overflows, still bleeds sometimes — but it beats.
It beats with love again.
It beats with compassion again.
It beats with purpose again.
And it beats for the broken — because I am one of them.
And that’s the kind of people Jesus came for.
The Benediction of Becoming
I am still becoming.
Still learning to trust love again.
Still learning to tell the truth without fear.
Still learning to rest instead of perform.
But I’m no longer hiding.
I’m no longer living afraid of what people might find out.
Because everything they could uncover, Jesus already covered.
My scars are not my shame — they are my sermon.
My past is not my prison — it’s my platform.
My life is not perfect — but it is proof that grace still walks among the ruins.
“He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
— Philippians 1:6
And that good work — that wild, messy, beautiful restoration — is still happening in me.
Not because I earned it.
Because He loves me enough to finish what He started.
Finally, after all the years of fear, silence, and striving —
I am home.
Science and Spirituality 
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