What's My Story About His Glory?

I was raised Roman Catholic by a strict military father who had a troubled childhood. My mother died violently in our home one night when I was five, and that threw the lives of four small children into a shattered existence in a very dark and vicious world. I have many happy memories as a child, but tragedy was a common companion as well. I walked thru everything from a violent home full of alcohol and guns to sexual abuse from adoptive parents and older boys.

I have lived thru so many things but God has never abandoned me, even when I only knew him from a distance. I went from a life of wealth to a life of poverty after my mother died. I was a filthy child, rejected by the two-parent families around me that didn't want their children around me. I excelled in academics and sports, but felt like nothing inside. At the age of 13, I was diagnosed with severe scholiosis and was informed that all the bones on the right side of my body were out of sync. I endured a nine hour surgery, losing half the blood in my body, and resulting in metal rods in my back and life in a plaster paris body cast during my freshman year of high school.

Everything the enemy could think of to throw at me as a child came my way. He was bent on destroying me before I even had a chance at life. But God had other plans. He allowed so much tragedy in my life as a child to make my life a testimony of his great love. He loves the broken, the abandoned, the rejected. He loves those that feel like nothing, that have no one.

He kept me. He allowed the enemy to go only so far, and He sheilded the core of who I am and the foundation of my heart. I stand here today a miracle and a testimony of His Goodness and the redeeming power of His Love. People look at me today and have no clue of where I have walked. They see the overflow of blessing in my life, they hear the wisdom that He has put in my mouth, and they think me spoiled with a life of ease.

But they don't realize that God walked with me thru great suffering all the days of my life and he made me victorious by his grace and his mighty hand. Nothing in me deserved his mercy and his love, he simply chose not to forget me. He created me, set me on a path on this earth for a purpose, and he came along side me and was determined to perform his will in my life. The same promise that he extends to everyone willing to acknowledge his love for them.

Suffering and Tragedy are not gone from my life. They rise up and knock me to the ground every so often, this world is not my home and remains a place of cursed and wretched darkness. But I have a God who helps me up every time, who heals and restores because he loves. We are on a journey together a mission that requires some violence and some blood, some carrying of a cross and some death, but He set the example and made the way and empowers us thru His sacrifice and His Name. Jesus.

That's my story. Part of it anyway. It's not much different when you compare it to your own. Loneliness, Betrayal, Rejection, Broken-heartedness, Disappointment, Physical Pain... The first glance makes it seem different, but the heart of our walk is the same. But Christ suffered all this and more, and he did it to set us free from it. To heal the broken-hearted, to set the captive free, to comfort the bruised and wounded. My story is like yours -- the Good News of Jesus Christ has made me an overcomer in this life and the next.