Kirsten’s Story
When I was little, I was badly bullied at school. First of all it was by people who I didn’t play with, but after a few years it was also my “best friends” bullying me. I felt very isolated and alone. It also led to me having very little self-esteem and I didn’t trust people easily. I couldn’t wait to be done with school to have a clean break. The clean break was amazing, but the isolation, the lack of trust and low self-esteem followed me around like a bad smell. I just couldn’t get rid of them no matter how hard I tried. I got drunk a lot to try to ease the pain of it all. That led to more pain and self-hatred.
I went on a gap year after school and travelled to Israel as part of it. In that year, God made himself known to me. It started off with just little things – I was surrounded by people who seemed to be trustworthy. I still didn’t fully trust them, but I knew their love, even if I believed at that point that it would only last until somebody better came along. Then one day, I just knew that God was real. It’s hard to explain exactly what happened, but I felt peace and a strange excitement and just knew He was there and that He loved me. It was nothing dramatic, no lightning bolts or anything, just an inward thing, but it left me wanting to know and experience more. In the course of the next couple of years, Jesus showed me His love in amazing ways. He surrounded me with a community of people who loved me for who I was and He healed parts of me that were incredibly raw and painful in the wake of the rejection I’d experienced as a child. Things that had hurt so badly suddenly didn’t hurt because He’d taken those experiences and brought His healing love into them. I started to trust, which in itself was miraculous.
Since then life has changed in an amazing way. I have seen God provide for me when I had nothing. I have known Him close beside me, comforting me, loving me, strengthening me when my daughter died. I have seen Jesus heal me from PTSD – I was plagued with flashbacks after her death, but a friend of mine helped me bring these things to Jesus and He took them away instantly and I haven’t had any flashbacks since. His love is the one constant in my life. The one trustworthy source of love that I have. I know He will never turn His back on me because He loved me before I loved Him.
