I was daddy’s little girl and farmers daughter. My mom wished for years that she would get a little girl to raise, and after giving birth to my two older brothers, I was the answer to that wish. All five of us lived in a beautiful stone house that was attached by a dirt road to my grandparent’s farm. This was where my mom and dad worked, and Justin, Steve, and I would get to go there after school to ride tractors with grandpa.

A typical morning when I was six years old would consist of my father getting up at 4:30am and going to start the daily routine on the farm. My mother would stay home and help us get ready for school, and then head to the farm as well. But one morning in February of 1994, this routine was drastically changed.

I was woken up by my mother for school but decided to stay in bed as long as I possibly could. My brother’s room was right next door, so upon hearing them head for the bathroom, I dashed out of bed in order to beat them there. But as soon as I got to the hallway, I heard a sound I will never forget.

Someone collapsed, and though my six-year-old brain wasn’t the most developed yet, I knew something had to be terribly wrong. The only person it could have possibly been was my mom, because my two brothers were behind me in the wooden hallway. My tiny bare feet made their way around the corner, and I saw a sight that will be engrained in my mind forever.

There was my mother, on all fours, hunched over in obvious physical pain, puking up blood. There seemed to be so much of it that it now covered my innocent feet, and she was now kneeling in the vomit. She gasped for my oldest brother, at the time 11, to call 9-1-1. He immediately left, leaving Justin and I to stand there helplessly.

My mother looked up at me and told me to take her hand. I did, and my tiny legs knelt down in the mixture of blood with her. She looked at me with a pale, tear-streaked face, muttered the words, “I love you, Katie Ann,” and the next thing that was heard were sirens.

I was sitting on my dad’s lap, and we were in a room full of couches and tissues. My mom had been in the hospital for three days from a collapse due to a brain aneurism, and we had just been called in to hear the most recent news about her health. I do not remember anything but the smell of the room. And the fact that the doctor said my mom was dead.

I refused to go to the funeral. I was six years old, my mom was dead, and I did not understand. I had no idea where ‘Heaven’ was, who ‘God’ was, or why my mom wasn’t with me anymore. All I knew was that everyone told me she wasn’t coming back. But I didn’t understand why all of my other friends had their moms and I didn’t.

We had to move in with my grandparents because my father couldn’t get us ready for school on his own. My dad was no longer the happy, funny, huge-heart man that everyone once viewed him as. He lost the love of his life, his “fair lady” as he called her, and he didn’t know what to do. On top of all this, my grandfather had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and my grandmother constantly battled her high blood pressure and Diabetes.

I don’t remember much about the next month, except for when Justin started getting sick. I remember sitting on the couch with Steve, staring at Justin, who had a red face and soaked clothes because his fever was so high. I sat there and cried while looking at my oldest brother, my protector, who was in so much pain that he couldn’t even open his eyes.

And then, a little over a month after my mom died, I heard the sirens again.

They took Justin away, and he never came back. They put him in the same type of wooden box and put him in the same earth that they put my mom, right next to her freshly-dug grave. Justin died when he was 11. This earth was no longer dirt, it was now an open wound, and someone was pouring salt all over it.

Again, I was told that “everything was going to be okay,” because “God knows what he is doing,” but I didn’t know what He was doing, and whoever “He” was, he certainly didn’t sit well in my book. I had never been to church more than twice a year, and never understood the concept of a loving God of which so many people often spoke. The only God I knew was cruel and mean, and clearly had something against me, though I did not understand what I did to deserve that type of punishment.

My father became even less loving. He wanted nothing to do with Steve and me, having already lost half of his immediate family. He pushed us out of his life, and Steve pushed me out of his. My brother asked to live in the barns instead of the house in order to get away from us. The only interaction we ever had was physical or verbal abuse, and it was from him that I learned at a young age what the smell of weed was.

Though my father pushed me out of his life, I threw myself back at him. My father quickly became my everything. He literally was all I thought about, all I cared about, and all I lived for. Even during school I would cry and be sent home because I missed daddy. I had to sit next to him at every meal and I had to be with him whenever I was home. I even slept with him most nights and got up with him at 4:30 in the morning, when he usually got up to start his routine on the farm, just to be able to spend more time with him.

But with this came an insane amount of fear. I started to have terrible nightmares, so bad that I was completely petrified to sleep by myself at night, afraid that my father was going to die as well. I knew it could happen, because I had seen it first-hand with my mom and brother, which made it all the scarier. And the closer I got to my father, the more afraid I became of him leaving me, just like everyone else had.

My grandfather was getting progressively worse, now not able to remember any of us, who he was, or where he was. I had to help my grandmother and grandfather on multiple occasions, from cooking dinner to making sure my grandfather didn’t harm himself. There were multiple nights that I would wake from some strange noise and find my grandpa wandering away, either outside or inside the house. There were also some occasions, one in particular, where my grandmother’s high blood pressure would get so bad that she would not be in control of herself anymore. She broke seven plates that night on the floor of the kitchen and I remember helping her sweep them up with shaking hands.

It wasn’t until about three years after my mom and brother had died that I began to feel happy again. I was right around the age of ten and I was finally starting to cry less at night about anxiety toward losing my father, and the nights were less and less where my mom would show up in my nightmares. I still didn’t go to church, and I remember asking on multiple occasions if we could go, but my dad refused. He told me to ask my grandmother, which sometimes went with me, but most of the time she would have to stay home in order to take care of my grandfather. Steve still wasn’t in my life other than the fighting, but since it had been like that all my life, I found it completely normal and just assumed that’s how all sisters and brothers acted toward each other.

Fast forward about eleven months, and my dad started dating again. Things seemed to be getting better; my father even asked me if he thought it would be okay with mom if he re-married, so I knew he had the idea in his head. I loved the girl he was dating, so I was excited for him and our potential new life with her.

Casey, my best friend at the time, had the same birthday as me, so we had a joined birthday party in May of 1998. About twenty girls came for our 11th birthday party to Casey’s house, where we had a sleepover and watched a movie together. Her mom decided to pick the movie, and for some strange reason decided to choose Stephen Kings It. I already had the problem of nightmares, so this wonderful movie really didn’t help with the healing of that.

The following nights were filled with lots and lots of tears. I was literally afraid to close my eyes, thinking that if I did a clown would appear when I opened them. Because of this, I spent many nights awake with my dad, keeping him up much longer than he wanted to be.

It was the night of May 9, and this night was particularly bad for some reason. I was now crying on the couch with my dad and it was about 2am. Having to get up at 4:30, my dad was getting extremely fed up with me, and finally snapped and told me to go sleep with my grandma and grandpa down the hall. So with tears streaming down my face, I grabbed a pillow and a blanket and went to sleep on the floor of my grandparent’s room. That was the first time he ever asked me to leave him.

I awoke the next morning at about 8:30 to my dad’s alarm going off. I was immediately angry, thinking he went outside to work without me. I got up, made my way down the hall, and noticed he was still on the couch. I turned off the alarm and started telling him to get up, but he wasn’t answering me.
I then shook him, knowing that he was a heavy sleeper, and my hand did not recognize the temperature that it had been next to the night before. It wasn’t until then that I noticed the color of his lips. They were gray. They had never been gray before. I took the back of my tiny hand and felt his face; it was ice cold. I ran down the hallway to wake up my grandma, frantically screaming and shaking her.

She made her way down the same hallway and tried to wake him just as I had, and I watched with tears filling my eyes, hoping that somehow, someway, she could get my father to wake up. I stood behind my grandma, peering around her, hugging myself as I felt warm tears fall down my face. I needed him to wake up.

I heard the horrible sirens for the third time. The paramedics came into the living room; I stood in the midst of it all, and all I could see was my father. They were putting things into him, they were testing him, they were poking him, and he didn’t do anything about it. I was surrounded by frantically paced adults darting all around and still I stood there, silently staring at my father being treated like a unresponsive machine. It was as if their lives were in fast forward and mine was in slow motion. After refusing their request for me to leave, my grandma picked me up and carried me out into the hallway, and freeing myself from her grip, I ran upstairs crying. I was sitting on my dad’s bed after hearing the slam of his door and I quickly ripped a picture off the wall. The picture displayed the original five of us, my entire immediate family, all sitting on each other’s laps and all laughing. I watched as my silent tears fell and magnified tiny parts of the only happy memory I held. The picture vibrated within the grasp of my shaking hands, and soon I was crying enough that the tears were dripping off, falling onto my bare legs.

What seemed like hours later, I heard someone walking up the stairs. I slowly raised my head, staring at the wooden door between me and all that I cared about. Everything stopped. I no longer breathed, I no longer moved; I no longer wanted anything else in the world except for that person to have been my father. I say “have been,” because it wasn’t. As the door opened, my mind saw a woman wearing a stethoscope. But my heart saw the deepest disappointment possible and suffered pain so unfathomable I would not have guessed it to be real. She came to tell me my dad didn’t make it.

I threw the picture, shoved the woman, and ran into a different room screaming and crying. I sat in the windowsill hugging my knees, staring up at the sky, talking to not only my mother this time, but my father as well. I told Justin to take care of them.

I heard my door open, and it was Steve. He walked up to me with tears in his eyes, sat on my bed, and started crying. I crawled over into his lap, and he hugged me and told me he loved me.

Someone broke us up, because the next thing I knew, I was walking down the wooden stairs to say goodbye to my father. I held my grandma’s hand through that same hallway I had been in so many times, not knowing what I was about to face, and not wanting to see the truth. I walked into the room; all eyes were on me. The room was full of paramedics and tears. No one was there to me except my dead father.

I released my grandma’s hand, walked up next to the stretcher, and stared at my daddy’s cold face and irregularly placed body. I picked up my tiny, shaking, warm hand and placed it on his cold cheek. I looked firmly at his closed eyes, and told him I loved him. I promised him I always would love him and that I would always be his little girl.

People brought things. They brought food, they brought presents, they brought tears and they brought hugs. Nothing mattered. I turned 11 two days after my dad died, and I didn’t care. Family came, friends came, and money came. Still, nothing mattered.

You know when you put something in a freezer for a long time and its get solid; I’m talking really solid, like no matter how hard you try to unthaw it, it seems to stay the same? It’s like the only thing you can possibly do to alter it is to take your warm fingers and draw on the frost? I was solid. God had placed me in a freezer ever since the day I lost my mother, and kept cranking up the ice. I would let people hug me, let people try to unthaw me; only in an attempt to make them feel as if they were doing something good. Sometimes I would even show that they had done something; I would let them see the drawing on me, but my temperature overtook this as soon as I was back in my black box.

I ran out of the church when they closed the casket. And once again, out on the grass I sat in the first row, watching my father get lowered into the wound overflowing with salt.

What I assume to be days later, my aunt and uncle sat my brother and me down, and explained to us that we were to move to Ohio. It was in my mom and dad’s Will that if anything happened to them, we were to move in with my dad’s sister and her family. So in June of 1998, I packed up and moved away from everything I had ever known. My grandma was left crying in the kitchen, and my grandfather was still asking where Bill was. Bill is my father’s name.

Moving in with my aunt and uncle was possibly one of the hardest things I went through in life, despite everything that had already happened. I had no idea how a family was supposed to function, and I took everything personally. Every kiss between my aunt and uncle, every time my cousins would show that they loved each other, every time I wasn’t included in some sort of a game; it was all my fault. I assumed they did this because they didn’t like me. No one had before, why should people start now? My brother still didn’t speak to me often and was never home. I felt more alone than I had my entire life, and it was all because I was surrounded by a loving family.

I started going to church when I moved in with my cousins, and I hated it. I absolutely hated it with all my heart. I did not agree with anything that was said, and only went each week because I wanted to be a part of the family. I accepted Christ as my Lord in June, and did absolutely nothing to further this new Relationship afterwards.

I hated God, I hated Jesus, and I hated everything. I hated the fact that this so-called “loving” Father would do this to me. If He really loved me, why would he take away my mom, my dad, my brother, and put me in a home where I was constantly furious and upset, but no one understood?

It was normal of me to run upstairs and hold a fake smile until I heard the soft ‘click’ of my door. My body would then slide down the wood and I would cry for hours, holding it in to say goodnight, and as soon as the lights were off and my head was on the pillow, the tears would start again. For a period of about three years I probably cried myself to sleep at least four nights a week. I couldn’t even hear the words “mom” or “dad” without tears flooding my eyes, and I did all of this behind closed doors. I didn’t want people to see that I was hurt, especially my aunt and uncle. Since they had taken on the role of my parents, I thought that if they knew that I missed my biological ones it would hurt their feelings. So I kept it from them and I kept it from everybody.

And the worst part throughout all of this: I was alone. Completely and utterly alone. No one knew what it was like, and no one understood how just seeing a dad holding his little girl, or seeing a brother hug his sister, had the power to completely ruin my mood and my day. I went to counseling and despised it, only going because people told me I should, and ‘that’s what you do when you go through things like this.’ But no one had gone through something like this. Until I found someone who lost their mom, their dad, and their brother, all within four years of each other and all before they hit the age of 11, I would not be satisfied. Don’t get me wrong, I know children have and still do find help through counseling, but I felt like my personal situation was beyond counseling. I only went to satisfy others. And like I said, I held a smile on the outside, but I was still excruciatingly sad on the inside.

The second worst part throughout all of this: I was completely petrified to get close to anyone. I blamed myself for my father’s death, thinking that if hadn’t of stayed up with him for so long, or if he had just gotten sleep, maybe he would have been healthy, and he wouldn’t have died from heart problems. I was wholly convinced that people were dying because of me. Anyone that I got close to or anyone that mattered to me, died. They all died. No one loved me and everyone left me. And so I began to live my life alone at the age of thirteen.

Though I was never medically diagnosed with it, I had severe symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Separation Anxiety. Any time I would hear sirens, my heart would start pounding, my hands would start sweating, and I would start shaking no matter how hard I tried not to. Any time we drove past a church with a hearse in the parking lot or if I saw any gravesite, I would suffer the same symptoms. I would also go to school and miss my family, sometimes crying in a bathroom stall because I wanted to go home. But when I was at home, I missed my grandmother so much that I often times would cry myself to sleep, thinking that she was going to die as well. When I was around the age of sixteen, I began to cry about my aunt and uncle dying. No matter who I got close to, I was afraid they were going to die, and I would convince myself of it so that when they did, I would feel prepared.
But my aunt and uncle worked through this. I was still solid as ice, but getting weaker and weaker as time went on. I began to realize that maybe if I told my aunt and uncle just a little of how sad I was… maybe it would help. So I started opening up to them for the first time after I had lived there for about four years. I began to realize that they truly did love me “as their daughter,” as they so often said, but I still didn’t fully let them in.

Things started getting better, I continued to go to church, and for a while I started to realize that Jesus wasn’t as bad as I thought He was. I started praying and it made me feel better. I started to understand that maybe He wasn’t there to torture me, maybe instead he was there to love me, and maybe he was trying to protect me from the pain that I was experiencing.

Right around this time was when I came home one day to a crying aunt. I asked her what was wrong, and then noticed that all of Steve’s belongings were missing. My brother left overnight, leaving behind a two-page note, explaining how he was never going to get along with the family and how he was never able to act himself around them. He kept referring to my family as “them.” I hated that. He put me in the middle of him and our family, and once again I was left alone. The only person that had any slightest idea of what I dealt with on a daily basis had just left me. My brother promised that he would call in a week to let us know where he was. Four months later, we finally got word that he was okay.

Then college came, and the first weekend came, and frat parties came, and guys came. I got black-out, plastered drunk at least two, if not three nights a week, and would wake up in random boy’s beds. I would leave the next morning, completely hung-over, tip toeing through their room while grabbing my clothes from the floor and hoping that I would know my way back to my dorm. Though I never knew exactly what I did, I would remember enough to know that I did not have sex with them, and I thought that made it okay. I would get completely wasted and be sexually promiscuous with boys that first names I could not recall, but it was okay, because I didn’t have sex with them. I began to brag about how many boys I made out with; by a few months the number was well over 20. Then one night, about three months into college, weed was brought to a party, and the friends that I was there with left me after I got locked into a guy’s room that I didn’t know, with him and a bag of drugs. I didn’t want to smoke because it fell into the same category of having sex, and I wanted to leave but he wasn’t listening, already not conscious of what was going on. Two hours later, I was not only drunk, I had smoked weed, and I wanted to go home. The man that I did not know got mad and tried to drive me home, but instead dropped me off in the middle of campus and left me there.

I woke up the next morning, threw up a couple of times, and went on with life. I never went to classes, because around this time was when I started dating a boy I had met through a friend. He didn’t go to my University, so I often would drive about an hour to see him, sometimes two times a week, and would sleep over at his apartment. It wasn’t until about two months later that I realized he was abusive.

I always told him that if he ever hit me out of anger I would break up with him. But I soon realized that he hit me all the time, no matter what emotion he was feeling. I stayed in that relationship for as long as I did because I longed to have a relationship with a man. I had never had a healthy relationship with any guy in my life. My father died, my brother died, my other brother treated me the same as this boyfriend did, and though my uncle loved me very much, I was constantly afraid that I was going to get in trouble around him. It wasn’t until my boyfriend threw me up against a wall and hit me so hard that I couldn’t move my arm for a week that I decided it was over.

I got a 2.5 GPA that quarter; the worst I had ever done academically. I realized I was never going to be happy at the college I was at, so I decided to transfer to Ohio State, where my best friend in high school attended. Between the summer of my freshman and sophomore year, I went to church with my family on random occasions, but I never absorbed any of my pastor’s teachings. I went once a week and thought nothing of it in between.

Moving to OSU’s campus, I wanted to change, but I didn’t know how. I wanted to be happy, and I noticed that something had been wrong for a while, but I didn’t know what it was. The first weekend there I went out to a party with people I had just met on my floor. Three hours later, I ended up four miles away from my dorm with a guy I didn’t know and inside a house I had never been in. I told him I was not going to have sex with him and the next thing I remember is crying and trying to walk straight around dark streets that I was not familiar with at all. I have no idea how I got home that night.

Moving in with my best friend helped. Since she knew me, and knew what I had gone through, she could understand more of why I did things, or why certain things made me upset. But she had a boyfriend, one she had been dating for about a year, and I was internally jealous. She truly loved spending time with him, and they often spent a lot of their time together. I met a guy who lived two doors down my hallway and started dating him within weeks, convincing myself that I liked him, probably only because I wanted to have a relationship with a male so badly.

We started dating on a Wednesday. That Friday, we went to a party together, came back hours later, and had sex. I bragged about it to my best friend the next day, and though she didn’t tell me she thought it was wrong, she didn’t tell me she thought it was right, either.

The entire relationship was based on sex. I would have told you differently at the time; because I swore I loved him, and he swore he loved me, too. But I spent every single night with him, knew exactly where he was at all times, and whenever he was in his room, I was as well. The only friend that I still had was the one I lived with. Everyone else was thrown out the window as soon as this relationship came into my life.

About three months into it, I started feeling uneasy about his “love” for me, and it seemed as though he liked my roommate. I confronted him with this, and he immediately threw it back in my face, using very derogatory words and making me cry about it. After that, I was afraid to approach him with anything.

It was also around that time that I started to feel ugly. I had always had somewhat of a problem with self-image, probably only because I am a girl. It had never been something that I dwelled on, though. I had been complemented many times by women claiming they were jealous that I didn’t seem to care what I looked like. But this boyfriend made me care.

I soon was working out with him five days a week. We would get up every morning at 5:45, he would go to his navy training, and I would do the workout he made for me. After a couple of weeks I not only worked out multiple times a day, I also kept a record of everything that I ate. I would not allow myself to eat more than 1,000 calories per day.

After a few months, I started feeling depressed and lonely again. I had placed so much of my life in that relationship, so whenever things seemed to be going “wrong,” I would cry. Hard. I would lock myself in the bathroom and randomly start crying, having no idea where it was coming from or how to stop it. I started comparing this to how I felt after my dad died, and I did not like the comparison.

After a few more weeks, my boyfriend bought me diet pills, despite the fact that I had already lost two pant sizes. But I kept doing what he asked, I kept telling him I was going to remain by his side, even though deep down I was miserable and lonely. I just wanted to be with him because I wanted to have a man in my life.

It was around this time that my best friend and I decided to go on spring break together. Since we had gone to youth group together back in junior high and high school, we decided to check out Campus Crusade for Christ. We went to their meetings on and off, most of the time not staying for the entire thing. But she really wanted to go on the Daytona, Florida trip they were taking over spring break, so I agreed to go with her.

I had no idea I was going to have to share my faith (which was non-existent) with people on the beach. I was walking around, telling people that Jesus loves them, and if they want a better life, Jesus is that answer. I believed all of these things, but I felt like the biggest hypocrite when I was doing so. It was here that I met amazing people; people that really loved me and people who had a passion for God that I had never seen before. But as soon as I went back to Columbus, I continued to have sex and to get drunk with my boyfriend.

It was nearing the end of the school year, and we had been dating for about six months. I had just gotten back from being out of town for the weekend, and somehow the conversation came up about my best friend. He had mentioned that he hung out with her over the weekend, and I immediately was angry. I told him to look me in the eye and tell me that if he had absolutely no feelings for her whatsoever, I would be okay with it.

He was completely silent. Turns out, he had only been dating me in order to get closer to her. This not only ruined my relationship with him, it also ruined my relationship with my best friend. Since I had placed all my trust and hope in that man, absolutely nothing was okay. As I had made my father everything and he died, so I made my boyfriend my everything and he deceived me and left me. I cried myself to sleep almost every night for about four weeks straight. I lost my best friend. I couldn’t even look at her without thinking of him, and I was extremely depressed again.

But I kept going to the RealLife meetings, as it’s called at OSU, and I started to meet more people through the ones that I had spent a week with in Daytona. I began to feel a love in me that I never thought possible, but I quickly began to lead a double life. I would go to Bible Study, agree that underage drinking was bad and that sex should wait for marriage, and then afterwards go play beer pong with friends in my dorm. I would act holy and nice and awesome in front of my RealLife friends, singing and dancing to worship songs, but as soon as I was back in my dorm, I would cuss, lie, and get drunk. I quickly began to hate myself. And with the self-image issues that had recently been drilled into my brain, this mask-wearing was not a good combination.

I went home for the summer and pretended like everything was okay, not wanting to bear my family with my burdens. I continued taking diet pills. I now was taking about four a day, and constantly shook because of the effects of them. I didn’t eat for weeks, and what I did eat, I would immediately throw up with the aid of my finger and occasionally a toothbrush. I did this because it zeroed in on the pain. If I hated throwing up, I would make myself throw up, knowing that when I was throwing up the only thing that hurt was the vomit. I do not remember how long it took for this to subside, but it is a thought that I still struggle with to this day.

Throughout that summer there were a few friends from RealLife that reached out to me. I think they knew I wasn’t okay, they knew I needed a relationship with Christ more than anything, so they did their best to show me that without forcing it upon me. It was because of these few people that I started living a new life at the beginning of my junior year. It was because of their love and the love that I saw through Christ that I also regained my relationship with my best friend. She and I became even closer having gone through that tough time together, and since we both were starting to realize how important God was, we had that walk to share as well.

Slowly, and I mean really slowly, I began to realize that God was amazing. He did not punish me for something I did and he did not push me around, treating me like an experimental rag doll. I started viewing him as an actual Person, an actual being, rather than a religion. I didn’t want Jesus to be something I did once a week at church. I wanted Him to be my life. Since he was murdered for me, why wouldn’t I try to live my life glorifying him? I renewed my faith; that is, asked Jesus to lead my life and be my Lord and Savior over the summer of 2007, and this time I really meant it.

But just because I had done this everything was not okay. There was no magical snap of the fingers where everything became butterflies and fairies after I became a Christian. It was hard, and still is. Relationships are a huge challenge to me because I’m afraid that whoever I date won’t actually like me; this feeling being something that I’ve struggled with my entire life. I also get afraid that they are going to leave me for something that I’ve done to mess up the relationship. I even prayed to stay single because I didn’t want a boyfriend, and I truly meant it. However, God had something else in store, and has blessed me with an amazing boyfriend who holds me when I cry and never gets tired of telling me that he truly does like me. If you’re reading this, sweetheart, thanks.

But even though I have a great relationship with Seth and I know I have a God that loves and protects me, it is hard being a Christian. It’s hard going against society; telling people that I don’t drink because I love Jesus or choosing to read my Bible instead of going out on a Friday night can produce some really weird looks and hurtful words towards me. It’s difficult talking about my walk with Christ with my brother who is not a Christian. It’s even harder knowing that he is going through life without the love of God to rely on.

I often get asked why I have so much faith or why out of nowhere I started following God. The answer: I have no idea. I don’t know why God chose me. But I know I had two options: I could face this hurtful world alone, or I could face it with Jesus. I chose to let Jesus unthaw me. And I found out throughout the process that it wasn’t God placing me in the freezer, it was this painful world.

And that was not a decision anyone else could make for me. It was something I had to do on my own. Now, when I’m sitting in my room by myself crying because I failed a quiz or because I’m in a fight with my brother or because it’s my mom’s 15th year that she’s been dead… I know I’m going to be okay. I know I’m going to be okay because I have God, and I’m going to be in Heaven one day with him. This is not my home, and the pains of this world will fade. His love for me never will. My relationship with Jesus is the only relationship I have ever been in where I have never been fearful of it ending or Him leaving me.

People tell me that I’m a strong person; that they would never be able to go through what I have. But what people don’t realize is that I didn’t pick going through what I did. I didn’t pick who was put in my life, and I didn’t pick who was taken out of it. I am a million miles away from being strong—it is Jesus that is strong within me. I have been without Him, and I have seen the rock bottom of life. It is a feeling I wouldn’t place on my worst enemy.

You know what I’ve been through and you’ve seen life through my eyes. Now I challenge you to look at yours. If you could change it for the better, knowing that there is a Savior standing right next to you wanting to be a part of your life, what is stopping you from letting Him in?

Thank you for reading this. I know it’s long, but I wanted it to be as genuine as possible. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or if you just want to talk, I would love to. Please message me.