My testimony

Choosing to walk in darkness

Well, I figured that my testimony would be the best place to start my blog, seeing that you don’t know me and probably won’t ever meet me face to face, or maybe you do know me and don’t really know much about my life. I’ll just use this as a way to introduce myself, and also so you will know where I’m coming from when you read future posts. I’ll break this up into a few posts, so bear with me as it might take a little while to publish it all.

I was born in California and lived there until I was 10 ½ years old. We were basically your average American family – two kids and a dog. I have 1 brother who is 5 years older than me, so I’m the baby of the family. My parents owned an automotive business that did real well financially. My family and extended family have always claimed to be apart of the Baptist church, my great grandfather being a Baptist preacher. So we were raised going to church at Baptist churches. Both my brother and I attended public schools until we graduated. When I was 10 ½, my parents decided to move our family to Missouri. We ended up moving into a small town with the population of around 7000. It was a huge change for us, because all we ever had known was California city life, so we had quite an adjustment.

When I was about 12 years old, I started feeling accountable for my life and actions. At that time, my family was attending a First Baptist church and I was in the youth group, choir, and all the other activities that go along with it (i.e. co-ed lockdowns, swimming parties, movie nights etc.) It was during this time that I started to choose the path of darkness. I really struggled for awhile, because I wanted to do what was right, but everything that was in my life was teaching me ungodliness. Yes, my parents did try to teach me right from wrong and instill good in my character, but the World had always been apart of our home and it controlled us wholeheartedly. We celebrated every holiday the way the world does, watched TV daily (including MTV and the other channels that kids shouldn’t watch), rented the latest movies ( including romance, horror, comedy with all the junk that comes with them) wore the coolest fashions, ate at popular restaurants, and just enjoyed everything the world had to offer. My friends were worldly and I was heavily influenced by them also.

At this age I started feeling that I was doing wrong somehow, and that God wanted me to do what was right. The only ideas of righteousness that I had were to not do bad things like smoke, drink, drugs, lying etc, because my parents didn’t do those things. So when I would do anything that I knew was wrong, I would feel terrible. But I didn’t know how to stop. My parents would tell me that something was wrong and that I shouldn’t do it, but then we would sit down as a family and watch a movie that glorified the things they said were wrong. This showed me that sin wasn’t rejoiced over, but that it was tolerable.

This is where the confusion began, because I had heard what the Baptist taught. “Not one is righteous, no not one!” the preacher asserted from the pulpit every Sunday. After hearing this it made sinning seem acceptable, and inevitable. So trying to change the bad things I was doing was actually pointless, because it was suppose to be impossible.
So I realized that the salvation message I was taught and was useless, since everyone who believed it was suppose to be “made righteous” yet they expected to forever live as sinners. All of this seemed really frustrating and pointless, so I quit going to church altogether, and dove head first into the world - I never got saved. If you’re reading this you may be thinking “that poor girl” or “someone should have helped her”; but not getting “saved” or going down the “Romans Road” was actually the best thing that happened to me.


By the time I started high school two years later, I was fully walking in darkness. I rebelled against my parents in every possible way. I went to co-ed sleepovers, drinking parties, dyed my hair, got facial piercings, and started experimenting with drugs. My brother had also chosen to walk in darkness and I looked up to his example, and followed it in every way that I could. I had multiple boyfriends and with those came visits to the health clinic for birth control, abusive relationships, emotional torments from breakups, more drugs, and more darkness. I fought daily with my mother, I was disrespectful and hateful. I ended up moving out with some friends at 17 to get away from “being told what I can and can’t do”.

With this new found freedom in my life, I did whatever pleased me. I could hold down a job if I liked it, but I could also quit it just like that if I didn’t. I had gotten a job in a city, so I was traveling back and forth to work. I had also moved back in with my parents for about 6 months to save money. My mother and I got into another argument, so I moved in with some acquaintances to the city I was working in. I was about 19 at this time. I moved around quite a bit for the next few years; living by myself, having roommates, and also living with my brother for a time. My jobs varied from one thing to another. I mainly had jobs at restaurants and popular bars in the downtown district of the city I lived in. Waiting tables was the type of work I had always done since my parents bought a restaurant when we moved to Missouri. I liked the atmosphere and I got to met new people all the time. Of course this introduced me to even more darkness, and I became absorbed with trying to make a lot of money and live life to the fullest while doing it.