About Me

I was born on the 27th of February in the year 2003, and lived the first six years of my life in Palm Bay, Florida. I grew up in the church, so it seems growing up should have been pretty easy to tackle, right? Wrong. Very. Very wrong.

My family and I moved to an apartment in North Georgia, and there I experienced my first snow. But apparently, Georgia only gets snow every millennia, as I've experienced living there. Anyway, when we moved, I made the transition from private school to public school. I was psyched not to wear a uniform, but not too psyched to discover really fast that the outside world isn't pretty. It is very very imperfect, which my Sunday School in Florida did not prepare me for at all. As the new kid, I was bullied a whole lot to the point where my bedside prayer before bed was always that Jesus would come back quickly. I remember that vividly. I remember praying that Jesus would return any day now because I knew that when He does, it would all be over. Mind you, I was seven. I was seven years old and begging God to end the world.

When that prayer was not answered--which thank God it wasn't--I  began to lean on my own strength to get by. I became angry at everyone and everything super quickly. This was the stage in life when I began to develop seriously low patience, a people-pleasing, meek, isolated mindset, and I lost trust in everyone and everything. I began to be in my own world in my head a lot.  I never really prayed, I just attended church and loved the people there and had this superficial spirituality. And I basically began to mature on my own. Without recognizing at the time that it was a God-given gift, I grew in wisdom that many people my age don't really have. That also came from having extensive knowledge of the Bible, but knowledge does not equate to spirituality or salvation. The Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 8:1 that "knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." Without really realizing it, I didn't really love anyone. 

Underneath all of this, I had also been hiding for months--in fact, years--that I had begun to feel suicidal. I was God-awful good at covering it up, but that desire for Jesus to return or at least end my life so it would all be over and I could feel joy or peace or anything good was still there. I wanted to take it into my own hands and kill myself, but the Holy Spirit wouldn't let me. Every time I would go to sleep crying those many many years I spent being bullied and feeling totally alone and that little voice of the enemy would tell me that nothing was stopping me from ending it myself, some other little voice would tell me to keep on going. It didn't make anything hurt less and it didn't stop my crying--it actually made me cry even more knowing I still had to wake up the next morning--but God had redemption coming. I just didn't know it yet.

I desired so much to be loved by other people because of all of the hatred I had been given my whole life, and I was forgetting that God should be first in my life. I began to dive more into the Word in 2016, and slowly began to watch my life and my heart change.

But there was still something missing. I still had an empty space in my heart, and it wasn't for about another year that the Holy Spirit revealed to me that even though I was finally valuing God over any other relationship, I still felt alone deep down. I barely had any friends who were Christian, and even the friends that I had that were (including friends from youth group), I wasn't really close with them. I had no community. I mean, yeah I had my youth group, but even though I had gone to that church for years, I still felt like an outsider every time that I went. I was closer friends with all of the adults there than anyone my age, and though I wasn't alone spiritually anymore, I was alone physically and emotionally. I had no community.

On top of that, there was still something missing spiritually. One: I had this itch that there was so much more to Christianity than what I was being told. Sermons started to feel like repetition, and I had this feeling that there was so much more that I wasn't being told, but I wasn't sure how to find it. Two: my trust issues with people had been reflected onto my relationship with God. Often times, I wouldn't surrender certain things over to God because I believed I could handle it on my own. I had trouble trusting other people because of the situations I had been through, and I didn't realize for a long time that I let that same mindset into my relationship with God. 

It wasn't until 2019 that I realized this distrust that I had with God. And the distrust didn't just stem from my relationships with other people, it also stemmed from something deeply rooted in my heart that I had no idea was there. I had distrust with God because of bitterness that I was holding against Him. For many years of my life I had cried out to God asking for help and begging for my circumstances to change and asking why people were treating me the way they did, but I prayed so much that I reached a point early in life where I gave up. I wasn't praying because I didn't believe He would answer. I had convinced myself that He wasn't listening, and I was angry that I had gone through all that I had gone through. Even through the first half of 2019, I held bitterness against God for what I endured without even realizing I had that deeply rooted distrust. The next morning after bringing that to the Lord in worship, I felt more joy in my soul than I had ever felt before, and I wanted to tell everyone I knew about my experience.

Since then, God has moved tremendously through my life and taught me so much more. I've experienced endless amounts of miracles and answered prayers, and in every valley, God has been there to hold me steady.