My Testimony - Walking Away

When I was 13, I experienced my first trial of faith.
The father of the children I babysat next-door, a very kind man named Craig, disappeared in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania in a snowstorm on January 15, 1993. I found out about it through a friend calling to see if I'd read the newspaper. Everyone told me that God answered prayer, that all I needed was to ask and believe, and I would receive the answer I so wanted.

For over two months, I prayed. I wholeheartedly believed that Craig would be returned safe and sound at first, but as time went by I began to doubt he was still alive. Finally, in March, people on snowmobiles came across the wreckage, and the body of Craig. Down deep, I wondered if my own lack of faith had anything to do with him dying. During the two months he was missing, I started attending church with family, after two years of them inviting me. Their church became my "home church," the first church I ever attended regularly. I went with them most Sundays throughout the early part of my teens.

His wife was so positive and did radio and speaking appearances and talked about how good God was, and how He promised to provide for orphans and widows. It was the first time I ever questioned the goodness of God. I did not understand how she could be so certain of her faith when God so clearly didn't bring her husband home alive. At the same time Craig's death propelled me to start attending church, it also made me start to reflect on my own life, and wonder... where was God when I needed Him?

Well, by the eighth grade, I had it in my had that I wanted to be on the radio. Not really sure why - that goal was pretty short-lived. But I did manage to charm enough deejays that I found myself showing up on morning and evening request shows as a semi-regular guest. I was all of 13 years old at the time. My dad always accompanied me to the stations and I guess people were impressed with a kid who had so much gumption. I started a makeshift radio station at my middle school - which consisted of playing cassette tapes during lunch in the cafeteria - but that didn't last long, either.

In the meantime, I was making friends with the deejays... really good friends. Too good of friends, in some cases. Most of them were really nice people (with the exception of one morning host who mildly tolerated me) but a few of them were pervs. I met more than one perv, but there was one in particular - a guy who was fairly well-known in the area - that I became quite close to. He had a son my age (he was about 32 at the time) but he rarely ever saw him, and he used to tell me that he related better to kids than he did to people his own age.

I was a pretty stupid kids, too. Did I mention that? If someone said that to me now, I'd freak out, but at that age I "got it." I felt like we had some weird cosmic connection - he preferred kids, I preferred adults. It was perfect. But the conversations quickly turned sexual. He tried to convince my best friend at the time to let me sneak out of her house in the middle of the night to go meet him. My friend - always the smarter one - said absolutely not.

That relationship carried on until the summer before my freshman year of high school, when I told my mother I was going down the street to the library. It seemed fishy to her, so she called the library and found out they were already closed for the day. She encountered me walking up the road, demanded I get in the car, and demanded that I spill my guts. I told her the truth through sobs. I don't know what happened after that. I know my dad called and threatened the guy, but that's as much as I know. I never saw or heard from that deejay again.

I didn't know it was the start of a pattern in my life.

As a freshman in high school, I wanted to change. I was a Christian, actively telling people about the Gospel but sleeping with older men and not living out what I preached. I went to "See You At The Pole" that year and met a girl who was a senior, and we started a school-wide Bible study that met during club periods. We also started a daily morning prayer group that met in the cafeteria. I led both of them, taught lessons, led prayers, and as I got older and both groups continued to grow, I "trained" the younger kids to lead once I and the other leaders graduated. I attended youth group every Wednesday and went to church with my neighbors on Sundays.
I wore Living Epistles t-shirts and listened to Christian music and was doing a great job on the outside with the surface-y stuff.

That year my family got our first computer. The internet was new and most people didn't have it. I had America Online and Prodigy, which were online services minus the World Wide Web. (That didn't come with the package until a year or two later.) Back then, you didn't pay a monthly fee, either, you paid by the minute. Like a lot of other kids, I was fascinated by the online world and I started racking up outrageous phone bills and my parents wanted to kill me, put me up for adoption, or at least give me to my aunt in California! At first, I chatted about my faith in the Christian chat rooms and I got involved in the Friends of Amy (Amy Grant fan club) section of AOL, but it was through the advent of the internet that the aforementioned pattern in my life began to emerge.

I chatted with guys - always online, usually much older - and met them in parks or office complexes. Sometimes it was on the basis of just getting to know each other, but usually it was with the full knowledge that something physical was going to happen. It's a shameful part of my life and one that went on up until I met my husband, but I tell it anyway because I meet so many kids who meet up with strangers online and believe they are safe. Maybe people will look down on me for that, I don't know, but I'm going to keep talking about it. I went for the men versus the boys because I thought they were more mature. Too bad they were pedophiles, but I didn't think that way as a teenager.

I was also starting to drink. My parents always had a full supply of alcohol in the house. I took bits here and there, adding water to fill up the bottles. I started drinking with my friends, too. I must admit, my high school BFF and I still get a laugh out of remembering the night we spilled sweet vermouth on the white carpeting in her bedroom and how hard we worked to get it out before her parents got home from work. I didn't need a friend to help me drink, though. I did just fine on my own, all alone.

And some of those men I met online brought drugs. I smoked a lot of pot and dabbled in a few others here and there. The only thing that kept me from becoming a hardcore drug addict was the fear of how my parents would react when they realized what was going on. To be honest, I was so deep in despair by that point, the thought of becoming a drug addict actually appealed to me. I didn't care. I hated myself and I hated my life and I thought God had given up on me, so what did it matter?
Finally, I did stop meeting men online. When I was 14, I met a 25-year-old EMT online and he took me to the county park, where he asked me to do things to him that I wasn't comfortable with doing.

I refused.
He raped me in a pile of leaves and drove me home.

By my sophomore year, I had attempted suicide twice (and would attempt it again in the coming year) and I had started cutting myself with a box cutter I kept in my backpack. I'd sit in class (on the days I didn't skip school) and slice myself under the desk. I constantly wrote about and talked about suicide. I was flunking all of my classes and I'm pretty sure the only reason I passed from one grade to the next was because my teachers didn't want to deal with me a second time around. I'm a professional writer and yet I was flunking the lowest level of English every year in high school because I absolutely DID NOT CARE about anything in my life.

The feelings I had as a child of being different, of something being wrong with me, came flooding back to me as a high school student. Yes, I'd been molested. Yes, my family was troubled. It was more than that, though. In the 10th grade, I started seeing a counselor and attending a support group for girls that had been sexually assaulted, and I told my counselor that I felt like I was "riding waves." For a few days or a few weeks, I'd feel like I could take on the world. I'd throw myself into my studies, I'd stop cutting and stop writing about suicide, and I fell in love with God all over again. I read the Bible all the time and prayed and hadn't a single doubt in my mind that He loved me.

But after a few days - a few weeks max - the waves would crash over me again. I'd stop caring. I'd give up on following God. I'd go back to harming myself and wanting to die. That was just how my life was - up and down, up and down. The highs were incredibly breath-taking and the lows felt like the pit of Hell. No matter what I did, I could not find a happy medium. I was a chronic insomniac. I rarely fell asleep, and when I did I woke up many times during the night until I finally gave up. I was exhausted and miserable.

In the 11th grade, I attempted suicide one more time... but it was more for attention than actual suicide. I began taking Zoloft, an antidepressant, and it quelled my depression just enough to stop the cutting and attempts on my life. By my senior year, I wasn't sleeping around or harming myself, and I actually had fun that year, but I still wasn't walking with God. I made zero attempts to live the Christian live; I just lived. I believed in God and I wanted to love God... but I was so frustrated with the roller coaster my faith had been in the past, I simply wasn't willing to try anymore.

I thought that attending a Christian university would help me get my spiritual life on track. I wanted to go to school in Nashville, TN to become a songwriter. I chose a private Church of Christ in the suburbs and settled on campus in July 1997 and joined a youth ministry service group and campus Bible study in the hopes of "getting into God." Unfortunately, the extremely legalistic theologies taught at the school and I found myself deeply confused.

I had stopped taking my Zoloft shortly after I arrived in Nashville - at first I forgot it, then I couldn't be bothered to refill it. As my beliefs became more muddled, my depression began to creep back up on me. My insomnia worsened, and a good friend at college spent countless hours trying to talk me out of suicide. I began drinking heavily and taking a lot of risks, like driving with people who were drinking behind the wheel and even sniffing and huffing CD cleaner. I also started meeting and becoming physical with men again. There were good times too - meeting my musical heroes and going to concerts I never would have had access to anywhere else. But nothing could quell the despair that was overtaking me once again.

I flunked out of college that first year. I rarely went to class and I attended chapel even less - a major no-no at my school. By the time I left school and moved back in with my parents, I wasn't sure what I believed about God or if I believed at all. I wrestled with what I THOUGHT I believed versus what they taught me in chapel. I took my old job at a nursing home back, wrote songs, and drank.

By 1998, I was further from God than I'd ever been.

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In the next segment, I'll talk about my journey back to God. Pin It