My Testimony

My name is Lyndy. I am eighteen years old and I love Jesus. Who would have ever known I’d write this in a sentence. If you would have asked me a year ago, I would have told you I came from a place of despair. When I was a little girl, I spent a good amount of time with my grandmother. Every night, she would say a prayer and we would say what we were thankful for together. I was too young to know what or why I was doing what I was, but I did it anyways. Besides going to church on Easter day occasionally, that was the only time I could remember being devoted to God in any type of way. When I was nine, my uncle passed away. That was the lowest point in my life. Going through grief is so much harder when you have to watch everyone in your family go through it for years, too. Flash forward to my freshman year of high school, where I was friends with the “popular girls.” You know when you want to be friends with certain people and you don’t have anything in common, but you try anyway? That was what I did, and I did not feel comfortable or happy or loved. Flash forward to junior year when I was in a toxic relationship for a year and felt unworthy. Flash forward to when my great grandmother started getting sick. Many restless hospital visits, broken hearts, and many tears later, to the night I came into touch with Him. It was the beginning of January and my great grandmother’s health was slowly declining. She was in the hospital and I knew my grammy was a mess so I went to see her. I will never forget the hopelessness and tears that filled and consumed her. We talked for a while and the last thing she said to me was, “I guess the only thing we can do is just pray.” Something about that sparked my memory and I was reminded of my time with her as a child. I went home that night, crying. There was so much loss in my life that I would break down every time something bad would happen. I thought about what my grammy had said, “Just pray.” I had never prayed in my life but I went into my bedroom, got down on my knees, heavy. I was crying and I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I went with it.

I said, “God please help me. I give you everything. I give you my grief, my anxiety, and my fears. Just please, take it from me.” And something special happened that night. I became in an intimate relationship with God that cannot be broken. I felt calm and weightless. He took all my grief and fears away from me and I no longer look back on those moments as a time of loss, but a time of purpose. If you asked me today, I would tell you that I come from a place of passion rooted through me, through the power of God.