Author: Stories of Glory

“As a missionary kid, growing up in Europe, I never really felt like I fit in. I was not Portuguese and I was not American. However, when I started attending Black Forest Academy, a missionary kids’ boarding school in Kandern, Germany, I finally felt like I was with a group of people who knew and understood me. That was why it was so hard for me to come back to the United States in 11th grade. This was the first time I truly began to question God and his plan for my life. At BFA I had strong Christian friends who understood me and mentors who challenged me to grow in my faith. Why would God remove me from such a Christ-centered environment, to a place where I felt alone? Where I struggled daily to understand my purpose? Honestly, that question was not answered that year, nor the following. It took the next 10 years to start seeing God’s hand in that circumstance and to start to understand how He had chosen to guide my life.

After I graduated, I decided to attend Biola University and major in Biology. I was an ok student, but struggled in some of my classes. It wasn’t until 4 years after graduating from college that I was diagnosed with a condition called Focal Onset Impaired Awareness Epilepsy and found out that many of my learning struggles and memory problems were caused by the Epilepsy. Once this was treated with medication, I was able to go back to school and obtain my PhD in Biology and I think I got mostly all A’s!

As I look back on my life experiences thus far, I would say I have had three major struggles that truly wrenched my soul. The first two, I just listed. The lack of cultural identity, makes a person feel lost. It is hard to put in words, but essentially it makes one feel like they are constantly searching. The poor performance in school is hard for an intelligent person, which I am now ok admitting that I am. I understood concepts, but could not store them in long-term memory and communicate them back to my professors, which was so frustrating.

The third struggle was the loss of an adoption referral that my husband and I received 2 years ago. And again, to someone who has not adopted or planned to adopt, this is not an experience that can be easily explained. We were supposed to adopt a 2 year old little girl from Ghana; her name was Afia. We received the referral in May of 2015 and had completed all the paperwork. We were supposed to go and meet her then bring her home. However, providentially, the paperwork was held up. Eleven months later, the family that had abandoned her, came back and asked for her back. So, the adoption was canceled. For Afia, this was a good thing, for us, it was devastating.

As Disney-raised Christians, we expect the bad things in life all to work out. Beauty falls in love with the Beast who turns into the Prince and she escapes the mundane village to a magical palace. Yet, as I have seen the providence of God working out in my life and the lives of those around me, God has not promised a fairytale if we follow his will. Instead, the Bible promises struggles and I am learning to embrace these struggles (John 16:33). My husband and I have five adopted children and every day is a struggle to help them grow, learn and thrive. What I have learned in the struggles is not how to decipher God’s plan or where to find the fairytale. Instead I’ve found that I should continue to cling to him and follow his will whether I find out the reason for the struggle or not. He is God! His ways are higher than mine (Isaiah 55:8-9). Knowing that brings me peace.”

“During highschool, I didn’t understand what faith was at all and so I didn’t know what I was doing when I first went to Russia on a mission trip. But soon that uncertainty developed into a passion to tell others about Jesus but then slowly died down and became something I was only doing out of tradition. I hated being there because I was telling kids about Jesus without actually knowing if I believed in Him myself. As I was on this trip in Russia, I was at my end – I was ready to quit being a Christian. I told God, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore, I’m out” I still believed in God fully and I always will but there was just something that made me feel like I couldn’t continue – that there was too much that I couldn’t believe in. So I came to a point where I wrote God pages of letters telling him that He had to either prove to me that He is there and that this is worth believing or else I am just going to quit. At the bottom of the paper, I scratched in “ I NEED A SPIRITUAL REVIVAL”. Then the next day, after an extremely successful trip – I saw signs of God working in people’s hearts and I couldn’t help but ask “ what about my heart?” In Russia, there is a place called Spassk and its a very dark city. The church itself is right next door to a drug house. Late the night we were there, we played games – it was the end of our trip so we didn’t have to get a good night’s sleep. But when we started to wind down one of my friends started having a nightmare. But soon we realized – it wasn’t a nightmare. It was some incredibly scary spiritual warfare stuff. After hours and hours of praying, to the point where all we could say is “Jesus is Lord“ over and over again, God saved us through divine intervention. Everyone left with a different story that night but for me, it was God ripping through my doubts, fears, and depression and replacing it with His love and grace and glory. The next morning, most of us hadn’t slept but we still had to go to our last program. So we go to the church and literally, we sang the loudest praise we have ever done in Russia – speakers booming and we are screaming and jumping up and down. And so many kids showed up and praised with us. And that whole time there was one wall on the back of the stage all painted and cute but on the other side of it, there were prostitutes and druggies. And its so cool that we went from a place of fear in that city to God tearing that down and replacing it with something so incredible. The point is, that even this year there are things that I struggle with that just don’t matter anymore because God has already shown me His love and His power and His grace. Mental struggles do not define us – Christ does.”

“So, I was born with CP, which is a physical disability. This is something that I can’t really hide, and it’s been one of my biggest insecurities in my life, being different and not being like everybody else. I was afraid of not being accepted by everybody else, so I found acceptance through elementary and middle school in my friends, and then going to high school I started going to parties and finding acceptance in that. But then in the midst of all that, I started going to church with my dad, who wasn’t a part of my life growing up. We got reconnected and he introduced me to church, and through going to church I saw a group of people that accepted me for who I was, and not because they could fix me. So I started asking questions, like ‘why are these people so different, what’s going on?’ and learned that God didn’t make a mistake when He created me. That I am created in His image. He does have a plan and a specific purpose for me in this life, and He’s given me life for a reason. Through this extremely difficult time of figuring out what all of this means, I’ve wrestled with the question of, ‘am I somebody with special needs, or am I just like everybody else?’ And then I came to the conclusion that I’m simply a child of God that He created to do His work, and to glorify Him. So I get to rest in my weakness knowing that I am made in Christ’s image, and that He’s going to shine through me and use me for however He wants. I just have to keep a willing and soft heart to say ‘yes.’”

“When I was a kid I was very odd, something about my mental wiring was different. Eventually, that was discovered to be autism, particularly Asperger’s spectrum disorder, which means that I have difficulty interpreting social situations as well as having obsessive behavior as well as having an above average IQ. So when I was very young, I didn’t do very well in school. So that led to me getting tested. That testing led me to getting labeled by the state of Oregon as learning disabled. When you’re a kid getting told you’re going to this particular classroom and that you’re just a little bit different, you’re able to interpret that. You know what people are actually saying. They’re saying that you’re stupid, and that we don’t know how to handle you, so you’re going over here into more clinical situation. So I knew from a very early age that the world thought poorly of me. And throughout my entire life, the world said this about me. And so one day in elementary school, I took a breath because I was just so angry and so frustrated, and then when I exhaled, I didn’t feel angry, frustrated, or happy anymore. I didn’t feel anything anymore. I turned off my emotions for the next couple years and I said “I’m going to define myself. I am who I am.” And so I went through this process where I started letting the world define me. What happened was God wrecked my perception of who I am and what I’m meant to be, and right now, I’m kind of going through that again. Because when I was in middle school, I had my emotions turned off. When I got to high school, I logic-ed myself back into emotions. “Everything God made has a purpose, emotions are a part of everything, therefore, my emotions have a purpose. Dang it, now I have to start feeling things again.” So I started working my way back towards emotions, and then now what I’m working through is letting God define me. ‘Cus I let the world define me, and that didn’t work, I let myself define me, and that didn’t work, and now I’m fighting to let God define who I am, to have my own plan and have my own conception of what I want to do, and how I want to do it, but also being open to God pushing me in different directions. I am not who I am, I am who God says that I am.”

“I was raised by Christians, but I didn’t buy into the ‘Christian’ thing. I felt like church was a thing, and God was the thing church was about. When I was 11, I thought church was cool, there were nice people, I just didn’t believe what they believed. For the next three years, I lived trying to make myself as happy as possible. I decided life was what I make it, so I was in the pursuit of what was the best the world has to offer. But it left me really empty, thinking that if this is how it leaves me, life sucks. There’s nothing worth living for, but that’s all I had. So I became extremely depressed and a steady cutter. I had really great Christian friends at the time and they told me, ‘Christian, come to church camp.’ The speaker said on the first night, ‘I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what you’re doing. God loves you and he wants you, right now. You don’t have to fix yourself.’ I just kinda laughed, ‘if that’s the truth, if God really wants me for his purposes, then God is silly. I am a messed up kid and have nothing to offer God.’ I ignored it the first night, but it kept coming back, ‘Christian, I want you. Christian, I love you. I don’t care that you’ve done this, I don’t care what you’re going to do, you’re going to mess up a lot more then just now.’ Eventually, it just broke me, ‘God if you really want me, then I’m here. I know your love is real, and if you want me, then I’m running with it.’ And so I did. I became a born again Christian at 14, and that was the start of a wonderful journey.”

“Growing up my family was definitely a Christian family but church was not priority. I played sports and my mom was sick and it was hard to do things. The Lord blessed my growing up with not much family tension and a decent level of comfort. But in 2007, beginning of my 6th grade year, my mom committed suicide. That was the first time I’d ever really thought about life. I had prayed the prayer in 4th grade, but it wasn’t real. As soon as my dad told me that, I ran to my room and was just yelling at God, ‘Why would you do this?’ I was done, I shoved my emotions down and just went right back to school. Then a year and a half later my 18-year-old cousin passed away. The Lord used this to show me that life is precious and it’s fragile and it can be gone in the blink of an eye. I needed Christ on my own, my own relationship. So I committed to live for him in 2010. It’s been a fight ever since with healing a destroyed relationship with my brother, using unhealthy relationships to point me back to Him, and the Corban community to rebuild my life in Christ. I came here unknowingly weak and broken in Fall 2014 and God has used this place to transform my life. I will always fight my pressing insecurities, choking pride and inability to find my worth in Christ but He has shown Himself faithful hundreds of times and I know he’s not done yet.”

“So it’s preseason, and I’m playing really well and I tear my ACL. I had no idea what was happening. But through this process, I have gained so much joy. Every day I was just happy and rejoicing because I knew that trials can bring you closer to God. I learned that God is going to do something so cool even though I just tore my ACL. So this is the semester I would say that I have gained a relationship with Jesus Christ. Every day, I’m being revealed something from my past that I didn’t know then, but God is showing me, ‘Look at this, look at my glory.’”

“I was an arrogant and self-centered kid. My siblings called me the demon child. I know that if God had not been guiding me to Himself throughout my life, I would not be the person I am today. In middle school I was on a soccer team where the guys were not kind to me at all. After a really emotionally hard practice, I came home just broken. I sat down at the piano and started playing the song ‘I Surrender All’. In that moment I surrendered my sports and relationships for God’s purpose and glory. Ever since then God has been grabbing things in my life and saying, ‘this is mine, use this for my glory.’ God wants us to glorify Him in everything we do, and that’s what God has been showing me as a process of sanctification throughout my life.”