My Story
Some questions are learned in books. Others are learned while trying to survive them. My life has forced me to wrestle with suffering, authority, betrayal, faith, and whether God remains trustworthy when the people claiming to represent Him are not.
I did not grow up with a particularly safe understanding of authority.
My childhood was unstable, poor, and often frightening. My mother demanded unquestioned obedience while also being unpredictable and violent, so home never really felt like a place where the adults were reliably in charge of keeping me safe. We moved constantly, sometimes through shelters and soup kitchens, and there were seasons when there was simply not enough food. My father was mostly absent, and school was not much safer. I was bullied relentlessly and, when I was twelve, sexually assaulted by a group of children in an after-school program.
When I was fourteen, I was sent to live with a pastor and his family. For the first time, I learned that some families did not operate like mine. I loved them. I considered them my adopted family, and I protected that relationship with everything I had.
Then the pastor sexually assaulted me.
I kept his secret because I was afraid of losing the only family I had ever experienced as stable.
Eventually, I lost them anyway.
At sixteen, I moved in with my father. Two months later, I was reading in my room when I heard a massive explosion and the house shook.
My little brother and I were still upstairs, but my father and stepmother had already gone outside to investigate. The car in our garage had caught fire, and the force of the explosion had blown the garage door off. After seeing the fire, neither my father nor my stepmother came back inside for us.
To make matters worse, my brother and I did not even know the house was on fire. I thought someone had crashed a car into it. Then, through all the yelling outside, I heard a voice that sounded like my stepmother telling me to grab my brother and get out of the house.
So I did.
I grabbed him, ran downstairs, and got us outside. Within moments, the fire spread beyond the garage and cut off the route we had just used to escape.
What stayed with me was not only how close we came to being trapped. It was that the adults who were supposed to protect us were already outside while we were still inside, and no one came back in for us.
That experience stayed with me, not only because I almost died, but because it became the first time I consciously recognized a pattern that would repeat throughout my life: people could fail me terribly while God somehow kept pulling me through. I did not always understand how He was present, and I certainly did not understand why He allowed so much suffering in the first place, but I began to recognize that His faithfulness and human faithfulness were not the same thing.
Two years later, I joined the Navy—partly to escape my family and the authority structure I had grown up under.
I can admit that did not solve my authority problem.
I tried hard and performed well, but during deployment, after my ship responded to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, my mental health began to collapse. I became severely claustrophobic and suicidal, and when I asked for help, I was often treated as though I were being manipulative or simply trying to get out of the military. I was hospitalized, later diagnosed with Graves’ disease, and eventually sent back to a ship while still medically unstable. At one point, I attempted suicide onboard.
There are parts of that period I still find difficult to describe without anger. I approached people in authority because I was not okay. Some people helped me. Others used that authority in ways that made an already desperate situation agonizingly worse.
Eventually, I was medically discharged.
I wish I could say church automatically became a safer place during and after my military life.
Sometimes it did.
Sometimes it absolutely did not.
At nineteen, I was sexually assaulted by a church deacon. I kept that secret too. Later, I became deeply involved in another church and spent years trying to make that congregation into the family I desperately wanted. I served, led, volunteered, and stayed longer than my husband thought was wise because I was still clinging to the hope that maybe this place could finally become home.
Eventually, I left.
By then, I had married my husband, had children, and attended college. My work toward a theology degree led me to compare what Christianity actually teaches about leadership, accountability, and the Church itself with what I had seen from people claiming to represent it.
That comparison changed me.
It also made me considerably less impressed by titles.
A few years later, I attended a church I will call “Heavenly Chapel.”
There were things I genuinely loved about it. There were ministries I respected deeply and people there who showed me real kindness. But I also entered one of the most painful seasons of my adult life while attending that church. Relationships with much of my biological family were collapsing, I was grieving intensely, and I was trying to stay functional for my children while feeling as though my internal world had come apart.
That season led to more than a few moments of falling apart at church, and that is when I realized something: very few people went out of their way to comfort me. I often cried in public and completely alone. This jarred me because if I saw someone visibly upset, whenever it was appropriate, I always tried to sit with them. But when I was desperately in need of a shoulder to lean on, nearly everyone walked right by.
There was one exception. A woman saw me fall apart, hugged me, prayed with me, and then actually called me afterward. Several times. That may sound small, but when you are barely functioning, someone remembering that you are still hurting after the prayer ends can feel like water in a desert.
Other experiences were harder.
At one church gathering for a beach baptism, I temporarily lost sight of one of my young sons playing in the water. I became convinced he might be drowning but it was so crowded I couldn’t find him. I asked a couple nearby to help me look for him. They told me they would keep an eye out, then immediately returned to watching the baptisms.
My son was safe. Thank God.
But I remember thinking afterward: what kind of community hears a mother say, “I think my child is drowning,” and does not immediately start searching?
That question was larger than that one moment.
Around the same time, I began asking questions about church finances, leadership, accountability, and governance. I wanted to understand how decisions were being made, who reviewed them, how resources were distributed, and what checks existed on the authority of church leaders.
Those questions did not go particularly well.
I became increasingly concerned about how money was being spent and how difficult it was to trace accountability for some of those decisions. I asked for financial information. I asked who approved certain expenses. I asked to see governing documents.
Then the situation became messy.
Very messy.
I became angry, sometimes too angry. I sent one email I probably should have rewritten before hitting send. I was quite sharp at times. In fairness, some of the responses I received were sharp too.
But I do not want to tell this story as though I was simply the flawless wounded person surrounded by villains. I was wounded, yes. I was also capable of wounding people.
I had to apologize more than once. I had to reconsider some of my conclusions. I had to listen when leaders gave me explanations I had not expected, and in a few cases I changed my mind.
My experience at Heavenly Chapel became larger than a disagreement over church finances or governance. It forced me to think seriously about what the Church is actually supposed to be.
What is authority for?
Who checks the people who hold it?
What does servant leadership actually look like?
What do Christians owe one another when somebody is suffering?
What happens when a church becomes very good at preaching, programs, events, administration, and ministry activity while people can still bleed quietly in the pews?
Those questions are not theoretical to me. Neither are suffering, abuse, betrayal, forgiveness, reconciliation, justice, or faith. Those are themes deeply embedded in my own life.
I’ve needed to know whether Christian theology still means something when the people teaching it fail to live it. I’ve needed to know whether God remains trustworthy when His people are not. And that distinction became one of the most important lessons of my life.
People have failed me. Churches have failed me. I have failed people too. But when I look back over my life, I cannot say the same thing about God.
That does not mean I understand every terrible thing that happened to me. I do not. It certainly does not mean I believe every painful event was secretly good, or that every wound was necessary in order to produce some larger benefit.
I don’t believe that either.
It means that after years of asking hard questions, surviving things I once believed would destroy me, studying Scripture, challenging what I had been taught, and watching my own assumptions fail along the way…
I still find Christ trustworthy.
That is why I care so much about how theology is taught. Suffering is more than a sermon illustration. Forgiveness does not erase consequences. Submission and authority must mean something even when authority is abused, and faith has to survive outside the classroom, where people actually suffer.
Some questions are learned in books.
Others are learned while trying to survive them.
My story contains both.
I’ve studied the books and wrestled with the scholarship. I’ve written essays, defended arguments, and been corrected by professors. And because of that, I know there is a great deal of knowledge out there that rarely reaches the everyday Christian.
I’ve also lived in the depths of despair and felt God lift me out. I’ve seen and heard horrible things and still known the cocoon of His peace. There have been many moments when I did not think I could keep going, yet I am still here. Even now, chronic illness keeps me confined to bed for most of the day. But through all of it? I have learned how steady life becomes when I trust God’s providence.
There has to be a place where book knowledge and life experience meet—where faith taught and faith lived sharpen and strengthen each other. Deep knowledge should not remain trapped in classrooms, commentaries, and academic journals. Christians need it in hospital rooms, grieving homes, broken churches, and the ordinary places where faith is actually tested.
So I chose to pick up the pen and start writing.