To begin, my world, before I surrendered to Christ, was plain and simply a sad and lonely place. Sure I had friends, I had a wonderful family who loved me dearly and indeed let me know, but I wasn’t happy. Everything I did always left me short of complete happiness. And no matter how many people surrounded me, I couldn’t shake that awful feeling of complete loneliness. I had problems defining myself. I desperately tried to fit in, to discover who I was, and what made me special. When I was young my parents did bring my sister and I to a Catholic church regularly, but I retained nothing. Church going, to me, was a chore, such as doing laundry or making the bed. I believed church to be a “duty” and nothing more. It was a necessity, but it was only necessary for me to attend so my parents and grandparents would approve of me. I was Godly on the outside, but on the inside I was as distant from Christ as someone who had never heard of Jesu s. Eventually church lost importance in all of our lives, and we stopped going all together.

In 7th grade my mother announced she was an alcoholic. I was hurt, no doubt. I was confused. How could she drink and not stop? How could she drink all the time even if it meant she was not the mother we know and love? How could she continue to drink night after night even though she saw how clearly it hurt the ones she loves? I questioned whether she even loved us enough to quit. I truly believed her addiction to alcohol replaced her love for me, for my sister, and for my dad. She constantly wanted to be alone, and I missed her. The summer of 7th grade she went to a recovery facility for alcoholics. She was gone for 3 months, and those were the loneliest 3 months for my sister and I. My father, being a fire fighter, was gone every 2 days for 24 hours, so my sister and I frequently had to be shuffled from one relative’s house to another. All I wanted was to be home with my mom and dad, with my mom’s full attention. I wanted my mom home, but I didn’t want this new mothe r she had become. She had turned into a stranger. It broke my heart every time I saw that glazed, lifeless, cut off look she so often bore at home. I felt so lonely. She did eventually come home from The Recovery Center, sober and dedicated to her AA meetings. She was finally the mother I love and missed so dearly. I slowly began to trust her, and feel like our family had our loving and normal home again. Then, there came the day where we were informed by her and a therapist we were seeing, she had begun to drink again. My world fell to pieces around me. My security, trust, happiness, and my hope seemed to shatter. I was crushed. I decided if I couldn’t trust my own mother, I couldn’t trust anyone. 

Not long after my mother’s up and down battle with drinking reoccurred, I developed an eating disorder, anorexia nervosa. This began the summer going into 9th grade. I hated myself, I hated my body, I felt weak, lost, angry, confused, I turned away from my family and I replaced the little faith and comfort I still had in the Lord with exercising and starving myself. I felt so out of control and useless. I had no control preventing my mother’s drinking and I had no sense of control in my life, therefore, I controlled my body. Little did I know, I was slowly killing myself. My life was strict, ridged, planned down to what I could eat for the whole week, I recorded all the calories I ate and how long I exercised, I never saw my friends because I was afraid they would suspect something was wrong with me, I hid my calorie counting from my family and lied to them if they asked, I skipped social gatherings where there was food (as you can imagine, I had no social life whatsoe ver), I HAD to eat at a certain time or else I would become an emotional wreck, I could never even THINK about missing a day of vigorous exercising (which also caused me to miss out on so many opportunities to have fun), and I turned cold and angry towards my family when all they really wanted to do was help and find out what was wrong with me. I lost my youth and I became a shell. The scale was my worst enemy, and my best friend. Nothing made me happy anymore except fitting into smaller jeans and losing more and more weight. And I could never lose enough. I didn’t want to stop at a specific weight. I just wanted to keep losing until I eventually withered away to nothing…. This addiction never left me fulfilled. No matter how much I lost, no matter how little I ate, no matter how many pairs of jeans became too big, I was never happy enough. I knew something was wrong. Why wasn’t I becoming happier with all these things? Why did I continue to want more? Why is this al l I can think about? I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t love my family as they deserved, I couldn’t live. My life became too hard to live and be happy. If I didn’t do everything perfect, I couldn’t do anything right. And the fact that everything had to be perfect made it impossible for me to be happy. Life was too hard for me to live and I became depressed. When I couldn’t stand my life any longer, I went to my mother, thank God, and I asked for help. I was put into an intensive outpatient program for eating disorders. I went through 4 months of counseling and group classes. When I asked my mother for help, I was breaking some of the hold my eating disorder had on me, because, one of the rules of my eating disorder was I had to do everything alone, and could trust no one. Slowly, as the bondage and control my disorder had on me disappeared through counseling, I knew I was still missing something. I needed someone to give me a sense of safety, happiness, love, fulfillme nt, and joy that my eating disorder could not give me. I needed someone to take control of my life, because the reason my disorder developed was because I wanted something to control. So, I asked my mom to go to church.

Ever since I opened my heart to Jesus, my life is filled with all the things I lacked for so long. I no longer need to control everything happening around me, because I know Gods plan is better than anything I could ever have planned for myself. I am happy, because I God created me in his image, therefore, I am indeed beautiful. I gave all my control to the Lord, and I can now relax and let God take the wheel. With God in charge, everything has fallen into place, and I realized how big of a fool I was to think I could replace faith and comfort from the Lord with an addiction that I now recognize as a barrier from God. I feel safe knowing the Lord will watch over me. I now read my bible every night and I feel His presence like never before. The Lord has delivered me from despair and given me new hope. This was, of course, a gradual process for me. But from going to church weekly and being surrounded my hundreds of other Christians who were once lost like I was, I realized I ha d found someone bigger than myself. I had found safety. I would look around me in church and see the hands raised high, the misty eyes, the radiant smiles, the glow everyone bore, and I thought to myself, this has to be something special. I humbled myself to the Lord and openly asked for His help and gave him control, and He lifted the burden of the world from my shoulders. He was just waiting for the moment I would return to Him. Now that I belong to Him once again, I am happy, fulfilled, I am patient, and I welcome mistakes and learn from them. I know God has been waiting for me, waiting for the bondage obscuring my vision to be cleared. Now, I can clearly see how beautiful and smooth life can be when God is governing me. I live by his commandments, and I live with Jesus as my example. Because I now live this way, I no longer have a loss of I identity. I know who I am in Christ. I have never felt so alive in my life. I have a purpose, and that purpose is serving the Lord a nd doing His will and not mine. Because whatever God has planned for me, is the only thing I could ever want for myself.