By Angel Marti
There are a lifetime of stories I could tell that many people would be shocked to hear, but that is not where my biggest challenges lie. My experiences are a part of what made me who I am today, and I am thankful for even the worst moments.
I grew up the oldest of three with a single mom who was only 16 when I was born, 18 when my brother came, and 25 by the time my younger brother arrived. I loved my mom and my brothers so much, and I took on the care taker role for all of them. I love my family more than anything, and I am so grateful to my mom for not giving me and my brother up or aborting us, as so many people told her to. She happily sacrificed her whole life for us, and I am thankful to her for that, no matter what bumps we went through.
I have struggled my entire life with believing I was loved, or that I was worth anything. I talked a big game and was very independent and self-sufficient as long as I can remember. I also prided myself on being able to take care of myself and anyone else around me. Early in life, I learned how to take charge and “handle” a situation.
Ever since I remember having a thought, all I ever wanted was to be a mother, and I wanted lots of kids. Perhaps I thought, like so many other young girls, that if I had children, I would have someone that I knew for sure loved me and I would have them forever! I was going to be the best and most perfect mom because I would love them so much that nothing else would matter, and my love would protect them and they would grow up and be happy! Little did I know how completely backwards I had it.
I have always been very good at setting goals and achieving them. I had a plan. I would graduate from college and marry by age 24. I would then have my first child at 25. Somewhere in there I would buy a house. Check, check, check, check. But all the check marks weren’t permanent.
I got divorced after a nasty and abusive relationship.
“Ok,” I thought. “I’ll just start over.” I got married to my second husband and had another child and bought the house of my prayers! God is so good!
After 12 exhausting years and fighting like heck to save the marriage, I divorced again. While there was mental illness and other issues that were beyond control, it was still a failure that wounded my heart.
Now, I have 3 kids, no husband, and I would have to sell my home. I felt like a total and complete failure. I had failed my kids. The one thing in the entire world I did NOT want to do. I failed God – at least I sure thought so.
In the midst of all of this, my oldest child went silent. I didn’t hear from her for 2 years. It was 2 years of pure hell for me. I would go into their room and just cry and pray. One of my other children tried to kill himself. And my other child was showing signs of OCD, a fate I could not fathom for her!
How could this have happened? How could I have so completely failed my own children? Parenting is the one thing in life I thought there was no way I could mess up.
Through all of this, I struggled so much with feeling loved. I felt that God was punishing me and that He was turning his back on me because I was such a disappointment. My faithful pastor was by my side the entire time, reminding me of God’s promises and how much he and God loved me. He told me that I was not a failure and I was not alone. He said something to me when I was at my lowest and just wanted to die. He said “Angel, sometimes you just have to believe what you know over what you feel.” I knew what he meant, but I didn’t know what he meant. How could I truly believe it if I didn’t feel it? He knows that I am a very emotional person, and he has always been very good about telling me that it was a good trait and not something I needed to push down. He would tell me God made my soft heart, and I should stop trying to harden it. I wanted to harden it though – It hurt too much to have such a soft heart and live in this world.
At the worst of this, I remember laying on my bathroom floor with the door closed and the water running, tears gushing out of me, every cell in my body aching from pain, begging God to take me home. “I can’t do it,” I told Him. “I can’t.” He needed to do it because I couldn’t! He didn’t take me home. After some time I stood up, dried my face off, and walked out of the bathroom. That was four years ago, and it was the beginning of this particular journey for me. Although I considered myself a Christian my whole life, I had never really given anything back to Christ. That was about to change in the most unlikely of ways.
Through all of the tragedy and pain, I made a very hard decision. I chose to give my children back to the Lord! And at some point in that process, God gave me a clarity I had never experienced. I began to believe what I knew. I began to trust that God really does know better and that He actually does love me. He opened my soft heart and poured His love into it, and I had this overwhelming feeling of gratefulness.
There have been times in my life that I did temporarily feel loved by God, and I felt grateful. So I thought I better cherish this because it would soon be gone. I thought I would soon go back to feeling unlovable and in pain. I would soon go back to living in fear for my children and in fear that I would NEVER be loved fully for who I am.
But this time, the sense of God’s love for me didn’t go away.
Even as I write this, my heart feels like it is physically expanding with gratefulness. My worship is so much more. My prayer life is so much more. My joy is so much more. My service, my love, my everything is just SO MUCH MORE! I feel like I see life in color now. As I look back I can see myself letting go, giving in, and surrendering to my FATHER! All of the things I thought that would make me weak are making me stronger! I know how cliché this sounds, but it did NOT happen overnight. I did not do anything to earn it or deserve it. It really did happen through complete surrender. In all honest, this was mostly because it felt like my only option.
Today, I still struggle, of course, but I REFUSE to believe the lies! I refuse to take what belongs to God and try to control it. I will tell myself, out loud if I have to, that I am loved, that I am worthy, and that I am forgiven! I will tell God that He has to take it and that I can’t do it. I will remind myself that these amazing miracle children of mine are really HIS in the first place and that He loves them EVEN MORE THAN I DO! I will do anything for them and they know that! I finally really do trust God! I thank God! I love God! And He loves ME!
Praise God and hallelujah!
