Growing up with a violent father and a mother with serious mental illness, Anna concluded early on that God either didn't love her or didn't care — until a crisis at 18 and a conversation with her sister cracked everything open. In this testimony, Anna shares how the truth about who God really is, the love of a church community, and decades of healing transformed a broken girl into a wife, mother, and Christian counselor.
I had a bad childhood growing up. So my dad was violent and my mom had serious mental illness. I had four siblings and we all grew up kind of rough and neglected.
But my mom was very religious, so we grew up going to church every Sunday. So I would go to Sunday school and we would glue these little cotton balls on a piece of paper because Jesus is a fuzzy lamb and he's our friend and he loves us. Then I would go home and that didn't really match what I was seeing at home.
I didn't see any love. So I kind of came to the conclusion that Jesus must not love me and eventually I just came to the conclusion that God was just kind of watching, refusing to intervene, kind of laughing at my suffering. Then I grew up into a pretty angry teenager.
I was very hostile towards God. My friend and I would mock God and make fun of Christians. Then when I was 18, something really terrible happened and I almost died.
In that moment when I almost died, I just kind of turned to God in a moment of brokenness and was like, just what do I do? I don't know what to do. I obviously didn't die. Then my sister invited me to stay with her after that just to get away from things.
My sister had moved to Columbus for college and had joined this church and was living in a ministry house. I had been to visit her before and she was like, oh, you should come join us in this church. I was like, no thanks.
That's cool that you and all your Jesus freak friends love it here and go to church every day, but that's not really for me. When I was visiting, she was talking to me about what had happened and she told me that God was angry about what had happened to me. I was like, no, he's not.
God doesn't get angry. He's a fuzzy lamp. She showed me some Bible verses about how God does get angry.
He gets angry about sin and he hates sin. That really struck me because no one had ever really cared about the things that had happened to me. It felt like, wow, God is angry.
He does care about me and the things I've seen. Then I told her, if I would have died, I would have gone to hell. She was like, why do you think that? I was like, what do you mean? I was doing drugs and I was doing bad stuff and I definitely wasn't doing anything the Bible said to do.
She was just telling me, that is not what the Bible says about who goes to hell. She was showing me verses about how actually everyone goes to hell because they fall short of God's standard. That's why Jesus died is to pay the price that we owe for our sins.
Anyone can go to heaven if they receive that payment for themselves. That was the greatest thing I ever heard. I was like, why doesn't everybody do this? Her and I prayed together and I received Jesus's payment for my sin, which was really exciting.
Then when I was hanging out with her at the ministry house, I felt like God answered my prayer. I just sort of heard from God like, what do you do? This is what you do. You should come join this fellowship and follow me.
I quit my job. I lived in Cincinnati at the time and I moved from Cincinnati into a ministry house and just decided to throw all in with God. I was kind of a huge mess at the time, obviously.
God has brought me so far and I've had so much healing since then. I've been in and out of counseling since I came here because I had a lot of stuff to work through. Then I was living in a ministry house and a lot of people just kept pursuing me in love, even though I was really rough around the edges.
That was really impactful. I have one friend, Holly, who I feel made a huge impact on me because she always really believed in me. She would speak a lot of truth to me, which I really needed.
I didn't always respond well in the moment, but she knew that I would go pray about it and work it out with God and get on board with God. She spoke a lot of truth to me. One in particular that really stuck out to me, that really helped me follow God, was she was challenging me on something.
I can't remember what. She was challenging me and I was like, well, I can't do that. She was like, why not? I was like, well, because I'm really messed up.
I'm really broken. She just called me out on it and was like, that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says that God has good works for everybody and there's no caveat for people who are too messed up.
That really challenged me and really helped me take a big leap of faith in my walk, knowing that God doesn't see me as less than or give me a lesser part to play because of the things I've been through. Same as everyone else, He has good works for me. He wants to use me to love people and grow the kingdom.
That was really awesome. I've also had healing from doing those types of things. I have been mentoring a girl for about a decade.
I met her when she was six in a Bible study called Lighthouse. I started mentoring her when she was eight and she's 18 now. It has been really healing just to get to be the source of stability and love that I never had for someone else.
That's been really sweet. God gave me a great husband. I grew up in a violent home and my husband literally never yells.
I've never heard the man yell. He's so kind to me. We get to have a daughter.
I get to steward this little person and watch her grow up into who God created her to be. I get to come alongside her in figuring that out. That's really exciting.
I also got to become a Christian counselor myself. I don't work now that I have my daughter, but for a couple of years I got to really help people work through their stuff and find God's healing and appropriate God's love into all these areas in their lives. God has taken us out of the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of light.
My story really is kind of plain in the sense that you're like, wow, the big reveal is I went to college, got a job, and got married and had a kid. That's what everyone does, but that's not the path that I was on at all. For me, it is a miracle that I ended up just having what everyone else has.
I think that's really cool. God just really did take me out of the domain of darkness and put me into the kingdom of light.