My Testimony: Part 3
- Gabriela
- Jan 6, 2022
- 12 min read
Updated: Apr 13, 2025
There’s a battle between good and evil // And it’s raging inside of me - Chris August
Our minds are a battleground. Our flesh speaks one thing, the enemy speaks another, the world cries out, and the Lord has to speak to us through all of it. Whichever voice you feed more will be the voice you hear the loudest. As I sit in the Lord’s presence, I am able to focus on His voice. But I have heard all the voices before. I have listened to other voices over His. As a result, my mind has been ill at different points in my life. The battle for my soul began waging before I even truly understood what I had said yes to. This part is my attempt to verbalize how God has worked through my mental health and transformed my mind.
My Creativity
My mind and I have not always been friends. Even as I write this I can feel my brain wanting to shut down so I do not go back to past memories. However, from fear to depression to anxiety and probably some ADHD mixed in there, God has walked through it all with me.
I gave my life to Christ initially when I was 4 years old. At the time I did not fully grasp what that meant or what that looked like practically. Without a full grasp, I spent parts of my life struggling on my own, thinking that it was my job to do it on my own.
In second grade I started in a new public school where the people I knew were either in a grade younger or grades older than me. I rode the bus by myself and was bullied on occasion. I cried to my mom and the bus driver but no one seemed to be able to do anything about it. Only my seat buddy on the bus helped by shielding me from the bully when she was on the bus. I learned that I had to take care of myself and no amount of crying will cause someone to help. That same year, fear crept into my life.
The fear began one night when I was laying in my room by myself, ready for sleep. Something drew my attention to open my eyes so I opened them and I saw a green glowing hand holding onto the railing of my bed. For some context, I slept on the top bunk because I shared a room with my sister. I felt fear course through me and I bolted out of bed to find my mom. She was in the downstairs laundry room with my sister and they both gave me a surprised expression. My mom told me nothing was there and I went back to bed. After that night there were many instants where I felt fear in bed by myself. I couldn't close my eyes or fall asleep because fear was keeping me awake. The way I coped was by sharing a bed with my sister.
Fourth grade was when I found a school I wanted to be at and started being more comfortable. Then my family moved to Arizona halfway through the year. This move caused me to fall into an abyss of depression, bitterness, and more fear. I spent most days at home with my family and when I was with friends at school I was on the quiet side. It didn’t help that my friends at school shared secrets with other people so I didn’t really trust them.
My parents decided to homeschool me in fifth grade because we were moving midway through the school year. This was the third time my parents tried homeschooling and my sister was in school too so most of the schooling time was focused on my sister. It felt like I taught myself most of the content. I even figured out how to cheat on the quizzes because I didn’t know what to do.
Once we moved to another house, I started at the nearby school. I joined the choir and band, making friends in every class. I even had my own room, which really wasn't a plus because I was still afraid to sleep alone. The summer before sixth grade, my parents had me go to church camp. This was a challenge because it was the first time the one constant in my life wasn't there, my family. However, at this camp, the Lord showed up and reminded me that He was a constant too. During that camp, I rededicated my life to Christ. I felt like my life was getting better. I was sleeping by myself more often. I stayed at the school I had gone to the previous year. I even stood up to a bully, which ended with a threat from him and me telling my teacher and vice-principal. The bully left me alone and I ended up gaining the respect of my peers. I was well-liked. I started attending the church group for my age, I was at a school I liked, I got to help kids on the bus, and I wasn’t in my house all the time. And even though I still didn’t have friends I wanted to bring home or spend time with, I was hopeful.
That feeling came crashing down when I was told I was changing schools in seventh grade. It was a smaller school where we had to wear uniforms and my parents had to drive me to school. Fear crept back in and I started finding myself back to sharing a bed with my sister but she stopped letting me stay with her so I slept in my brother's bed, whichever brother would let me take up space.
Since the new school was a K-12 school I made my parents promise me that I would graduate from the school, which they agreed to. I tried the bigger friend groups at the new school and couldn’t figure out where I fit in. So I ended up having a small friend group in junior high. I felt more comfortable having people over knowing I would stay at that school. Going to church was also more consistent for a number of reasons. I got to spend time with a Christian community, I got to learn more about God, I got to spend time with new friends, I got to spend time with my dad, and I got to see the guy I had a crush on. I even made friends there that I could hang out with outside of church on occasion.
Despite life seemingly going well, there was still something wrong. It wasn’t until the middle of eighth grade that I realized what was wrong. It was all because my friend decided she wanted to watch a horror movie for her birthday. After watching the horror movies the fear became paralyzing. I wasn't sure how to cope because I was too big to share a bed with my siblings. The first thing I tried was reading as much of the Bible as I could until my brain was too tired to keep going. That worked for a while until my sister and I swapped rooms with our brothers. Once we swapped rooms, reading the Bible wasn't working as well, nor did I want to keep reading it in huge chunks. The next thing I tried was listening to worship music while trying to sleep, which abated the fear a bit and allowed my mind to dream of being a worship leader (my cousins and I had written songs and talked about starting a band, so I clung to that idea). I created the dream, to begin with, and over time would manipulate the dream to include the people I wanted and to switch up who was doing what in the band. Some nights though, the worship music wasn't enough. So on top of reading the Bible, praying, and listening to worship music, I started sleeping with my phone lit up to a picture of the guy I had a crush on at the time.
Over the summer before my ninth-grade year, I began to realize I wanted to focus on God in a new way. A way I had never experienced before. The church camp helped guide me through a routine of how to study the Word and how to pray. I started putting what I learned into practice and I could feel God pulling me out of the pit of depression I had fallen into back in fourth grade.
Not only did the Lord pull me out of depression, but He also opened my eyes to the fact that I was chasing after the wrong things. He showed me that despite my best intentions, I was mainly going to church for a boy, not Him. So I decided to give up my feelings for the boy I was "in love" with. However, I wasn't sure how to do that. I wasn't sure how to hand things over to God. Since I had been using my dreams to cope with hard things, I began to manipulate my dreams to create dreams where the boy would do something to break my heart. These dreams felt so real, I often cried in my sleep, and I could feel my heart breaking. Once those dreams stopped having an effect on me, I created a council in my mind made up of different versions of myself. Each one had a different purpose, attitude, and view of who I was as a whole, but the version that ruled was a part of me that made me feel worthless, unneeded, and unloved by pointing out all my failings and issues that made me less. I had found a new way to create a feeling of pain. This council was a fallback of mine until about my junior year of high school.
In my junior year of high school, I took on the task of running the student ministry tech department. I trained volunteers, made sure the slides were ready for service, and eventually scheduled volunteers. Through that, I ended up meeting my first boyfriend, who convinced me to go on my first mission trip with him. It was another step closer to seeing what the Lord had for me in life. The mission trip stirred up desires to do more in life, to change, to help others. The only way to do any of that was to draw closer to the Lord. As I began to spend more time with Him, He began to reveal the bitterness in my heart towards my parents because of the move to Arizona. He helped me to forgive them and let go of the anger that I was holding onto. To further deepen my relationship with Him, He pushed me to join a two-month mission trip with Institute for Missions (IFM). Through the eight-month training program, the two-month in-country experience, and the two-month debrief, the Lord brought healing and freedom to my mind. My heart was renewed and committed to knowing the Lord better, so I promised to pursue the Lord only through my freshman year of college.
Freshman year of college was great. I grew in my relationship with Christ exponentially and was so ready to take on everything. I had a solid group of friends and a church community that I loved. But my mind was fixated on traveling. I desperately wanted to study abroad, hoping that the experience would improve my life just as IFM had.
Once my sophomore year began, I began to pursue studying abroad. My mind also became fixated on boys and which ones might like me, and whom I should start dating. This trend followed me into my trip to Spain and drew me away from God just enough that I did not notice. While in Spain, I allowed myself to indulge in my desire to travel, meet new people, and spend time with any guys I wanted. It wasn't until near the end of my time there that I realized I had spiraled out of control and was no longer as focused on God as I was before. I began to feel like I had gone too far to go back to Him or our relationship.
When I got back from Spain, my parents asked me to lead at church camp, I felt unworthy and unclean. Yet I still went. That week, the Lord showed me a fresh perspective about who I am and who He had called me to be. He reminded me that He has made me clean, that through Him I have worth. He restored my heart in the course of a week. But I wasn't out of the woods just yet.
I started out the next school year feeling like everything was going incredibly well. I had a boyfriend who I was convinced loved me and the Lord. I had just returned from another country with many stories to tell. However, once I started reaching out to my friends from before the trip, I began to realize how much I had lost in my striving to study abroad. I had few connections I could turn to, and my friend group had been reduced to three. To top it all off, the Lord opened the door for my parents to move to Michigan without me. Once again, fear crept back into my life, anxiety began to grow, and my mind started to spiral. I prayed, and I cried out to God for a change, for healing. His answer was for me to go to counseling, so I started researching counseling options. Everything was too expensive for me, and I did not want to burden my parents with the cost. Instead of trusting in God's provision for counseling, I sought out mentorship. Despite not following God's initial request, He still honored my time with my mentor. He guided us to choose a study that was also relevant to our lives.
The pandemic started shortly after my parents moved and when my mentoring started. COVID exacerbated the fear that had crept in, and that fear was once again paralyzing. Yes, the pandemic was a time where I rededicated my life to Christ, but there were many nights where I clung to the truth that I could cast out fear in the name of Jesus. There were even nights where I had to cast out the fear out loud because it was overwhelming. I even wrote blog posts to start sharing what was going on when the nights were intense. But no matter how hard I tried, the fear, anxiety, and spiraling got to a point where I needed meds to sleep. Once it became unbearable, I finally decided to cave in to the Lord's request to seek counseling. As a student worker at my university, I had heard of the school's counseling options, so I decided to research it. Eventually, I found out the school had free counseling through the master's students practicum lab. Through counseling, I was able to put a name to and visualize my anxiety and fear. I was able to see it as something that could be overcome, not something that could overcome me. At the same time as counseling, my mentor and I started reading through Get Out of Your Head by Jennie Allen, which focused on the spiraling aspect of mental health. Both the study and counseling pushed me closer to the Lord.
As I drew closer to the Lord, my boyfriend drew farther away. We started to argue, and I became fearful of being myself in our relationship. This caused our relationship to fall apart, and I felt like a failure. After we broke up, I spent a week or two in tears and in bed. I cried out to God and left it all at His feet. He comforted me and brought me out of that period quickly. He had been preparing my heart all summer and fall for it without me realizing it. Once I was able to get out of bed and get back into church, I prayed for the next steps regarding my church community. He asked me to get plugged into a new church and start serving, which was weird for me because I knew I was not staying in the area after graduating, nor did I want to.
Once I started developing relationships at the church, I began to feel on fire for the Lord again. I began to wish I could stay in the area. I began to pray for the opportunity to stay, but the Lord quickly granted me peace about moving. There was no doubt in my mind that I had to move back to Michigan, despite how sad and fearful the idea made me. I had told myself many years before that I would never move back to Michigan. It was the place where everything started, where every struggle began. I did not want to be forced to face it all.
Moving back to Michigan was not as challenging as I thought it would be. However, it was still harder to get plugged into the church and the family lifestyle that I had been without for 12 years. When I went to the family church camp, God showed me that the revival, the change, the growth in the church that I had been praying for was happening. He used the few times I went to the young adults' service to reveal to me that I was still holding onto the past and allowing it to influence my life. The morning that we gave each other our rocks to carry each other's burdens was the first day I took the step towards letting go. Each day, I took the steps to move closer to Him.
One night, as my boyfriend and I were doing a devotional, I realized that I still had a lot to let go of. I was still struggling to hand all of the past over to the Lord. That night, I prayed about entering counseling again, and the Lord granted me peace about the decision. Not long after deciding to enter counseling, I received a phone call from my sister that left me feeling like a failure and worthless. At that moment, I took the step to sign up for counseling again. I also began to share my past with absolute strangers and started the journey of posting my testimony. And how faithful the Lord has been to bring healing, bit by bit, as I am faithful to Him.
In this season, counseling has challenged me to relive my past and process it. Some things from the past came easier to process than others, which is why this portion of my story took so long to write.
Since my testimony has been reliving my past, there will be one more part that will share how God has been working in the present and what He is calling me to in the future.
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