My Life Prior to My Salvation:

I was raised in a Catholic family and attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. Given this environment, all of my friends were Catholic as well. In my early teenage years, I began to hang around with a rebellious group of friends, who did not attend my own school. I had a boyfriend who was involved in drugs and I began to drink and party.

My life as a teenager consisted of promiscuity, rebellion, disobedience, partying, and the list goes on. There is one word that can sum it all up—SIN. I loved every minute of what I was doing, because behaving in such a way numbed the absolute misery I found myself in. Deep down, I was ashamed and hurting. But to drink and party was my way of coping. I thought I could handle it all on my own.

I had a boyfriend who I thought loved me and I loved him. I had no clue what love was. I could not handle it on my own, but rather than turning to the One who could handle it all, I attempted to take my own life. After being hospitalized for several weeks and subsequently placed in a group home for 6 months, I returned to my parent’s home with a new perspective. I wanted to be happy and to do better for myself. It proved to be a much more difficult challenge once I was placed back in the environment that I had once lived in a pit of sin in. It wasn’t long before my old ways crept back in and the partying started back up. Then came the depression. Since I was Catholic and attended Catholic schools, I was regularly attended mass and went through all the required Sacraments. I was going through the motions, but nothing was clicking.

How I Came to Know Christ:

One night, I stayed up in my room all night crying and praying. I had a horrible fight with a friend because of my absolute betrayal to her, again a result of my sinfulness. I was 16 at the time and believe it was shortly after my Confirmation because I had a bible available to read. My family had never read the bible together and it wasn’t something that was really talked about, but that night, I just felt compelled to read the bible. Even though I had attended Parochial school my entire life, I didn’t know much about the bible. We never read it in religion class, but rather used textbooks that focused more on Catholic doctrine. Thus, I know now that it was the power of the Holy Spirit that prompted me to open up the Gospel of John.

I read the entire Gospel of John that night, pausing at moments to cry and pray my Lord Jesus. I couldn’t believe the countless ways that I had sinned, each recollection of sin bringing me feelings of nothing but shame and disgust. To finally understand that Jesus paid it all on the cross was so overwhelming. How could He, perfect and sinless, give such a sacrifice for someone like me? I couldn’t believe it, but my heart knew it. My heart knew Jesus was the only way out of the pit of sin that I lived in. I needed to turn to Jesus right then and there, so I did. I knew I was a sinner and I hated that part of me. I wanted to be pleasing to God. I wanted to be forgiven and I asked forgiveness. I couldn’t believe that Jesus would forgive me.

My Spiritual Rollercoaster:

In the following days and months, a dramatic change took place. I knew that something was different. I felt different and I lived differently. My friends changed, my activities changed, and my attitude changed. I was happy. I hadn’t been truly happy for years. I was in Christ and He was in me. It was amazing! Still, the faith community that I was in was not one that supported or understood what I was going through. We didn’t read the bible and I didn’t grow spiritually in God’s Word. I didn’t know to take the initiative to do so. Thus, after a couple of years and upon my entrance to college, I began to drift further from God.

Then, in the fall of my freshman year of college, my step-brother was killed by a drunk driver. I was so angry with God. How could he do this to our family? Already I had dealt with my father’s 6-bypass open-heart surgery and my mother’s breast-cancer. Both of my parents survived these medical problems, but still, hadn’t we been through enough? My church at college extended their condolences and took many efforts to reach out to me. However, I was mad at God and did not want anyone to get in the way of that. I stopped going to church, stopped praying, and began to take up some of the sinful activities of the past.

By the following summer, I was pregnant with Gabriel, my first child. His father, Justin, and I had only been dating for a few months. I was 18 and he was 20. Neither of us were ready to be parents. By God’s grace, we were married when Gabriel was 2 ½ years old and have now been married for 3 years. When our son was around 8 months old, we had him baptized in the Catholic Church. We were not practicing any kind of “faith”, but it was important to me that we raise him to know God. At that time, this meant that we started attending church regularly and had Gabe baptized.

Justin did not have much of a faith background, so he went along with my ideas and took the classes to become Catholic as an adult (RCIA-Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults). Soon after our Catholic wedding in 2004, our church attendance decreased and we became less involved with church activities. In 2005, we moved to Ames so that I could pursue graduate studies in Marriage and Family Therapy. We decided during my first semester that we would try to have another child. By then, Gabe was nearly 4 years old and we were finally financially stable and looking forward to having another child. Everything seemed to be perfect. I’d be done with school soon, Justin was working full-time, and Gabe was getting older. One thing that took us a while to realize, but is now all that we cling to, was understanding God’s plan for our precious baby who was yet to be born, how it was not in accord with our own plan, and how he has used her life to impact us and those around in countless ways.

We found out at 20 weeks along in our pregnancy that our unborn daughter, Chloe, had a rare chromosomal abnormality, which caused very severe problems with her brain development. The prognosis for the condition, holoprosencephaly, was 100 percent fatal. When faced with the decision to continue the pregnancy or induce labor at that point, the choice was clear. We knew that the only way we could honor life and give our daughter a chance at life was to continue the pregnancy. So with the news and limited time given, we did what we knew best to do at the time.

We went back to the Catholic Church and attended faithfully every Sunday. No one at church knew anything about the situation that we were in, nor did we dare tell anyone. Church for us consisted of showing up, singing some songs, shaking hands, and receiving communion. Church was a place and an activity, not a group of believers. But still, I knew that God was pulling on my heart strings. When we found out about Chloe’s diagnosis and prognosis, all I could do was cry out to God, first in anger, then in desperation. Maybe this was punishment for all of my previous wrong-doing. Surely, I must have done something to deserve all of this! I know now that our God is a loving and gracious God who is for us, not against us.

Chloe was born on May 11, 2006, weighed 3 lbs. 6 oz. and was 16 ½ inches long. Chloe lived for 45 minutes before she went to be with Jesus. I can vividly recall that at the moment her death was pronounced, the song “Better is One Day” was playing. The lyrics state, “Better is one day in your courts, better is one day in your house, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere…” meaning in the dwelling place of the Lord. I thought about how that song could not have been more fitting for that very bittersweet moment. To know that my little girl was in the presence of God for eternity got me through those days and continues to do so now, more than a year later.

Assurance of Salvation:

A couple months after Chloe was born, my family visited Lakeside for the first time. We came because some good friends of ours, Jen and Doug Diers, kept our son for a sleepover the Sat. before. The plan was that we would then visit Lakeside on Sunday and pick him up from there. At this point, we were looking for something different. Although we were regular church attenders, we still felt like something was missing. When we went to Lakeside, we were overwhelmed by the hospitality and welcoming attitude of everyone. We were surprised that people were actually talking to us. When we introduced ourselves, many already knew who we were, as they had been praying for us throughout our pregnancy with Chloe and after her death. This fact alone spoke volumes to us. Members at our current church didn’t even know what had happened, didn’t bother to ask why I was no longer pregnant or where the baby was, and even after spilling our hearts in a letter to our priest about it all, we got no response.

With all that said, we decided to return to Lakeside the following week and to eat lunch with Pastor Dave and his family, along with the Diers’ after church. We spent ours discussing religion and spirituality, but most importantly the personal relationship with Christ that you must have to be assured of your Salvation in heaven. I was finally starting to realize what happened to me 8 years ago, when I was 16 and prayed to Jesus to bring me out of the circumstances I had found myself in! I was saved that night and now I was being brought back to Christ in a faith community that would disciple and support me in my spiritual walk with Christ! Equally exciting, my husband came to know Christ as his Savior in September and I had the privilege of being with him when he surrendered his life to Christ one Sunday after church, along with our good friend Jen Diers.

Walking in the Light of Christ:

We have attended Lakeside ever since that initial Sunday, and each and every week, I have grown in God’s Word. My husband and I have become involved in small group bible studies, have begun to pray together and as a family, and are excited to be in the Word individually. It has been a struggle this year, with coping with our daughter’s death, but we realize that Chloe’s life had a purpose.

One of those purposes is clearly that from the suffering we’ve endured, my husband has been brought to repentance and is assured of Salvation through Christ Jesus (2 Corinthians 7). We’ve grown in our understanding of God’s will and accepted his perfect plan (Jeremiah 29:11-13). Ecclesiastes 11:5 reminds me: “As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.” That’s where faith comes in. So often we want to know the results before they occur. We need to know the end of the story and we demand to know why bad things happen to good people. I’m satisfied and at peace knowing that I will be reunited with my daughter in heaven, because of what Jesus did on the cross for ME! There is no end to the story for me because I will live eternally. I can’t even fathom what that will be like and constantly remember Romans 8:18, which tells us “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”