From Broken Soil to Unshakable Peace

I grew up knowing of God and Jesus the way you know distant stars, aware they existed, but never close enough to touch. My mom’s side of the family was Christian, yet church was rare. Sunday school happened maybe three times, each visit leaving me terrified and shrinking into the corner. As I grew older, even those faded away. Life pressed too heavily on my mother for consistent faith practices.

It was mostly just me, my little brother, and her. My father came and went – more present than many absent dads, but never steady enough to heal the deep daddy issues I carried. My older siblings had already left, unable to bear the toxicity that sometimes spilled from our home. We drifted through projects and borrowed rooms, never rooted in a real neighborhood or home. Bills loomed like storms. Lights might flicker off without warning. Hot water often meant boiling pots on the stove for a lukewarm bath. WiFi at home was a fantasy for us.

School brought its own quiet wars. I wore dirty uniforms and mismatched socks, the bullying relentless about my face, my teeth, my nose, the way I smelled. Teachers sometimes took pity, slipping me McDonald’s and letting me eat lunch in their classrooms away from the cafeteria noise. We never had the shiny things other children flaunted. New schools came with every move. Around us moved a haze of drugs and addicts. In those unstable shadows, I was molested and sexually assaulted by men and boys my own age. The wounds ran deep and silent. Yet on the surface I stayed smiling, unaware how much damage was taking root.

I became a people-pleaser, a quiet yes to anyone who asked. My mom fought hard for us. We never slept on the streets. When food stamps arrived each month, it felt like Christmas; she let us pick whatever we wanted at the store, her eyes lighting up at our excitement. Summers held their own fragile magic. She loved tanning, so we’d spend hours at the pool. I felt heavy and insecure in my bathing suit as a little girl, convinced I looked wrong. But after the first awkward hour, I’d plunge in and stay hidden beneath the water, safe from judging eyes. Movies were our shared escape. My mom’s love for them – Blockbuster nights, Redbox, the theater when we could swing it – planted in me a lasting affection for stories, especially Marvel’s heroes who somehow kept fighting.

My father’s betrayals cut deepest. Cheating, drugs, other women; he left and returned with excuses my mother forgave again and again, hoping to weave us into a family. He never stayed for long though, always an excuse for his abandonment. When my little brother and I stayed with him, the house was never truly safe. One terrifying day, the FBI raided while we stood just feet away. Agents seized us roughly, throwing us over their shoulders like sacks. My brother screamed as they pinned him down; I rocked in the grass, frozen in fear, the world shattering around me. That chaos tore us from our mother and placed us with strict grandparents for nearly a year. We missed her with every breath, crying through every court-supervised visit. She fought the system relentlessly – classes, fines, court hearings – because she knew we belonged with her. She won us back, and I embraced the next new school without complaint, just grateful to be home.

At thirteen, Mom received a stage 3 cervical cancer diagnosis. I met it with stubborn denial: “She’s strong. Nothing that terrible could touch us.” Family prayed, calling any improvement a miracle. A year later it returned as stage 4. Chemo stole her strength. I shaved her long, beautiful blonde hair myself – those smooth, shiny strands I had always admired falling away as I whispered to myself that it was only hair. She lived in my father’s chaotic home for a while but needed more care and eventually moved in with my nanny. I watched her body and mind slowly fade: a bag for waste, constant hemorrhaging, foggy thoughts, calling me my sister’s name. My own heart began to ice over. Outside, I turned trauma into jokes and forced smiles; inside, a quiet depression bloomed.

The first time I tried to end my life, cruel bullying struck on a video call. My face was mocked and compared to a blobfish, the picture posted online in front of my crush. Old wounds ripped open, and for the first time I believed every ugly word. I grabbed a bottle of pills – twenty-five or more – from a cabinet nearby and swallowed them all. I survived, violently ill and hospitalized for days. Visiting Mom afterward, she drifted in and out, repeating my sister’s name before locking eyes and whispering, “Why would you do that… that was stupid… please… please… please.” Her weak, repeated plea pierced me deeper than any scream. I promised I wouldn’t try again.

Yet the weight grew unbearable. I avoided her, convincing myself I was simply a busy teenager. In truth, I was a coward; I couldn’t face what was happening to the woman who had carried us through every storm. When I finally stepped into her hospice space at my nanny’s house – hospital bed, machines humming softly, her once-vibrant body now scrawny and still – my heart plummeted. I turned and fled in pure shock, unable to believe it had become so awful.

The pain was unbearable, but I built the courage to go back, sat with her a long time, and whispered apologies and how much I loved her. She couldn’t speak the words back. I could not hear my mother’s voice tell me she loved me one last time. She slipped away the next morning. I was fifteen. My older brother woke me in the dead of night, tears streaming down his face as he said, “Momma died.” The pain was a canyon, raw and indescribable, swallowing everything I thought I knew.

Two weeks later, I lost the dog she had given me. It felt like losing her all over again – the final thread to her love, severed.

Grief swallowed me whole. I cut myself in hidden places, raged at God for taking her, and searched frantically for anyone or anything to fill the gaping hole she left. Depression led to another attempt; antidepressants chased by sharp slits to my wrists. Right before, I texted my best friend “I love you.” She was only fifteen feet away. She found me just in time. Paramedics said minutes more and I would have been gone. In the mental hospital, severe depression became my diagnosis. My family rallied in ways that still humble me – my brother racing down the freeway, my little brother praying through tears for me, my sister reaching to understand. We had all lost Mom, but I had convinced myself the pain was mine to carry alone.

I spiraled deeper, numbing everything with pills and whatever else I could find. A toxic relationship mirrored the chaos I knew: constant fights, hands laid on each other, police calls. We slept in separate rooms; intimacy had long vanished. I cheated, chasing fleeting validation. Then came another blow that shattered what was left of my heart – my cousin, who I loved very much and had grown up with, killed his mother (my aunt) and her husband. In one unimaginable moment, I lost my aunt, and the cousin I had cherished. He was sent to prison for life. My older brother went to prison for seven years around the same time. Losses piled like stones.

Then grace intervened in ways I can hardly explain. God gave me a strength I didn’t possess on my own to leave that relationship. I packed boxes in secret while he was gone and walked away, heart trembling but finally free. Living with my father, still broken but breathing easier, I worked hard and dated casually, quietly searching for something real.

At the chicken plant, in an orientation class that felt divinely timed – we’d both missed the earlier session – I met Matthew. Something gentle and unfamiliar pulled me to him. We talked simply: favorite foods, colors, pets. After our shift, he handed me a free Sprite at the gas station – my favorite. A small, sweet kindness I hadn’t known in so long. I leaned out the car window and offered my number so he could text first. Our first date nearly faltered when he learned I was still seeing others, but honest conversation won. We stayed. Four months later, I was pregnant. Our daughter arrived like a living, breathing blessing eight months after that – tiny, perfect, and already rewriting my heart.

Motherhood rewired my soul in ways no one had warned me about. Matthew had always spoken softly of God, played Elevation Worship in the car, and prayed quietly for me even when I brushed it off. His family embraced me with open, non-judgmental love from the very beginning. His mom once shared that my own mother had seemed to visit her, asking her to watch over me. Something in me believed it completely.

One ordinary evening, I joined them at an Elevation Worship concert – my first. I expected songs, not an encounter that would crack me wide open. The Holy Spirit wrapped around me like arms I had longed for my whole life. Tears I had dammed up for years broke free. I cried through the entire night – not pretty, controlled tears, but deep, shaking sobs that carried every unsaid goodbye to my mom, every hidden cut, every night I had felt invisible and unworthy. It was overwhelming, terrifying, and the most peaceful thing I had ever known. Afterward, voice hoarse, I whispered, “I’m not angry at God anymore.”

My heart opened wider than I thought possible. Blessings began to unfold like quiet dawn after a long night: Matthew’s father built us a home, my first true one, where lights stayed on and hot water came from the tap. My father, from what my grandmother left behind, gifted me a 2022 Honda Civic, a car so nice I sometimes just sat in it and cried with gratitude. I drew closer to my older sister – a relationship that had never existed in my whole life – and that closeness became one of the sweetest, most unexpected blessings of all. Matthew received a truck. Stability, real love, and family that felt safe began to surround us.

Looking back across the projects and boiling-water mornings, the raids and hidden assaults, the cancer rooms and the nights I wanted to die, the numbness of drugs and toxic emptiness—I finally saw the thread. Every wound, every wrong turn, every tear had been guiding me, step by painful step, toward God. He had walked beside me unseen through it all, believing in me when I saw only brokenness and shame. It took twenty-four years of soil-breaking pain, but I finally surrendered my heart fully to Jesus.

Now I carry a peace the world cannot explain: pure, unshakable, and often bringing tears of its own. I cry easily these days, not from sorrow, but from the sheer overwhelming love I feel for Him. Love that fills my spirit, my quiet prayers, my daughter’s laughter echoing through our home, and the warm embrace of a family that chose me. I know my mom rests safely with Him, hand in hand with Jesus, no more pain, no more machines or silence. My God is not some distant figure in the clouds. He is here – everywhere, all at once – in the ordinary and the miraculous alike.

If you’re reading this from a place that still feels dark – whether you’re hiding tears in a bathroom, carrying old wounds no one else sees, boiling water for a bath because the lights are unreliable, or lying awake wondering if anyone could ever love your mess – you are not alone. I was that girl: broken, angry, empty, running as fast as I could from the pain. From nothing, through everything, God reached down and found me. He loves you fiercely, exactly as you are, scars and all. Jesus stands ready, hand extended with the same patience He showed me. Take it. Let Him draw you close. He turns the deepest scars into stories of grace and redemption. He did it for me. He can do it for you.