As the years went by, and I left home at fifteen and married the same type man I was used to being around. He was like my father. He was a drinker. We had a lot of problems with his temper and him being a physical abuser. As I was growing up, we had spent many years with abuse and perversion in the house.
By the time I was thirty, I had experienced five failed marriages. I felt like I could do nothing right, like I had this big black cloud hanging over my head that followed me everywhere I went. I felt dirty and ashamed. I became a heavy drinker and a serious drug addict with many different kinds of drugs: cocaine, PCP, horse tranquilizer, pot, Quaaludes, valium, all of it. I was also a thief and a liar. My life just continued to get worse. Although I needed and desired a relationship with a man I also loved and hated men at the same time because men had hurt me and abused me from the time I was in the first grade on. Still, I felt this terrible desire to have one all the time.
The last marriage I was in I felt like my life was in jeopardy. I had a gun put to my head several different times. I had been beaten. I really feared for my life. I remember getting down on my face before the Lord and crying out. I said, “If you’re real and if you’re even up there...” I didn’t even know, at the time, if He was or not, “If you will get me out of this marriage alive...” I wasn’t sure that I was going to survive it, “I’ll never look at another man unless you speak to me and I hear your voice.”
I owned my own hair salon. An evangelist, his wife, and three children were clients that came into the shop about every five weeks. Every time they came in they would invite me to church. Over and over and over, I turned them down. Finally I thought, “It wouldn’t hurt me to go to church one time, and I don’t want to offend them and lose their business.” So that was my reasoning for going.
What an impact it had on me when I saw these men and women sitting in church together. The men had their arms wrapped around their wives. They would smile at one another. You could see that they loved each other. They had love in their eyes for each other. It was something I had never been around. I’d never seen anything like it. It floored me.
As I sat there that day, feeling dirty, shameful, crying, my heart and my spirit shattered to pieces. I couldn’t imagine what God would want with me. I said, “Lord if you’re really real. If you’re really there and this is you that I see in these people, then I want all of that. I want everything that you’ve got for me.”
A few weeks later I became a Christian. My life has never been the same after that. The world even looked different. Nobody looked the same to me. Even the trees and the grass didn’t look the same. Everything was brighter and cleaner. I had such a hunger for the Lord that all I wanted to do was just read and pray and study and learn.
I have never felt the desire or the need to marry after that. I feel really complete. I feel like if God wants me to have someone He will put them in my path and set that up. If He does that’s fine. If He doesn’t that’s fine. Since receiving Christ, I no longer feel the desperation of having to have a man. It’s just not there anymore. I no longer need that. I feel like God has set me free.
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