My Testimony
   My testimony isn't exactly a page turner. (Although it is very long. I don't really expect anyone to read it all, I just wanted to write it all out and say what I thought needed to be said.) I've had a pretty easy life, even though I complain about it a lot. I've grown up in a Christian family and I've been exposed to church and Jesus all my life. We had serious money troubles for a long time while I was growing up, and I've fought with low self-esteem for a long time, but I've never been abused or neglected, and I've never been involved in drugs, violence, sex, pornography, or any of that stuff.
    I've known about God for as long as I can remember. My family went to church pretty regularly until I was six (when we moved to a new town, the one we're in now, and had to leave the church we'd been going to and felt a part of for 2 1/2 years) and sporadically for awhile after that. We rarely go at all now, but I really hope to change that. I knew how to pray and but not really why it was important. I was "saved" when I was nine years old, but that salvation didn't become *real* to me until just a few months ago. I guess I sort of thought that it was optional, that if you believed in God that was all it took. (That seems to be my mother's basic opinion; I guess that's where I got it from.) I don't even remember why I did it. I can remember a lot of times praying, "Jesus, I know You're up there and You want to take care of me, but I'd like to handle this one on my own."
    We started going to church less and less and I started thinking about God less and less--and focusing on the world more and more. I wasn't really like other kids, I liked to read and write instead of playing or watching sports, and I didn't wear the same clothes everyone else wore. At the time, of course, we couldn't really afford the same clothes and entertainment the other kids had. My parents separated when I was seven and divorced when I was nine, and my mother struggled to make ends meet on a part-time minimum wage job and public assistance for almost ten years. But I was trying to be more like the other kids I knew, and to be accepted. Our town is small, and our school is small, too, and I can only remember one obviously Christian person from all the years I went to that school--and he didn't start his religious out-speaking until we were juniors in high school. So of course I didn't have very wholesome friends. Oh, sure, they went to church some Sundays and to Vacation Bible School, but when they were outside of church they were definitely NOT glorifying God. There were a lot of times that I felt uncomfortable around them, and they liked to make me feel like I was weird or there was something wrong with me because I was different, but they accepted me and seemed to like me, so I continued to spend time with them.  I had a reputation as being nice, polite, and especially smart. I was the perfect girl with the perfect life. And apparently a pushover, too, because a lot of kids tried to take advantage of me as a target for their teasing (aside from being weird, I have had a constant battle with my weight since I was a young child, and I had a "bad" habit of befriending people who didn't have friends, helping people who needed help, and when my sense of rigth and wrong was stronger than my sense of shyness, sticking up for people who were wrongly accused), or my brain. I almost always knew the answers in class and I got good grades, so everyone assumed I was practically a genius and whenever we had a group project in school, whatever group the teacher stuck me with (no one ever *asked* me to be in their group, because I wasn't popular and they wanted to work with their friends) always let me do all the work while they sat around talking.
    Things weren't that great at home, either. My mom was angry or in a bad mood a lot. She was bitter about the fact that while she was struggling to stay afloat with two young daughters, my father was living the free and easy single life. He hasn't bothered to come see us, call, or write since Christmas Day 7 years ago. He wouldn't help her out at all. One time before we got government insurance, my sister (who was only 4 or 5 at the time) was seriously sick, and I was starting to come down with the same thing, and we really needed medicine that we couldn't afford. She had to borrow money from her parents because he wouldn't even loan her the money until payday. My mother was always fighting with Child Support Enforcement because they wouldn't get the child support money to her. (My father wouldn't bother to pay it, and his employer wouldn't take it out of his paycheck until he owed us a whole lot of money.) She was embarrassed for people to find out that we had all kinds of help from the government and private agencies. (I never was. It wasn't our fault--it wasn't like she was too lazy to get a job, she had a job and was always looking for a better one. And besides, I'm really proud now of the way we've managed to turn things around.) And our money gave us constant problems. I'm glad to say that my younger sister and I didn't often contribute to the problems. Our mom used to tell us sometimes how great we were and what a big help we were to her. We never grumbled when we had to stretch the milk until Wednesday (that was practically our motto; the public assistance checks came out on the first Wednesday of every month, and the food stamps came out on the third Wednesday) or asked for things we knew we couldn't afford. We understood that there just wasn't enough money to go around.
    We did have fights, though, a lot of them. I was very sarcastic (in a hurtful, hateful, mean way, not in a funny way) and I wanted to argue about every little thing. I had to always be right and I didn't want to drop the argument until I proved I was. I know that I tried my mother's patience more than once.
    One of the things that frustrated--and scared--me was the fact that my mom didn't think it was wrong for Christians to dabble in the occult. And she dragged me into it with her. One of her favorite Friday-evening pastimes was her Ouija board. (For those of you who don't know, it's pronounced "weejee board" and it's a big wooden board with all the letters of the alphabet on it, and usually numbers and a sun and moon. There's a wedge-shaped slider with legs that goes on it, with a see-through plastic circle in the middle with a pin in it pointing down. The board is supposedly inhabited by a spirit--ours told us that it was a dead Catholic nun from, I think, the 18th century--that can talk to the dead, predict the future, communicate telepathically with the living, and just generally answer any question you have. Two people put the tips of their fingers on the slider, one person on each side, and the slider moves around the board stopping on letters or numbers to spell out words. (If it stops on the sun, it means "yes," if it stops on the moon it means "no," that the spirit refuses to answer, or that the spirit is tired and wants to stop.) You can ask it questions, or you can just sit and wait for the spirit to tell you whatever it wants to say.) She also had tarot cards (they're supposed to predict the future by the cards that come up as you lay them out in a diagram) and she even once or twice bought witches' herbs. (She got some jezebel root one time. It's supposed to bring bad luck to your female enemy and it was intended to be used on your husband's mistress. She found out that the guy she had been dating actually was in love with his best friend's wife.) Another time she bought some "love beads" that were supposed to make your sweetheart fall in love with you. And a friend of hers taught her a few spells that her neighbor used, which, as far as I know, my mother never made use of.
    To make matters even worse, we suddenly started having trouble with a prowler. My mom got a second job, which was great, except that it was overnights, so my sister and I (now 16 and 13) were home alone four nights a week. We had motion-sensing alarms on all of the door knobs, but they were cheap and kept going off when no one was touching the doors. I lived in almost constant fear from Sunday through Wednesday every week.
    But through this all, God was there for me. I only turned to Him when I was in physical pain, and once after a band trip when I started shaking all over and couldn't stop, I was so scared that I asked Him to make it stop. (He didn't reach down and suddenly heal me, but He have my mother the presence of mind to call the hospital, and the woman there told her to put my in a hot bathtub and give me a sleeping pill. It worked almost immediately.)
    Things finally started looking up. We got all but kicked out of our house, which turned out to be a semi-blessing in disguise, because that was the beginning of a very long chain of events that got us where we are now. Suddenly, almost overnight, we were all in a better mood. My mom eventually got transferred to evenings, so she came home in time to talk to us for awhile before we had to go to bed and she was there all night and when we got up in the mornings (when she was working nights she didn't get off work until we were already in school). As I got more involved with marching band and with school in general, I started to make new friends. Most of them still weren't the greatest, but they were a definite improvement over my former friends, and they didn't try to change me into a clone of themselves, they liked me for me. (And I was slowly learning to like me, too.) One of them was the aforementioned Christian guy, who I've never been particularly close with but we're still good enough friends that when we see each other in the store, we stop and talk for a few minutes. Ever since elementary school, I'd felt like I was wearing a mask or playing a part; I was being who other people wanted or expected me to be, I wasn't being the *real* me. I got so good at being someone else that I didn't even know who I was any more. I thought that maybe the real me was just a body to fit into a costume and a role, that I didn't have a personality of my own. But now I was finally beginning to "find" myself. I was developing my own personality and opinions and beliefs. Unfortunately, those opinions and beliefs didn't leave a whole lot of room for God. I prayed most nights about trivial things like that I'd get an A on the next history test or that I wouldn't have any "spells" that night (more on that in just a second), and occasionally I'd talk to Him about how I didn't feel close to Him or like He was *real* to me, and pray that He'd give me a more personal relationship with Him, but as soon as I'd finished praying, I turned over, went to sleep, and shut Him out again. I had a conscience but not to desire to follow through.
    But there was one more huge trial in store for my family, and it started with me.
    My senior year in public high school was tough. A computer program put together the schedule of classes that were available to us, and also picked the classes each person got and their schedule. The only class I'd asked for that I *wanted* (as opposed to the classes I *needed* to get into college) was marching band, and I had to drop that because there wasn't enough time. I was taking an impossible course load which included calculus, college algebra, college biology, English literature, and a couple of others. We were on block scheduling, which meant that we only had four classes a day for 1 1/2 hours each, and a different 4 the next day, and then the original four the next day... But college biology (which just happened to be the most difficult class I have ever taken) met every day, and it was the extended hour-over 2 hours long. Since it was an actual college course, we had mountains of homework to do, and I also had at least 2 hours of math homework each night, depending (calculus took me longer than algebra). No matter how many hours of sleep I lost a night, I never got completely caught up on all my homework, and my grades slipped in a big way. I have hypoglycemia, which basically means that if I don't eat a semi-balanced diet, I get really sick. I end up with dizziness, sickness to my stomach, severe headaches, shakiness, and I could even end up in the hospital if I don't take care of it in time. But I hadn't been eating right for quite some time and it started to catch up with me. (I never ate breakfast because I felt sick in the mornings--which was caused by not eating right, and I mostly picked at lunch, eating a lot of junk food because the large amount of sugar would bring my blood sugar back up the fastest, and in the evenings I mostly ate a sandwich or a piece of pizza in between stacks of homework.) And the stress was getting me down, too. I never got enough sleep, because of all the homework. And although I didn't know it, I was developing allergies that needed to be treated, and when I didn't get any medicine for them, they contributed to the problem, too. And all of this was affecting my hormones, too. I started missing school, and I was out once for almost a week. I sat around the house all day feeling dizzy and sick to my stomach and being scared that something was seriously wrong with me. Even at night, I'd sometimes wake up freezing cold and shaking all over and have to get in a hot bathtub the way I had that time after that band trip. The principal at the high school (who didn't like me, because he thought his students should do whatever he told them no matter what, and I not only had the gall to question his absolute authority, I brought my mother along with me when I did it) decided to disregard the note from my doctor excusing me from school whenever I didn't feel good (he thought it was a sinus infection and that it would run its course and I'd been fine in a few weeks) and reported me to the school truancy board.
    My mom was really dissatisfied with her jobs, too. She was working too hard and still not really getting ahead. And my sister was having trouble with her friends. They were even worse than my old ones. So when my mom found an ad in the paper for a live-in houseparent at a facility in another town that housed 4 mentally retarded children, she seriously considered it. We discussed it at length, and visited the home twice (it was actually a foster home, and the woman who owned it wanted to spend more time with her family and to get things organized--she was moving to Texas) and finally we decided to take the job and move. That was like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. (This was in late November 1998, when I was 18 years old.)
    That's how we got into homeschooling. I was a senior in high school, and really shy, and I didn't want to go to a new school just for a couple of months, so my mom finally agreed that I could try homeschooling. (My sister wanted to go to public school, since she still had almost 4 years of high school left and she really wanted to make new friends.) That was one of the best things that could've happened to me. The school she finally picked was a Christian school and it has had an enormous effect on me. I'm so glad she let me do it!
    The trouble for the rest of my family was just starting, though. I won't make this even longer by trying to describe those horrible 3 months, but to give you an idea of what it was like: my younger sister, Andi, had to leave the home and stay with my recently-widowed grandmother (that was another bad thing that happened to us, my grandfather died in January while we were there). One of the kids in the home kept harrassing her to the point where she had some sort of nervous breakdown and couldn't stay in the house any more. She turned white and started shaking and couldn't even come out of my mom's bedroom until the kids were in bed, and even then I had to walk her down to her room (we kids all had bedrooms in the remodeled basement) and stay with her while she packed up the suitcases I'd loaned her and tried to box up some of her things--we'd already decided we were leaving at that point. She slept in my mom's room on the floor that night (she was used to it, because she used to sleep in my room when my mom was working nights, and I only had a twin bed, so I couldn't share with her) and we took her to my grandmother the next day. She also started homeschooling, which has been pretty good for her, too. I joined her a month later when we finally got out of that house and came back to the town where we'd come from. My mom stayed with a friend and got her old job back. She also got a new job. That was in March of 1999.
    Now, looking back, I can understand why all of those things happened. There were a lot of problems and illegalities with that foster home, and partly because of us, it was shut down, the woman who ran it put in jail, and the kids brought to a new town, where one of the girls who was a major behavior problem is finally behaving herself and even getting good grades in public school. If we hadn't gone up there and I hadn't gotten sick, we wouldn't have started homeschooling, and if things hadn't happened the way they had while we were there, we wouldn't have bought or been able to buy our house. We only got the Internet (which has been a HUUUGE blessing and impacted my life, and brought me all of my wonderful friends) because my mom was worried about us not having any friends if we were homeschooled and because we could afford it since we didn't have the expenses of going to public school. And while we were living with my grandmother, she realized how much she missed people and gave her house to her son, my uncle (who was having problems of his own that have been solved by her giving him the house) and moved into a small but very nice apartment in a senior citizens' complex. Now, she's surrounded by other retirees all day who have her same interests and who even take her places. (She can't drive, and she was depending on us to take her to the store and places, even though we live in a different town.) My mom is still working two jobs, but one of them is mostly work-at-home and the other is part-time, so she's pretty happy about that. She gets plenty of time at home to plant flowers and work on her house. (This is the first time we've bought a house of our own, and it's been really fun being able to redecorate and do whatever we want with it.) Our money troubles will never be completely over, but we have enough money now to buy all the things we need and most of what we want with money left over to spare. In fact, I "adopted" a little sister a few months ago through Compassion International: I sponsor an adorable little girl from Mexico. And my sister, Andi, was saved last week! She and my mom both are having a sort of spiritual reawakening. (And my mother ripped up her tarot cards and the Ouija board is purposely forgotten and left out in the garage. I think she's going to destroy it whenever she can get to it, but our garage is jam-packed with junk that we've got to get through first.)
    When I was sick, I felt... not exactly like God wasn't available to me any more, but like I couldn't reach Him or talk to Him any more. That was such a scary feeling, because I always knew that He was there whenever I needed Him, even if I didn't want Him any other time. That feeling lasted even after I got over being sick (which happened almost immediately after I left public school, because the stress was completely gone, and I could get enough sleep at night, and since I was home all day and my mom had quit her jobs to pack up the house and move, she made sure I ate better even when I didn't feel like eating ANYthing, and she took me to a different doctor who realized what was wrong with me and gave me allergy pills) and I just couldn't shake it. I stopped praying almost altogether and I just let myself be separated from Him, until one night I picked up a Bible off the bookshelf in the living room and started reading it, and I looked for and found some Christian friends on the Internet (if you ever want pen pals of your own, go to http://www.classifieds2000.com and place a friendship ad; you'll get more responses than you know what to do with) who sort of made me feel pressured to become a better Christian than I had been. It still took almost a year before anything really started to happen to me. Even after I discovered Onelist and made a *lot* of awesome Christian friends, I still didn't really feel convicted to straighten out my relationship with God. Then something just started to happen... I can't really explain it, it was like this little flower inside me started to uncurl. Then came all the last-minute hype about the new millenium, and I watched almost every minute of the celebrations and discussions on ABC on New Year's Day, and you know how you just get caught up in the moment and you decide to go on a diet, apologize to someone, or just fix whatever's wrong in your life on New Year's? Well, for me, it was more than that, I suddenly realized how messed up my life had become and how much help it needed and how much more I could do religiously. And all that time of feeling separated from God made me realize not only how much I needed Him but how much I liked knowing He was there, too. And the news anchors kept talking about how the new millenium was so special and important because we were moving into this new era and everything was going to be different because of how the world had come together to fight the Y2K bug and how this would be the first millenium after the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, and how there was no war or death or pain or messing up yet, because the New Millenium was still new and totally unblemished. I decided that it was the perfect time for me to start a new life and I made a New Year's resolution: I was going to be more of the Christian and the person that God wanted me to be. And, for the first time in my life, I've been able to keep that resolution! I'm not perfect, I never will be. But I know that God loves me and He's willing to be patient with me while I learn, and He will still be there even when I stumble or fall. I know that He isn't going to do everything, that I have to make an effort of my own. My relationship with Him isn't any different than one with another person: I have to put some work into it and invest some time in it, and give it priority over other things, and He has already worked at it--and died for it. My looks, my faults, my inadequacies, even my weight don't affect my self-esteem too much any more. You've heard that saying, "God doesn't love you because you're cool, you're cool 'cause God loves you!"? That's how it was for me. I felt like nothing when I didn't let God into all of my life, but just knowing that He loves me and thinks I'm awesome (I mean, would you lay down your life for "just anybody"?) and He wants me to succeed at what I do and be the best that I can be has made me feel good about myself and encouraged me to try things I never would have done before. I used to be too shy to look at people in the store; now, when I pass strangers on the street, I look at them, smile, and sometimes say "hi". I'm not saying everything is always sunshine and roses, I still get angry or depressed or fight with my mom and especially with my sister, and I still sometimes get mad at God for the things He puts me through, but He's always there when I get done acting childish, to shake some sense in my and to carry on with the job of showing me how to live my life and live for Him.
    I know this is long, and I'm sorry. I didn't even intend to write this much when I started! But I feel like almost every event in my life is tied together and leading up to this point and on into the future, and I just realized as I wrote this how some things were important to God's plan to bring me and my family to the point we are today, and I understood why other things happened to me even though I got really mad when they did. And if this blessed even one of you who read this then it's worth it.

<WWJD><
Kate :)

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