"I came to know the Lord at a young age, got baptized when I was really little, but lacked an understanding of what it meant to be a true follower of Jesus. I believed being a Christian meant showing up at church every Sunday and following the rules as best as I could.
“Throughout my adolescence, I looked for my worth through affirmation from other people. When my now husband, Jesse, and I started dating, I was very focused on what he thought of me and what I could get from him to help me feel loved and secure. But whenever I was feeling insecure, I would also try and look for affirmation from other guys.
“At the end of high school, I recognized the life I was living wasn't great. Even though I didn’t want to fall into the same struggles, college brought about a wave of tempting ways to live.
“Jesse and I got back together at the beginning of college after breaking up in high school, which felt like a chance to redeem the past relationship we had, but we were met with a different slew of new struggles. Very quickly, we fell to a lot of sin in our relationship.
"I was still looking for my worth in him, compromising my beliefs, knowing that we shouldn't be doing things that we were. I justified it because I thought I was a ‘good’ girl. I was still going to church, and I wasn’t going out and partying, but I was not honoring God with my choices.
“In my junior and senior years of college, I was really living for everything the world said would make me happy. I still would have considered myself a Christian, but I do not think anyone who knew me would’ve thought that. Jesse and I were fully immersed in our sin, not feeling any conviction about it whatsoever. I even started to party and drink more, looking for my worth in the things that people thought of me and the people who I was with.
“I knew I shouldn’t have been doing the things I was doing, but I liked the false security my sin gave me and wasn’t willing to turn away from it. But after college, I came to student teach near my family in Dallas, which was definitely the Lord's provision in pulling me out of that lifestyle.
The move brought a lot of things into perspective and helped me realize Jesse was who I wanted to commit to in marriage. We got engaged in 2018 and went through Merge, Watermark's premarital class. For the first time, we actually understood how and why purity in our relationship matters, and I'm really thankful to that ministry for showing that to us. It completely changed how we walked into marriage.
“When we got married, we did all of the right things. We joined Watermark and were so excited to join a community group. We understood the importance of walking with people, and we really wanted accountability to have a good marriage. On the outside looking in, things looked really great.
“Marriage, however, shines light on a lot of things. Sin started to be uncovered on both ends of the relationship. Jesse was struggling with not being content, and I was struggling with deep insecurity. When conflicts came, there was never true repentance, only empty promises of how we’d try to be better. But that only made things tense and uncomfortable.
“During a vacation, tensions came to a head. We couldn’t stop fighting, and finally something just clicked. I realized that I couldn’t change myself like I had been trying to do. I told Jesse that I was going to start re:generation, Watermark’s recovery ministry, as soon as we returned from our trip and that he could join me if he wanted to.
"Attending re:generation was the biggest catalyst of change in our marriage, but also in my personal understanding of what it meant to have an abiding relationship with Christ. I no longer desired to check off the boxes of Christianity but to develop an actual relationship with Jesus.
“But following Jesus did not mean things would be easy and that life would be perfect. In spring 2023, Jesse and I faced serious challenges when, in a span of a few weeks, I unexpectedly lost my job, found out I was pregnant, and then miscarried.
"It was really tough to think, 'God, I know your word says you're good, and I really want to believe that, but why is this happening? All I could do was have faith in my grief that he was going to use this valley for my good and his glory and pray for the Lord to help me in my doubt and unbelief (Mark 9:24).
"I still feel the sting of that loss, but I can look back and see the sweetness in that season, too. The Lord provided for us spiritually, emotionally, and materially through the people he graciously put in our little corner, and that blessed us beyond what we could have imagined.
“We are now living out the Lord’s faithfulness with our 9-month-old daughter, Maggie. This new season of parenthood is so humbling, and I'm learning (again) not to try to find my worth in motherhood and to relinquish control over how I want things to be.
“Nothing has looked as I hoped or imagined in parenthood, but God is still good. He is sustaining me through every hard day and every new valley that pops up, offering me peace and security that can only be found in him.”