The Testimony I Didn’t Know How to Tell

After I was born again (or awakened or whatever one calls it), there was a question that kept coming up… “What is your testimony?” And every time, I struggled to answer. I didn’t have the kind of testimony I thought I was supposed to have. I didn’t come to Him because I had everything figured out. I didn’t come because I had finally become the person I thought I needed to be. I came because I had reached the end of myself, and I had to surrender.

I surrendered in the middle of a hurricane. Not just a literal storm, although it was that. My roof was beginning to come off. But it was also a season where everything I had built my life on was being stripped away, including the things I thought I could control, the things I thought would protect me, and the things I had used to survive. Everything was being shaken. And there, in the middle of it, He met me. For a long time, I thought that moment was my testimony.

The moment I finally let go. The moment I finally stopped fighting. The moment I finally said, “I can’t do this without You.” But almost four years later, I began to understand something deeper. That moment was not the entire testimony.

Because the testimony was never that I finally reached Him. The testimony was that He had been there all along. He met me in the storm, and He rescued me when I could not rescue myself. He covered me when I had nothing left to stand on. He pursued me when I didn’t even fully understand what I was searching for.

I thought my testimony was the moment I surrendered. I did not realize surrender was only the beginning of the story He was writing.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted And saves those who are crushed in spirit.
—Psalm 34:18

Before I share the parts of my story that are painful, I want to begin with something that is also true. I love my mother. That truth has never changed. This is not a story about someone I hate. It is not a story written from bitterness. It is not a story where I place myself above her. It is a story about what God has been revealing, healing, and restoring in me.

The truth is, love can hold grief. I can love my mother and still grieve the things that happened.
I can honor my mother and still be honest about the ways I was hurt. I can forgive and still acknowledge what God is asking me to bring into the light. For a long time, I thought those things could not exist together.

I thought loving someone meant protecting them from the truth, but God has been teaching me that truth and love are not opposites. In fact, real love requires truth. My concern is not that my mother would be condemned. My concern is that she would truly encounter Him. Because I know what it is like to have a distorted picture of God.

I know what it is like to try to reconcile the God people show you with the God who finds you. And I know the difference.

I do not want my mother to know a God shaped by fear. A God shaped by pride. A God shaped by self-protection. I want her to know the real King.

The God who searches hearts. The God who convicts because He loves. The God who restores what has been broken. The God who does not call us into truth to shame us, but to set us free.

My desire is not that my mother be condemned. My desire is that she truly encounter the same God who rescued me.

but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, that is, Christ,
—Ephesians 4:15

Looking back now through the lens of “Autism Spectrum Disorder” there are so many things that make sense that did not make sense then. For most of my childhood, I was trying to navigate a world that I experienced differently than the people around me understood.

I was an untreated autistic child, but no one knew that. Instead of being understood, I was misunderstood. Instead of being assessed, I was labeled. Instead of asking, “Why is this child experiencing the world this way?” the question became, “What is wrong with this child?” I was misdiagnosed.

My behaviors were viewed through a lens of pathology instead of a lens of understanding. My differences were interpreted as symptoms. My struggles were interpreted as character flaws. At some point, my mother became convinced that I was bipolar, and that became the lens through which so much of me was viewed.

The problem was not that I was struggling. I was. The problem was that the reason I was struggling was never fully understood. The things that were actually part of the way God created me were often interpreted as evidence that something was wrong with me. My brutal directness was seen as hurtful. My direct communication was seen as disrespect. My sensitivity was seen as weakness. My intensity was seen as instability. My ability to recognize patterns and inconsistencies was seen as looking for problems. My inability to pretend or easily mask what I was feeling was seen as defiance. My strong reactions to injustice were seen as rebellion.

But what if the things people misunderstood about me were not flaws? What if they were parts of how God designed me? What if the child who noticed what others overlooked was not trying to create problems but was just trying to make sense of a world that often did not make sense to her?

What if the child who spoke what others did not want to hear was not trying to attack, but trying to be truthful? Ironic since my mother had always insisted I was a liar. It wasn’t until He saved me in that storm that I experienced the freedom real truth brings.

I spent years believing that something about me was fundamentally wrong, but God has been showing me something different. He did not make a mistake when He created me. He did not need to erase me. He needed to heal the wounds that came from being misunderstood. The very things God created in me were often interpreted as evidence that something was wrong with me, but He knew the truth all along.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
—Jeremiah 1:5

When I look back at my childhood now, there is something I understand differently. I used to tell stories. A lot of them. For years, I carried the weight of what that was called. I was called a liar. But as I look back through the lens of understanding autism, development, and the way my mind worked, I see something I could not see as a child.

I was not trying to deceive people. I was trying to communicate. I was trying to make sense of a world I did not always understand. Stories were how I processed things I did not yet have the words for. They were how I expressed feelings, fears, experiences, and realities that were too complicated for me to explain directly. In many ways, they were almost like parables. They carried meaning. They were a way of saying, “This is what I am experiencing,” even when I did not yet know how to say it plainly.

But the people around me did not always hear the meaning underneath the story. They heard a lie. Instead of someone helping me understand the difference between what actually happened and what I imagined. What I felt. What I was trying to communicate.

I received an identity. “You are a liar.” And when you hear something enough times, especially as a child, you start to believe it. Shame entered. I began to see myself through the label that had been placed on me.

And the heartbreaking part is that what started as a child trying to communicate became something I eventually had to confront in myself. Because words have power. The words spoken over us can become the words we use to define ourselves.

But then Christ found me, and He began teaching me something I had never fully understood before: Truth was not something to fear. Truth was not something that existed to expose me and shame me. Truth was freedom.

The same God who already knew me completely was not asking me to hide. He was inviting me into the light. He was teaching me that I did not have to protect myself with stories anymore. I did not have to reshape reality to make it safer. I did not have to carry the identity someone else gave me.

I could cling to truth because truth belonged to Him. I had spent years carrying the label of a liar. God began teaching me that truth was not my enemy. Truth was where freedom lived.

So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free.
—John 8:36

Before I understood theology, I understood something much more basic. I understood whether I was safe.

Before I could explain God, before I could understand Scripture, before I could articulate what was happening inside of me, I was learning something about the world around me. I was learning whether my feelings mattered. I was learning whether my vulnerability would be handled with care.

Looking back now, I realize that some things that should have been met with seriousness were sometimes treated lightly. Not because I believe my mother was incapable of love and not because I believe she never cared, but because brokenness can affect the way we see and respond to the vulnerability of others.

There are moments from my childhood that I look back on differently now. One of those moments is something I was reminded of every time I heard my mother laugh about having blown marijuana smoke in my face as a baby. The significance of that memory is not simply the act itself. It is what it represented. It represented how something involving a vulnerable child was remembered as something humorous instead of something requiring reflection. And for a child, these moments matter.

Children are constantly asking questions without saying them out loud. Am I safe? Am I seen? Do my needs matter? Can I trust the people who are supposed to protect me? When the things that should be handled with care are minimized, a child begins to form conclusions. Sometimes those conclusions are not true. Sometimes they are painful adaptations to survive.

Maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe what I feel is not important. Maybe I should stop bringing things into the light. Be quiet. Be a good girl. But the truth is, God never saw me that way.

He saw the child before I had words. He saw the child who was trying to understand a confusing world. He saw the child who needed protection, understanding, and love. And one of the deepest parts of my healing has been learning that my vulnerability was never something to be ashamed of. It was something God created to be cared for.

Because He is a Father who sees. El Roi. A Father who does not dismiss. A Father who does not laugh at the places where we are fragile. A Father who meets us with compassion and restores what was wounded.

The question I have had to bring before Him is this… What does a child learn when the things that should be handled with care are treated as insignificant? And the answer I am learning is that a child may learn to hide, but God’s desire has always been to bring that child back into the light.

For my father and my mother have forsaken me. But the Lord will take me up.
—Psalm 27:10

The deepest wound I carried was not only that I was misunderstood. The deepest wound was that the person who shaped my earliest understanding of God also shaped my understanding of myself.

Because the truth is, I did know Him. I knew Him as a child. Before I understood theology, before I could explain doctrine, before I could defend what I believed with Scripture, I knew something about Him. I knew His goodness. I knew His presence. I knew that there was a difference between what was right and what was wrong. I knew that truth mattered. I knew that love did not look like fear, control, or condemnation.

But as a child, I also trusted the people around me. And when the people who were supposed to guide me told me that the things I sensed were wrong, I learned to question myself. I learned to question what I knew. I learned to question what God had placed within me.

Looking back now, one of the hardest parts of my healing has been realizing that some of the things I believed as a child were not childish misunderstandings. Some of them were things God had already written on my heart. As I have grown in Him, I have found that many of those early convictions align with His Word, while some of the things I was taught to believe did not.

The pain was not that I had no understanding of God. The pain was that human voices became louder than the God I already knew. Someone can carry His name and still resist the very transformation He calls us into. Someone can speak about Christ and still refuse the humility, repentance, and self-examination that Christ requires.

Jesus addressed this in Matthew 23 when He confronted the religious leaders of His day. Their problem was not that they lacked knowledge. Their problem was that they honored God with their words while their hearts resisted His transforming work. Titus 1:16 says, “They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny Him.” That warning is not about people who do not know His name. It is about people who carry His name without allowing Him to change them.

The people who represented God to me were not always representing the God I already knew and would continue to know more deeply. The God I encountered later in life was not the author of confusion. He was not threatened by truth. He was not asking me to deny what He had shown me. He was leading me back to what had always been true.

The King was never the problem. The distortion was.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you too, outwardly appear righteous to people, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
—Matthew 23:27-28

When I finally surrendered, I did not meet a God who looked like the things I had feared. I met the God I had always known was there. The God who had been pursuing me. The God who had been patient with me. The God who had seen me long before I had the words to explain myself.

What I discovered was that He was not who I had been shown. He did not shame me. He did not silence me. He did not reject the intensity with which I love, the questions I ask, or the way I seek truth. He did not tell me that the way He created me was a problem. He did not require me to become someone else before I could come close to Him. He met me exactly where I was, and then He began transforming me. And my Abba didn’t transform me by erasing who He created me to be. He did it by healing the places where I had been wounded.

One of the hardest things I had to learn after being born again was that not everyone would recognize what God was doing in me. I remember my mother telling me that God had told her to tell me to stop talking about Him so much. That moment was difficult because I had just encountered the very thing I had been searching for my entire life.

I had encountered Him. I had experienced His presence. I had found a love and truth that I could not keep quiet about. And suddenly, someone else was trying to define that encounter for me. Someone else was telling me what God supposedly wanted from me, but God began teaching me something important: My mother had told me God told her to tell me to stop talking about Him so much. That not everyone was on fire like me and that I made people uncomfortable. It was then that he taught me the lesson about whose voice had authority.

Not every voice that uses God’s name is speaking from God’s heart. That does not mean we stop listening to wisdom. It does not mean we become unteachable. It means we learn to test everything against Him.

Acts 5:29 says, “We must obey God rather than men.” Galatians 1:10 asks whether we are seeking the approval of people or the approval of God. Jesus told us in Matthew 7 that we recognize things by their fruit. The fruit of God is not fear. It is not control. It is not silencing someone’s love for Him. It is love, truth, freedom, and transformation.

The God who found me was not asking me to shrink. He was teaching me to surrender. He was not asking me to stop speaking about Him. He was teaching me how to speak about Him from a place of love, wisdom, and truth.

The King I encountered was not the God I had been taught to fear. He was the God who had known me all along.

For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!”
—Romans 8:15

I used to think refinement was God removing the parts of me that weren’t right. The parts that felt too intense to deal with. The parts that asked too many questions, noticed too much, and
refused to ignore what was right in front of me. I found that was nothing like what He was doing.

God was not refining me by erasing me (although I had tried to do that to myself). What He was doing was refining me by removing the lies I had carried. In this season, He has been tearing down things I did not even realize were strongholds.

God has been tearing down lies. He has been tearing down false beliefs. The Holy Spirit has been leading me in breaking generational patterns, and He has been separating His voice from the voices I had spent years trying to please.

Some of the hardest lies to let go of were the ones I had lived with for so long that they felt like truth. “I am not normal.” “Something is very wrong with me.” “Why can’t I think and feel the way other people think and feel?” “My perception cannot be trusted.” “If I tell the truth, I will hurt people.” “Honor means staying silent.” “Love means carrying what others refuse to face.”

But God has been showing me something different. I was never created to carry lies. I was created to walk in truth, and truth does not threaten Him. God is not afraid of what is brought into the light. He is the One who is light. He is not threatened by questions, nor is He fragile. He does not need me to pretend in order to protect His reputation.

God is not threatened by honesty. He is the author of truth. For years, I confused peace with the absence of conflict. But God has been teaching me that true peace does not come from avoiding what is real. True peace comes from standing in what is true with Him.

The refinement has not been comfortable. It has required me to look at things I wanted to avoid. It has required me to acknowledge wounds, patterns, and beliefs that needed healing. But it has also been an act of love. Because the God who refines us is not trying to destroy us. He is removing what keeps us from freedom.

He is not silencing me. He is teaching me how to hear Him more clearly. He is not asking me to become less. He is teaching me who I was created to be.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
—Romans 12:2

For most of my life, writing has been the place where I could be the most honest. It has always been pure expression for me. A place where thoughts, questions, experiences, and things I could not always say out loud could come together.

Writing was never just putting words on a page. It was how I processed. It was how I made sense of things. It was how I searched for truth. When God called me to write, I knew that the purpose was not simply to share information. It was to bring truth into the light.

But then God began asking me to do something I did not expect. He asked me to write my own. Until April, I had struggled to look at my own story with the same honesty I have used when writing about everything else. I could write about truth. I could write about healing. I could write about what God was revealing. But when it came to my own story? I hesitated.

Some truths are harder when they involve people we love. I was afraid that telling the truth would dishonor my mother. I was afraid that acknowledging what happened would somehow violate the commandment to honor.

But God began showing me something I needed to understand. Silence is not always honor. Hiding is not healing. Denial is not love. There is a difference between exposing someone to harm them and bringing something into the light because God wants to heal what has been hidden.

God never called me to carry a false version of my story. He called me to surrender my whole story to Him, and the truth is, holding the full truth back did nothing to fulfill a commandment and everything to harm me.

The fact is, I doubt myself often still, but I never doubt Him. And He tells me that my truth can help others. Not because my story is the center, but because He is. Revelation 12:11 says, “They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.”

There is power in testimony. Not because our pain is special and not because our wounds define us, but because God takes what was broken and shows what He can redeem.

My story is not just about what happened to me. It is about what He has done with it. It is about the God who entered the places I wanted to hide. The God who brought truth where there was confusion. The God who brought healing where there was hurt. It is about the God who can take even the things we thought would destroy us and use them to bring freedom to someone else.

I spent years believing that silence protected people. God has been teaching me that truth, surrendered to Him, can bring healing. The truth I was afraid to write may be the very thing He uses to set someone else free.

And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death.
—Revelation 12:11

Looking back over my story, there is one thing I know now that I did not always understand. The problem was never Him. People failed and misunderstood. People carried wounds they had not allowed God to heal. People passed down things they had never surrendered. Sometimes they even distorted what they were supposed to represent.

He did not. The God I was shown and the God who found me were not the same. Not because He changed, but because my understanding of Him was being separated from the things people had placed on Him.

The King was always who He said He was. He was never threatened by truth nor was He ever afraid of what needed to be brought into the light. He was never asking me to deny what was real. He sees clearly and He sees beyond appearances.

He sees the child before anyone else understands her. He tells the truth and not the kind of truth that crushes us. The kind of truth that frees us. He restores identity, and He takes the names we have carried that were never ours and reminds us who He created us to be.

The King heals what was distorted. He reaches into the places where lies took root and replaces them with His truth, and He calls His children into freedom. No, not freedom from responsibility or from repentance, but freedom from shame. Freedom from false identities and from the voices that have kept us from hearing His.

For years, I tried to understand God through the brokenness of people, but God was never meant to be understood in such a way. Broken people need Him too, and the same God who has been healing me is the God who desires to heal everyone who comes to Him.

The King was never the problem. He was the One who was pursuing me all along and He was the One who saw me when I was misunderstood. He was the One who held me when I did not understand and the One who led me back to truth. And He is still writing the story. After all, as the Brandon Lake song says, “I’m just ink in the pen in the hands of the Author.” Regardless of how you feel about his music or him, those lyrics resonate with me so deeply. Because that is exactly how I feel.

Taste and see that the Lord is good; How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!
—Psalm 34:8

I still do not know the full testimony, and maybe that is the point. For so long, I thought a testimony was something you told after the story was complete. Something that had a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Something where you could look back and say, “This is what happened, and this is what God did.”

I am learning that some testimonies are still being written. Mine is, and the story is still unfolding. The same God who met me in the middle of the hurricane is the God who is rebuilding what was broken. The same God who found me when I reached the end of myself is the God who is continuing to transform me.

God is not just rescuing me from something. He is forging me into someone. He is restoring the parts of me that were buried under shame and the truth that was buried under confusion. He is restoring the identity that was buried under the names others placed on me, and He is teaching me that the places where I thought my story was ruined are often the very places where His redemption shines the brightest.

I do not know everything He is going to do. I do not know every chapter He will write, but I know the Author. And I know He is faithful. Philippians 1:6 says, “Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” The God who began this work in me is not finished. The child He knew before anyone understood her. The daughter He pursued before she knew how to find Him and the woman He is still refining.

All of it is part of the testimony, and the story is still being written.

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, this person is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
—2 Corinthians 5:17

This ministry/work is reader-supported. If you would like to help support my writing, ministry, and help me as I support myself and my children during a very difficult season, you can do so here: Buy Me a Coffee.