Since young, I’ve always felt misunderstood by my family members. My mother would often talk down to me and compared me to others, resulting is us clashing over many incidents which left me deeply scarred.
Growing up, I carried all these hurts wherever I went. Too often, I looked for solutions to my pain in the wrong places. While these sinful habits offered me temporary relief, it only left me more broken and lost.
As a Christian, I thought I could adopt “formulas” to formulate a healing and breakthrough to overcome my sinful habits. But these “formulas” were proven futile.
Eventually, I gave up as I felt this struggle was just part of life, and also felt that breakthroughs can never happen to me.
During a conversation with my leaders, they brought up the struggles I faced and at that moment, I felt extremely vulnerable and exposed, and a huge sense of shame began to overwhelm me.
Yet deep down, I knew God was opening the door for my breakthrough, and it’s now my choice to take it up.
James 5:16 says, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” So, I decided to overcome those fears and confessed all my addictions and sinful lifestyle.
Even though, I was constantly sharing and keeping accountable to my community, I didn’t feel that I was progressing. I realised that I’ve not truly experienced God’s love because of all the unresolved hurts.
God began revealing to me that I couldn’t receive His love because I hated myself for the things I’ve done to myself and others. After this revelation, I knew I had to relearn the fundamental truth of my identity in Christ and know what God’s love is.
It was a difficult learning process because I was constantly bombarded with guilt, shame, and condemnation.
Whenever I declared the truth of God’s word over my life, I'd experienced great resistance, yet at the same time, I saw myself overcoming these condemning thoughts and lies from the enemy. Over time, as I fought with the Word of God, the voices of condemnation became softer and easier to overcome.
But the enemy changed his strategy on me. Since he could not attack me during the day when I was guarding my mind, he attacked me every other night when I was asleep. I would get nightmares of different natures - sexual, violent and demonic.
I constantly feared, but I knew He who is in me is greater than he who is in the world.
As I started growing in God’s love daily, I realised that God was healing me of all my hurts. I no longer needed to turn back to my addictions to find relief.
He also gave me a renewed love and fight for my family. God challenged me this year to pray and fight for their breakthrough too.
In March this year, I finally took the step of faith to speak to my mum about my hurt over the years. Following after, I also had a conversation with my dad, on how his absence in my childhood scarred me. It was simply amazing to see how God reconciled my relationship with my parents.
Although the fight for breakthrough in my life and my family has not been easy, it was definitely worth it.
God’s love has changed me from the inside out. I feel liberated to walk in His promises daily and to lead people to know the truth about His great love.
I encourage everyone here to fight for your breakthrough, to be honest and vulnerable with your community.