Mercy Came Running

Growing up, I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. We were a military family, and we moved a lot. I didn’t make friends easily, and as a mixed-race family, we were all subjected to racism in many forms. Without even understanding what was happening, I internalized this trauma, and it became some serious self-hatred.

After high school, I began to come into my own, so to speak. Men started finding me attractive, which was something I was not at all used to. But I never considered being the kind of young woman who would have premarital sex, and although I dated, I always kept it clean.

Until one night.

I’d been invited to a party a coworker was throwing. This guy, who I knew, had a cousin there who I didn’t know. The cousin cornered me in a room and assaulted me.

After this, I felt lost. I didn’t know where God was. I didn’t even think I knew who He was anymore. And, more than ever, I didn’t know who I was. So, I began behaving in ways that made no sense. I wasn’t trying to find myself—I was trying to lose myself. And the more I acted out, the more men I slept with, the more I hated myself and the God who had allowed my life to be ruined.

Or so I thought.

Everything culminated when I started an affair with a married man and quickly found myself pregnant. I was terrified, he was angry, my parents were mortified.

But this tiny baby who came into my life one sunny June afternoon—she was perfect.

Because of her, my relationship with my parents was repaired. My choices became about her and not about self-sabotage. And because of her, I turned my heart back to the God I’d been hiding from. The one who didn’t cause my pain but was hurt just as badly as I was. The one who waited patiently and even gifted me a daughter by a man I had no business being with, but who, twenty years later, would become my husband.

This little girl grew up to be the best thing to ever happen to me. She’s kind and good and she loves the Lord with her whole entire heart. And she still keeps me on the right track.

I was a victim, not because I deserved it.

God blessed me, not because I deserved it.

And no matter how hard I ran, His grace and mercy were just waiting to pour over my life.