All Light and Fluffy

I shared my testimony for the first time today in chapel at Simpson...in front of everybody. The Lord totally spoke through me and He blessed me so much through sharing my story. I was so encouraged by people who came up to me and told me that my story really touched them. One lady even told me that I am supposed to show people my freedom and share my story, and help them to find freedom as well. It was such an amazing day. Not to mention I got my hair done and it is amazing, and so is my Aunt Amy because she did a great job and we got to talk about all sorts of things. She always encourages me. So I feel an even greater sense of freedom now after sharing, I feel all light and fluffy. So I thought I would share my testimony here as well:

Today I want to share a little piece of my story with you. It is about my journey to discovering who I am and who I want to be. It is a journey that has not been at all easy, but it is the most beautiful and freeing journey I have ever been on. This journey has cost me so much, yet it is such a little price to pay for what I have got in return.

My story begins with the entering of a new and uncharted territory in my life: high school. High school became the place where I was introduced to the world and all that it had to offer. It was this time in my life that I began to think for myself and decide what I really wanted, and what I wanted was to party! I began drinking and getting high at parties with my friends. It was just an occasional thing up until my sophomore year of high school when it became a weekly habit. I would go out every night of every weekend and party with my friends. I would lie to my parents so that I could stay out all night and not come home. It was during this time that I also became sexually active. This was all normal in my group of friends, and so it is what I did. I became a person who got drunk and high, lied, cheated and stole. I let go of my morals and inhibitions and I did whatever I wanted. It was also during this time that I decided I wanted nothing to with God. To me He was non-existent, or so I told myself and so I went on with my party life for 3 years. At the end of the three years my habits had become so destructive that I became severely depressed. I was partying almost every night of the week, sleeping around, stealing all the time, and destroying the relationship with my family by being deceitful and disrespectful. I reached a very hard bottom in my life; I began to realize that the life I was living was anything but fulfilling. I became very depressed, I felt disgusting and extremely dirty. I felt as though I was the lowliest human being on the planet. I felt used, abused, discarded, and severely lonely. I was crying out for help in every way, I needed out of the hole I had dug myself into.

Then one night I encountered the love of the Holy Spirit, and my life was changed from that point on. Although I still struggled I was changed. I had grown up in the church and I had accepted the Lord as a child, but I had pushed myself away from the Lord and that night He held out His arms and He opened my eyes. He cleared away all that had been blocking me from seeing Him, for He had always been there right beside me. He had never left me, but waited patiently for when I would run into His open arms. From that point in my life I knew that the Lord loved me, and I had truly felt it. Although I continued to struggle, I could no longer ignore the Lord’s convictions. I eventually surrendered everything to Him and dedicated my life to Him. In the process I lost many of my friends, including my best friend, because the Lord knew what I could handle, and what I couldn’t. He knew I couldn’t I live a life for Him while being surrounded by my old lifestyle and the people in that. But the Lord gave me more than I could have ever asked for, he fulfilled my life. He filled that hole that I had been trying to fill with alcohol, drugs, sex, and friends. He gave me the love that I had been searching for, and he gave me a new identity. I was saved by His grace.

I have been living for the Lord ever since, but I will not tell you that is has been easy, because it has not. It has been the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life, but the most rewarding. Until recently I had never truly embraced the freedom that Christ gave me the night that I gave up my old life to live a new one in Him. Christ changed me and made me a new person, He forgave me for my past mistakes and said “Elisa you are a new creation, you are not who you were.” The problem was I never truly believed this for myself. I had been living in shame for the mistakes of my past. I had felt for so long that I was worthless and deserve to feel the shame because they were my mistakes. And because I struggled so long, I would never get it right, I would always be a screw up, a failure, a nobody, a person that didn’t matter. Satan drilled these thoughts and words into my head. For so long I had let them hold me back from being who the Lord really wanted me to be. It paralyzed me with the fear of rejection because I felt like I could face no more of that in my life. But recently the Lord has shown me that I do not need to accept that shame in my life any longer. Christ did not die on the cross to take away our sins, only for us to wallow in them. Christ died so that we could have freedom from our sins, He offered us the chance to have life and have it to the fullest. Life to the fullest does not mean continually feeling shame for how we have lived our lives, full life is life found in the Lord, where we have freedom from our sins.When He forgive us He no longer looks at that sin, He forgets it. For the Lord does not care about who we were, but who we are and who He is creating us to be.

I would just like to encourage you all, if you are living in your past and holding onto your mistakes and the shame of your past, you need to let go and give it up to the Lord because He wants you to feel His freedom. It is as though you are saying to the Lord, "I know you died and took away my sins, but I am just going to hold onto the shame of those sins for a little bit but you can take the rest." It doesn't make sense, Jesus takes ALL of our sin away including the shame that goes with it. God made you a new person and He wants you to live a new life free of shame.