God, Wife, and Struggles

Have you ever seen the All-State Commercials with Mayhem? Yeah, that’s how I feel my life is sometimes. Twenty-two years ago, I was born in the city of Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico. I was born into poverty and grew up with an abusive mother. When I was six years old, my dad paid to have me brought to the US. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t know the culture and worst of all, I didn’t really know anybody here.  My mother was going on her third child and couldn’t take care of me anymore. I recently spoke with her and she said that I had a few weeks where she had been telling me that I was going to go see my dad and that I was going to be happy with my dad. I don’t remember her telling me that.

My experience crossing the border was strange. We didn’t go through the legal processes. Instead, there was a relative of my mother’s that was supposed to pick me up, take me across the border, then drop me off with my dad in L.A. That… didn’t happen. I crossed the border in Tijuana. My mother and I took an airplane from Guadalajara to Tijuana. She then dropped me off at some lady’s house and left. That was the last time I saw her for 12 years.

My time with my mother was not a happy time. She had brought me a lot of pain and trauma. She was heavily involved with witch craft. So, I grew up with some really dark things and was terrified of the dark until a few years ago. She also did drugs.  And I’m 90% sure that at one point she prostituted herself. She would force me to watch horror movies and be there when she was doing some rituals. During my time with her, I was also verbally and sexually abused. So as a child and part of my teenage years, thinking about my mother would only bring me pain. It would bring me back to a place where I had no control and so many bad things happened.

Coming to the US was supposed to be magical., but as soon as I was with my dad and we were headed to Nebraska I fell ill. We made it to Nebraska and one of my first memories of being here was being taken to an ER. I had fallen asleep when they brought me in. So, I don’t remember getting there. I just remember waking up and four nurses holding me down as they are trying to get a blood sample so they could run test. My father was terrified of taking me to a hospital because he didn’t have any of my legal documents yet. My mother had mailed them to him, but he hadn’t received them yet. So, taking me to the hospital was scarier for him than for me. He didn’t know if they would take me away because he had no proof of who I was and that I was his child. At this point, I had maybe been in the US for a few weeks. The doctors at the hospital were very gracious and didn’t ask any questions. They just took care of me, I don’t think that they didn’t know that I had just crossed the border. I left that hospital with the medicine to help Hepatitis C. 

Eventually, I got better but I still get nervous when I go see any doctor. Everything was going fine, I was adjusting to my new life and starting to accept the language. Until, my seventh birthday, I remember it all too clearly. That day was the beginning of about four years of sexual abuse from a family member. I didn’t know that that was not normal. Because I had already lived something similar in Mexico, I just assumed it was normal.

But slowly, in school they continued to raise awareness and told all of the students that if “stuff,” like what I was going through, was happening to them that we needed to tell a trusted adult. So, I told my grandma. I got help but my family always acted like nothing happened. My dad was much more cautious of where I was at and what people were around me. But everyone ignored the bigger situation. I never felt safe at a family gathering, until, he was deported, and I knew that he was not around. That was about six years ago.

Besides that, growing up my life was pretty calm. My dad was married, and we lived pretty well. He took good care of me. When I was in third grade, my dad and his then wife decided that they were going to started attending a Pentecostal church. This was my initial introduction to Christianity. That was new and very scary. I hated going to church, I was so close to my first communion and they had just taken me out of an environment I enjoyed. But eventually, I came around. From then on, I started learning about who God was. I remember learning that you should fear God but I took it to literal and was actually afraid of God for a few years. We stayed at that church until I was twelve. Then the church split and the pastor was sent to prison. He was convicted with child molesting.

We eventually, after attending a few different churches we found a local church that was just starting. This church was different because it was a church inside of a church. The “big church” as some people like to call it was in English but the hispanic church inside was in Spanish.

I was in the middle of my seventh-grade year and once again. I hated going to church. None of my friends were there and there was not kids my age. My dad encouraged me to join the youth group, but I didn’t know anyone. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school that I really started to attend high school group and started to let God into my heart. Sometime, during my second semester that year I accepted Christ into my heart. In the middle of all of that, a youth pastor invited me to attend a group called Student Leadership Team. I really to this day don’t remember how that happened, but that group became like a little family. And I shared my story for the first time there. I was scared that people would look at me different and that they would treat me different, but they just loved me more.

Junior year of high school, that was the year of a lot of changes. I grew an incredible amount that year, I was at an all-time high with Jesus and everything was great. I was looking into colleges, military recruits and I wanted to see what I was interested.

March of that year, I ended up living in Mexico. We had been in the process of getting our green card for about five years and we had finally made it to the interview part. Which meant that I needed to go back to Mexico, so that an immigration could review my case and officially grant me my green card. My father and I both were granted our green cards that year. But during that time, my dad’s wife committed adultery. So, life became a little hectic.

My senior year was a big ball of unhealthy relationships between my stepmother and everyone in the family. I started to seek pleasure in other things rather that God. I fell into depression and had sever anxiety. I was verbally and emotionally abused by my stepmother and I could see that my brother was being more affected than I was.

But somehow, after my senior year, I met my husband. In the middle of a lot of hurt. God brought me this wonderful man who was loving, understanding, and so positive thinking. From there after a year we got engaged and three months later we got married.

We’ve been married for over two years now, life is difficult and we are still learning about each other, but I don’t regret any decision I’ve made since meeting him. God is with us everyday and if I don’t trust in him then I have nothing.

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.

If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

-1 Corinthians 13:1-10 The message