I created this blog to share with others, stories and testimonies about my life and God's faithfulness. I hope to graciously convey nuggets of truth I learned and picked up throughout my own journey toward healing and freedom. 

   I was raised in an Amish home, inside a large Amish community, in Northern Indiana, where I spent my formative years. I joined the Amish Church when I turned 18 and left after I turned 21. Five years after I left the Amish Church, I relocated and moved over a thousand miles away from everyone and everything familiar to me. I got married several years later, to my husband, who is from the area, and we still reside in Dallas with our three boys. 

   While the thousand-mile move was initiated by a desire to attend Bible School, it became the doorway, that helped me break away from many falsehoods and beliefs I was conditioned to believe about God, myself, the world, and so many other things. It is where I discovered safe and solid relationships and counseling/ministry that helped me unpack and heal the childhood trauma and abuse I silently bore, for many years, as a young child.

     When the childhood trauma surfaced in my teen years, there was no substantial help to be found. I became known in the community I grew up in, as a hopeless case, a wild child and a lost cause. This only added more trauma to the childhood trauma and complicated my teen years with severe depression. When I got involved with "Rumspringa" (Amish youth practice) at 16 years of age, I thought I would finally find freedom from all the suffering and restrictions I lived under. When that failed and disappointed me, I almost committed suicide trying to escape it all. 

     A direct intervention that I can only attribute to God Himself, kept me from following through with plans to end my life. Even though I didn't know God yet, I was never quite the same after that, and started to see many changes take place in my life. 

    God began sovereignly orchestrating circumstances in my favor where I started meeting people outside the culture who could see past my level of brokenness and saw good in me that I couldn't even see myself. They began to demonstrate Jesus's heart and love to me. They would educate me in areas where I was naive, ignorant and uneducated, without condemning me. One of those individuals formally introduced me to Christ, and when I first encountered His presence, I wept.

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I wept because He offered me so many things that I had been so bereft from. He gave me hope for a new life, and I began encountering His pure love in ways that changed me and gave me confidence. It was that confidence in Him, that helped me courageously navigate all the losses when it came time to leave it all. As hard as it was, I have never regretted my decision to leave it all behind. 

I knew that my well-being was dependent upon that decision, and I was choosing to find life and to discover the life and purpose Christ had before time, ordained for me. As crazy as that made me appear to those around me, at the time, I knew with absolute certainty that I was going to make it, no matter what I faced, when was God with me and on my side. I believed that if God was big enough to bring me hope and support through people, he sent me from outside of the community, (back then befriending outsiders could get you in trouble) then He was perfectly capable of ordering my steps and helping me navigate ANYTHING I would need to face, in order to discover the abundant life, He promised, and He did, and still does. 

 My hope is that He will reveal His true nature and His heart to others through the stories shared in this blog, and that those who desire Him, will grow even closer to Him, after coming to know His true nature. 

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Velda 

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