This is my testimony. Basically, this experience proves God's existence to me. What you’re about to read is perhaps one of the most important, if not the defining moment of my faith. It can get quite emotionally graphic, so if you're easily affected, please be warned.
I am what people might affectionately call "chubby". In reality, I'm overweight. I always have been. I don't know how not to be. I didn't really take any notice until I went to secondary school (age 11). I attended a girls’ school, so image was super important. My weight really started getting to me when I wanted to start looking “good”, and feeling beautiful, just like those other girls in my class who snickered at me did. At about the age of 12, I started calling myself names. ‘Fatso’, or something similar, when I was feeling down.
Within a startlingly short amount of time, at the age of 13, I found myself daily insulting myself, calling myself names. Not just as some childish bully calls another child a loser, but as an abusive enemy. I hated myself, so so thoroughly, and I proved it. Everyday I faced my reflection and I would say, ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘worthless’, ‘unlovable’, ‘stupid’, and keep up this stream of negativity. To accompany this, I purged occasionally, but mostly, I self-harmed, merely to punish myself. “You deserve this,” I would say, “You deserve this pain.” And when I cried, I would berate myself and bully myself some more, because the pain I caused myself was so much less than I thought I should receive. “I mean come on,” I would say, “look at you. This fat, annoying blob of stupidity, of ugliness, crying over that. You’re pathetic. You make me sick. Like anyone would ever want anything to do with you, even without seeing how ugly you are on the inside.” I’m not really sure that even with this, I can fully describe my depth of self-hatred. I was like an infected wound, festering and welling up with pus, but never getting better.
So, 3 years on, I go to a conference called New Wine (similar to Spring Harvest or Soul Survivor), and my faith is exploding in whole new ways – I helped a guy called Oli find his own faith, I spoke in tongues and saw visions for the first time. I was truly finding myself abandoned in worship to God, and my mind was being blown daily.
On the last night, there was a healing session in the youth event, and God says to me, “Can you see this? Do you not see what you’re doing?” And I think I realised at that point that I wasn't just hurting myself when I was saying these things; I was hurting God. I was fine with what I did cause no one else knew, right? But the person who mattered most was the one I was hurting and overlooking. And you know what, I was just so sick and tired of being embittered and sour, and so absolutely sick of being in pain and feeling guilty, and I just asked God to get rid of it, and He showed me this picture:
A thornless rose, glowing, bright, vital, absolutely stunning, in my heart. And God said, “This rose represents my relationship with you.”
But around the rose had grown a huge bramble bush, choking and hurting and killing the rose. If they stayed, that rose would die. And God points out that those brambles are the barrier that I’d been building up with all this self-hatred. All these words, all this bitterness, I was killing my faith.
Desperate, I ask God to cut them out, to heal me. Now, when has God ever done something that conforms to our expectation of “awesome”? In this moment, God totally blew the doors off all of my expectations, awesome and more.
If I had been looking at my watch, I could pinpoint the moment that my world burst into colour. It was like someone set me on fire and doused me with ice water simultaneously, like I was seeing for the very first time, like there were rainbows I’d never seen before, and unicorns and puppies, and choirs of bunny rabbits, and overhead is flying an orchestra of winged badgers, and there’s a kitten singing opera with a virtuosic violin-playing turtle, and seriously, seriously, I could go on. I just can’t capture it. I was free!
But in all of that noise, in that thunderous joy, and exclamation of freedom from the chains of my own self-loathing, the thing that stood out the most was that in that shattering second, I saw myself through God’s eyes. And He sees me as this little girl, smiling her face off; an outpouring of joy, and song, and laughter, but more than even this – beautiful, radiantly so. This person that God beheld, He said, "She is beautiful. You are beautiful." And for a microsecond, I thought my heart would explode, because God said “THIS IS HOW I FEEL” and suddenly there was so much love in me that my heart couldn't stay unbroken. If I live 10 000 years and have 10 000 children with a husband who completes me in a way that can't physically exist, I will never experience love on that scale again.
I realised later that if I had tried to get those thorns out of my heart myself, I would only have hurt myself in the process and never removed it all. But God took His magic secateurs and cut it all out at the root.
Two and a bit years on, and God has told me repeatedly, "share your testimony, share your testimony". And when I do, He always seems to have put the right people there who need to hear it. So I hope that even if this doesn't apply to you at all that you would pass on the message of beauty in God NO MATTER WHAT THE MEDIA SAYS to everyone around you. God bless, my brothers and sisters. <3
I am what people might affectionately call "chubby". In reality, I'm overweight. I always have been. I don't know how not to be. I didn't really take any notice until I went to secondary school (age 11). I attended a girls’ school, so image was super important. My weight really started getting to me when I wanted to start looking “good”, and feeling beautiful, just like those other girls in my class who snickered at me did. At about the age of 12, I started calling myself names. ‘Fatso’, or something similar, when I was feeling down.
Within a startlingly short amount of time, at the age of 13, I found myself daily insulting myself, calling myself names. Not just as some childish bully calls another child a loser, but as an abusive enemy. I hated myself, so so thoroughly, and I proved it. Everyday I faced my reflection and I would say, ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘worthless’, ‘unlovable’, ‘stupid’, and keep up this stream of negativity. To accompany this, I purged occasionally, but mostly, I self-harmed, merely to punish myself. “You deserve this,” I would say, “You deserve this pain.” And when I cried, I would berate myself and bully myself some more, because the pain I caused myself was so much less than I thought I should receive. “I mean come on,” I would say, “look at you. This fat, annoying blob of stupidity, of ugliness, crying over that. You’re pathetic. You make me sick. Like anyone would ever want anything to do with you, even without seeing how ugly you are on the inside.” I’m not really sure that even with this, I can fully describe my depth of self-hatred. I was like an infected wound, festering and welling up with pus, but never getting better.
So, 3 years on, I go to a conference called New Wine (similar to Spring Harvest or Soul Survivor), and my faith is exploding in whole new ways – I helped a guy called Oli find his own faith, I spoke in tongues and saw visions for the first time. I was truly finding myself abandoned in worship to God, and my mind was being blown daily.
On the last night, there was a healing session in the youth event, and God says to me, “Can you see this? Do you not see what you’re doing?” And I think I realised at that point that I wasn't just hurting myself when I was saying these things; I was hurting God. I was fine with what I did cause no one else knew, right? But the person who mattered most was the one I was hurting and overlooking. And you know what, I was just so sick and tired of being embittered and sour, and so absolutely sick of being in pain and feeling guilty, and I just asked God to get rid of it, and He showed me this picture:
A thornless rose, glowing, bright, vital, absolutely stunning, in my heart. And God said, “This rose represents my relationship with you.”
But around the rose had grown a huge bramble bush, choking and hurting and killing the rose. If they stayed, that rose would die. And God points out that those brambles are the barrier that I’d been building up with all this self-hatred. All these words, all this bitterness, I was killing my faith.
Desperate, I ask God to cut them out, to heal me. Now, when has God ever done something that conforms to our expectation of “awesome”? In this moment, God totally blew the doors off all of my expectations, awesome and more.
If I had been looking at my watch, I could pinpoint the moment that my world burst into colour. It was like someone set me on fire and doused me with ice water simultaneously, like I was seeing for the very first time, like there were rainbows I’d never seen before, and unicorns and puppies, and choirs of bunny rabbits, and overhead is flying an orchestra of winged badgers, and there’s a kitten singing opera with a virtuosic violin-playing turtle, and seriously, seriously, I could go on. I just can’t capture it. I was free!
But in all of that noise, in that thunderous joy, and exclamation of freedom from the chains of my own self-loathing, the thing that stood out the most was that in that shattering second, I saw myself through God’s eyes. And He sees me as this little girl, smiling her face off; an outpouring of joy, and song, and laughter, but more than even this – beautiful, radiantly so. This person that God beheld, He said, "She is beautiful. You are beautiful." And for a microsecond, I thought my heart would explode, because God said “THIS IS HOW I FEEL” and suddenly there was so much love in me that my heart couldn't stay unbroken. If I live 10 000 years and have 10 000 children with a husband who completes me in a way that can't physically exist, I will never experience love on that scale again.
I realised later that if I had tried to get those thorns out of my heart myself, I would only have hurt myself in the process and never removed it all. But God took His magic secateurs and cut it all out at the root.
Two and a bit years on, and God has told me repeatedly, "share your testimony, share your testimony". And when I do, He always seems to have put the right people there who need to hear it. So I hope that even if this doesn't apply to you at all that you would pass on the message of beauty in God NO MATTER WHAT THE MEDIA SAYS to everyone around you. God bless, my brothers and sisters. <3
