Christy's Story

Christy and Steve

There were a lot of times when Christy wanted to give up and walk away.  She even had thoughts of suicide.  “Why don’t I just die and be done with it?  My husband doesn’t love me anymore, so why am I here?” 

Christy has three sisters, all from different fathers.  When she was five years old, her mother left her father to be with another man.  This man was a preacher, and he would beat Christy’s mother.  They lived like that for many years until her mother got up the nerve to leave him when Christy was 12.  Then when she was 13, she was raped.  She didn’t get along with her older sisters, who were twins.  At 16 they were already pregnant and married.  At that time it was just Christy and her little sister living at home, and they were restricted from doing many things; they couldn’t go to a football game or to prom.  Christy wanted to be free.  She ran away from home several times and ended up moving in with her best friend and her father.  He helped her get through school and got her a car.  He taught her what being a father to her was supposed to be like.  That helped her out a lot because of all she had gone through and all that she had missed out on growing up.  Christy graduated and went on to college.  Her friend’s father helped her with all of that.

Christy’s first son was with a guy she thought she was going to marry but who then changed his mind.  Several years later, she had her second son.  That was not a good situation either, so she ended up raising her boys by herself for many years.  There were a lot of times when she would cry and ask God why she was such a bad person and why nobody loved her.  She didn’t have a relationship with her mother or her sisters.  It was just her and her two boys. 

When her youngest was three, Christy met her ex-husband.  After six months he walked in the door, grabbed a bag, and on the way out he said he wanted a divorce.  After the divorce, they didn’t see each other until two years later when they got back in touch with one another.  They remarried and were together for 10 more years.   There were many more hardships.  Then another divorce. Yes, there were a lot of times when Christy wanted to give up, but yet she knew in her heart that God had something better for her on the other side. 

Christy believes that God protected her through all she went through.  He has blocked out much of what happened to her.  She doesn’t remember a lot of it.  She doesn’t dwell on those times.  She went through stages of healing where she learned how to not have a victim mentality.  It could have turned out where she was bitter at all pastors because of what happened in her childhood, but she wasn’t.  Later, it was good Bible preaching from good pastors that helped turn her life around.  She knew she would have a better life.  That was a choice Christy made.  She wanted to find her purpose in life.  During her 10-year marriage, she spent a lot of time crying, praying, and asking God what is so wrong with her.  The Lord showed her how to walk in love and forgiveness.  He would tell her that there is not anything wrong with her.  He would tell her how much He loves her. 

There were days when it was tough, but she always knew it would get better.  She didn’t want to be like her family.  She wanted to be who God called her to be.  She was hungry for answers.

“What is my calling?”

“What is my purpose?”

“Why am I here?”

“Why did God create me?”

One of the biggest things Christy learned during that time was who she was in Christ.  She learned that the Lord didn’t hate her and wasn’t mad at her for divorcing.  “I learned that all my wrongs were washed away.  I was cleansed.  I was made new.  I was transformed.  I knew God loved me.”

There were days the Lord would just tell her, “I love you,” and she would just cry about that. 

She would cry and ask, “God, why didn’t I ever get to experience my daddy?”

“Why did my mama leave my daddy?”

She would cry about not being able to be around her father.  She would get in her closet and wrap her arms around herself and say, “Lord, I know You love me.”  She would envision Him wrapping His arms around her, and she would say, “I love you.  I love you, Christy,” and she would imagine it was God speaking to her.  But it took her a long time of doing that to really believe it.  But once she got it, she got it!  Christy knows God loves her, and nobody can take that away from her.   

After she and her ex-husband went their separate ways, Christy grew in her prayer and fellowship time with the Lord, and she was sensing an itching in her spirit.  During an intense 30-day daily prayer time, she asked, “God, where do you want me to go?  What do you want me to do?”  She knew she couldn’t stay where she was at.  She knew there was something more.  She knew in her spirit that she was going to be married again.  It was going to be a man who was taller than her, who had dark hair, and who would be on the front row when she was teaching.  God gave her that vision.  She also knew somehow that the man she was going to be with had something to do with airplanes.

Christy moved about four hours north of where she was living and became very involved with volunteering at her new church, and eventually got a job on staff at the church.  One Sunday she was checking out a customer at the church’s bookstore when she overheard a nearby conversation with a man named Steve who said to someone, “I just need somebody to go fly with me.”  Christy felt a nudging in her spirit to write her name and number down on a piece of paper.  She gave it to him and said, “Here, I’ll go fly with you,” and proceeded to finish checking the customer out.

Steve had also been married a couple times and was currently divorced.  He had recently relocated to the area from a different state, and also has two sons.  He needed to find a church that would help him get on track to do what God wants him to do and ended up at the same church Christy was attending.

After that first meeting in the bookstore, Christy and Steve went out casually a few times for ice-cream with their boys and grandkids.  She got the sense that it just wasn’t time for her.  She was recently divorced and wanted to make sure that she was healed on the inside before jumping into another relationship, so she and Steve didn’t talk for a while.  Christy just spent time in the Word of God, continuing her intimate fellowship with the Lord, listening to teaching CDs, volunteering wherever she could, doing what she needed to do, and doing what the Lord was leading her to do.  She watched Steve come and go with the kids over a four-year period.  He would occasionally date and would introduce to Christy the women he dated. 

The church started discipleship classes on Wednesday nights, and staff members helped by assisting whoever was teaching the class.  Christy was scheduled to teach the offering message for one of the classes.  Steve attended the first class.  She looked over at him and said, “I’m going to do the offering message tonight, but I need you to come do the baskets.”  She walked away, looked back, and said that she needed him to come up front so that he could pass out the baskets.  When she got up to do the offering message, she saw the same vision that the Lord had given her many years ago.  She saw Steve on the front row, he was taller than she was, and he had dark hair.  She had to try her hardest to stay focused because that was a real moment she was experiencing.  After she did the offering message, the two of them started talking.

The next day he called her and asked her if she was married.  She said she wasn’t.  He said, “Ok.  We’re not children.  We’re not in high school.  What are we going to do?”  She said, “Right now, we’re not going to do anything.  We’ll take it one day at a time.”  Christy wasn’t ready to jump into another relationship.  She wanted to know this was from God.  They just talked on the phone at first.  She told him she didn’t want him sitting with her at church.  She didn’t want people to think they were together because she just wanted to take things very slowly.  She did, however, know in her heart that he was who she was supposed to marry. 

After a certain period of time, Christy said they could start dating.  They did, but she had a lot of stipulations and a lot of questions.  They talked about practically everything, including finances, sex, kids, and religion.  The biggest thing was that Steve wasn’t going to be getting a kiss from her, or anything else for that matter.  She told him that waiting was something she knew from the bottom of her heart that the Lord was telling her to do.  She told him he would have to be a man of his word, somebody who is filled with the Holy Spirit, who goes to church, who volunteers, and she would want them both to have the same vision.  Christy tested Steve on a lot of things that were important to her in this stage of her life.  She wanted to make sure he was truly the right one.  When he’d be over for dinner and things started to get a little heated physically, she would tell him it was time for him to leave because it was getting “a little too hot in the kitchen.”

Christy and Steve dated for almost a year before they got married.  Once they were headed out of town to attend a wedding.  Steve had been working on getting his pilot’s license and was scheduled to fly to log in some more hours, so he took a quick flight, and she went with him.  He flew her over his home on five acres.  Earlier he had dug up the ground with a plow to spell out, “Would you marry me?” so that it could be seen from above.  She was looking down to see it because he had tilted the plane, and when she turned around toward him, he was holding the engagement ring and was waiting for an answer from her.  He asked, “Well?”  She said, “Yes, I will marry you!”  He almost got a kiss, but she insisted, “No, not until we’re married.”

They were married in April of the following year.  That was when they had their first kiss.  That was a big thing for Christy because of all the things she had been through as a young girl, from being raped, not growing up with her father, and having other men there in her father’s place. 

Christy says, “It’s very different for women when they don’t grow up with their daddy.  God restored every bit of that for me.  It was as if none of that past ever happened.  It was like all of my purity was back.  God is still restoring.  Everything that had been stolen from me is being restored back.  I am honored to have a husband like Steve.  He is such a good man.  I believe I have the best husband.

“Steve and I go to church together, serve together, talk about everything, and pray about everything.  There is so much communication between us.  It’s very different from the previous marriage.  When you’re living for God and you put Him first, you can’t get any better than that.  That’s the ultimate best thing that you could ever have in a marriage.”

Right now Christy is mentoring her sisters.  Her mother passed away recently.  Her sisters are relying on her.  They’re coming to church with her every Sunday.  She went from not having relationships with them to now building relationships with them.  She knows there’s complete and total restoration all the way.  It’s never too late.  God restores everything that has been stolen.