I stole this post. It was written by Jon Acuff, the blogger behind  the Stuff Christian’s Like Blog. I can’t stop thinking about Beth’s story, and this was posted a couple of weeks ago. Since it “knocked me over” — I thought I’d share it with you. 

Having no clue how God will use your story
By Jon Acuff 

I recently received an email that knocked me over.

I decided to post it for two reasons:

1. Somebody has a story like this and needs to know they’re not alone.

2. A lot of us have gifts we’re supposed to use that we can’t ever imagine God doing something with and this is a testament to what happens when we try. When we do something as silly and insignificant feeling as starting a blog.

After she emailed this to me, I asked Beth if I could share her story and she graciously agreed. I changed some of the details to protect her privacy for reasons that will become crystal clear as you read it. It’s time for me to just get out of the way and introduce you to the amazingly awesome Beth.

Hello!

My name is Beth and I’m from Texas. I am painfully shy. I didn’t always used to be. I used to be the crazy, silly gal that everyone laughed with. But now, I am shy. I used to be NUTS! I distinctly remember going to a pool hall and crawling around under the tables pretending like I was an alligator to cheer up a friend who had just broken up with her boyfriend. I was the only one who was SOBER.

My mother was a practicing (sorta) Catholic & my father was a Buddist. Since they could not see eye-to-eye on religion, I was not baptized. My younger sister, on-the-other-hand, was born 4 months premature & in 1977, there was no surviving that. She was baptized right away. She did survive though and in our Catholic upbringing, what that meant was that all my family went through the Christian education and rituals while I constantly sat in a pew. Because I was never baptized, I wasn’t able to go through church school or learn about the bible. My mom did the best she could to teach me, but she was hurt by being disowned by her family when she became divorced. It was difficult for her to teach me about Christ’s love when she was having a hard time experiencing it herself.

I found Young Life in High School and thought that was great. I got to start to learn about Christ and the bible, but I was struggling with my Catholic upbringing telling me I couldn’t do anything until I was baptized. I was very ashamed to become baptized at so old an age, so I always felt on the outskirts of Christianity. I used to tell people “I love Christ, but I’m not a Christian.”

A few years later, I graduated from college. My friend fixed me up on a date with a friend of hers and the night ended up with me in the emergency room. When I woke up, the doctors told me they had given me Plan B to prevent any pregnancy, done an STD work-up and started pain medication and antibiotics for a broken right cheekbone. I still can’t bring myself to use the word used to describe what happened to me that night. I’ve only used it a handful of times in counseling and with my husband.

My mom was a single mom of myself & my sister and we are 3 very strong women. I was in amazing amounts of physical pain from the damage to my face and struggling all the time an emotional crisis from letting some man do this to me. I tried to cope for 2 months. The broken facial bones and bruising were so obvious. My sister is a model, literally. It’s how she worked through college. She’s a tall, thin, leggy perfect model. The joke in the family was always that she was the pretty one & I was the smart one. Compared to her, I was a bit of a troll, but compared to the rest of the world, I was a normal, fairly attractive young woman. This trauma to my face was obvious and had so many people asking so many questions that I just couldn’t bear to answer. One day, I gave up. I took a bottle of 60 Vicodin, curled up on the bathroom floor and waited to let it all go.

Within just a few minutes, I started vomitting everything in my gut. My mom found me and took me to the doctor. I was 8 weeks pregnant. I spent days crying non-stop. My mom & my sister thought the decision was obvious. The pregnancy was because of a rape & this is 1 of 3 times when people don’t judge you considering the inconsiderable. Everything in my body told me that this baby was a gift from God and even if he wasn’t conceived in love, he was given by love… the love of God. I mean, God did save my life with morning sickness, ya know.

I called this man and told him about the pregnancy. That was about the worse thing I could have done. He began all kinds of violent threats. Evil violent threats. The police were called and he was hauled away. I walked over to St. Mark and asked to speak with a priest. There was no priest available, so I spoke with a nun who lived at the convent. I think I got the bitterest, crankiest, meanest nun in all of Texas, maybe the US. I told her the situation. She told me the only thing I could do was to marry the father. I remember her words to this day “if you don’t marry him, you’ll be damned.” I got up, threw my bible at her and left that church in a dead run. I was sure there was no redemption from throwing a Holy book at a Holy person.

I had a very difficult pregnancy and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. After a few years I decided to go back to school and became a nurse. I raised my daughter and dealt with restraining orders and her violent father for 4 years alone. I was so ashamed of what happened to me that I refused to press charges, so he was never charged with what he did. He was arrested and found to have an unbelieveable amount of drugs on him which kept him in/out of jail most of the time which was a blessing.

When Julie was 4, I started to take an interest in gaining a specialty in Hospice Nursing. I took care of a woman named Nancy. She came onto an Alzheimer’s unit I was running. She was 46 years old. Her husband was so tired and so desperate for any help he could get. She started losing her memory 13 months before I met her; the day after her daughter committed suicide in their garage and Nancy found her. She was so hard to care for. She didn’t just have memory loss, she had severe hallucinations, often thought she was on fire, screamed at her reflection in the mirror and cried sometimes non-stop for days at a time. One morning I got a call from the nursing assistant telling me that she was so hot that it was painful to touch her. When I got there the paramedics had just arrived. Her fever was 108 degrees.

Turns out she had a drug interaction from the antipsychotic medications we gave her that caused this syndrome to happen. So now we had a woman who was severely uncomfortable with psychotic symptoms and we couldn’t treat her with any medications. She went to a psychiatric hospital for 2 weeks. Her husband was told that the only way to control her symptoms would be to completely sedate her which meant she would not be able to eat and she would die. Her husband very tearfully agreed. She was transported back to my facility on Hospice services.

The sedation didn’t work and she started this syndrome again. She started having seizures. We covered her floor with mattresses and her walls with body pillows. I stayed in her room for 3 days and slept on her mattresses waking up every hour to give her medication for her pain & seizures. After 3 days, the chaplain came in. Usually when the chaplain came in, I always left the room or sometimes the building. This time, the Chaplain came in and I looked at her & asked “why won’t she let go?” Tears started streaming down my face. The Chaplain offered to pray & I accepted. The Chaplain prayed for mercy and to take her onto her new home. When we said Amen, Sharon took her last breath. I broke down in sobs in the Chaplain’s arms and took a week’s vacation.

The next day I walked into the 1st church I could find from my house. It is an Assembly of God church I’ve been going to ever since. The Assistant Pastor is amazing and held my hand through my journey. I completed the Basic Christian Beliefs class and felt really good. It felt good to finally agree that I was, in fact, a Christian. I felt free and peaceful. I was baptized finally and started taking communion. It felt good… For a bit.

Pastor Bob started trying to get me into small groups. I went to a parenting small group, but I wasn’t married & not about to volunteer up why, so everyone thought I had been stupid and young and kept trying to fix me up. That was too painful. So I went to a Singles small group. Pastor Jeff promised me that it wasn’t a pick-up club, but a place for singles to get together. He was wrong. I tried to volunteer in the kiddos department, but found it was not OK to talk about Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter and that may even send me to hell faster than being an unmarried mother.

I used to be a barista, so I tried to help out in the Connection Center, but we covered this before… I’m shy. Apparently I wasn’t outgoing enough for the supervisor lady to volunteer and slowly started seeing my name disappear from the schedule until it was gone altogether. I started taking some bible classes and really got into 1 on the book of Revelations. I look very young for my actual age and at the time, I was still getting carded EVERYWHERE I go. I was joking with someone in class about how I had been carded at a R rated movie that my sister and I went to over the weekend. The teacher called me out in the middle of the class (horrifying for us shy ones) and told me that if I would just listen to the Holy Spirit within my heart, I wouldn’t want to see those movies in the 1st place. After that, I started avoiding classes.

I started going through the motions at church and lost that sense of peace and comfort. I still prayed and read my bible, but found excuses to not go to church on Sundays and quit going on Wednesdays all together. I started to believe that I couldn’t believe in Christ and be a goof ball. I started to believe that I would never get my goofy spirit back. I started to believe I would always be a shell.

This went on for 6 years. Until I found Dave Ramsey. My husband is perfect. Perfect in every way. The only thing not perfect about him is the fact that he’s PERFECT. He never yells. He’s always supportive. He gorgeous (I know that’s not supposed to be important, but he’s really hot)! He’s brilliant. But I’m not. I’m broken. I’m weird. I have a temper, who boy, do I ever have a temper. We were teetering on the edge. We were discussing divorce. He was completely responsible with money, I was completely crazy with money. So Financial Peace University was offered through church & I suggested that we do it. He whole-heatedly agreed because he wanted to do anything to save our marriage (again, he’s perfect).

I’m a compulsive researcher. Once I learn about something, I have to learn everything about that topic. So I was looking over Dave Ramsey’s website before our 1st class and I ran across you and your blog and I started reading. I read every single 1 of your blog entries. I laughed out loud. I didn’t sleep for 2 days. I woke my husband up several times to read him entries I found enlightening (he’s perfect & he put up with it). I bought Stuff Christians Like and that 37 book for my Nook and read those.

You know what you did for me? It was something that no one had ever told me before. You gave me permission to laugh. You gave me permission to be silly. You gave me permission to be Not Perfect. For the 1st time in a very very long time, I have started to feel like I can be a good Christian and I can also be my goofy, silly self. For the 1st time ever, I realized that the 2 are not mutually exclusive. God made me a goofball. He made me a silly, R-rated-movie-watching, crawl under the table, laugh at myself, laugh with others goofball and there is nothing wrong with that.

I was in counseling with my Pastor/Counseler at the time I found your site. He told me it was like someone flipped a switch. 1 week, I was constantly crying and the next, I was almost chatty! My husband has said several times that it is nice to have me so happy. I do housework and play with the kids and get along with my sister. He told the counselor that he feels like he’s always seen this person in me and now I get to see it too.

People at work ask me frequently what happened to me. I love telling them your quote “God made laughter and when we don’t use it, it makes him want to take it away, like the unicorns.” I love referring to your blog and book when I try to explain why we do the weird things we do. The Chaplain who prayed over Nancy (and eventually married my husband & I) has me keep a Praise journal and not a Prayer journal. She says that it keeps me focused on the positives and not the negatives. She reminds me that we need to Rejoice in all things. I honestly write your Blog post about Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings in that Praise Journal down once a week. It lets me defend my absolute LOVE of Harry Potter without any guilt.

I’ve started going to church more (more importantly, I enjoy church more). I’ve started going again on Wednesdays and now I volunteer as a greeter. It’s great for me. It forces me to practice small talk and smiling and meeting new people. Soon I’ll be able to shed the “shy” label. I used to have to take anti-anxiety medication to handle the crowds at church. I don’t have to anymore. For some reason, you making satire and jokes about the silly things that Christians do, allows me to relax and I don’t need any medication anymore. No more anti-depressants. No more anti-anxiety meds. I continue counseling, but I think I probably will at some level forever.

So I read in your book, Quitter, today that not everyone liked Stuff Christians Like when it came out. And some gave it harsh criticism. I guess that I just need you to know that those folks are short sited. I needed the humor to move on. I needed permission to laugh in order to be a better Christian. If not for your blog & book, I would have likely given up again. I think I was about to walk away from the church again and I think I may have given up on my marriage. I believe that there are others out there just like me. As I start building my dream job of running my own company I look forward to developing a class about self-care and being about to give away whole bunch of your books and encouraging caregivers and nurses to seek humor and spiritual health.