Hi, Friend!

I don’t know you personally, but I feel I do know you. Today, I want to come alongside you to share my story, to comfort you with the comfort God has given me.

I was born into a Christian family. I’m a preacher’s kid and a preacher’s grandkid. There are four of us in my family, and growing up, we spent a lot of time together. If my brother and I weren’t at school, we were at church, or at activities like girl scouts or little league baseball. My parents took us everywhere they went, even to work sometimes. I loved spending time with them.

One of my favorite memories was going fishing and eating smoked mullet while we waited for the fish to bite. I still love doing that. Another was getting ice cream at a corner ice cream shop in the city where we lived. I can still taste the upside down banana splits. We’d sit in the car and just eat away, exchanging toppings, or drive along laughing.

Although we spent a lot of time together, I didn’t feel like anyone really knew me. I don’t remember ever talking to anyone about what I liked, didn’t like, what I was feeling, my dreams, my hurts. As far as I can remember, I never shared my feelings with my family about my mom’s battles with cancer, or when we lost the little girl I considered a sister to her biological family, or even how it felt to move and go to a different school every year. My family didn’t discourage us from expressing ourselves, but neither did they encourage it.

I didn’t know how I could be loved the way I longed to be loved. From an early age, I felt too dark around lighter-skinned relatives, so I believed I could not be loved for who I was. At age of 5, a babysitter introduced me to soap operas, where I learned I could do things to be loved. So I imitated what I saw. From childhood, my life was consumed with performing, striving, going, going, going. I figured out the best way I could get attention was to immerse myself in church, school, and my grades. I craved perfection.

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