Long before I knew what a testimony was, apparently I was practicing one.
I couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve. I'd stand in front of the bathroom mirror and pretend I was on one of those daytime talk shows—Ricki Lake, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael. You know, the shows where people sat beneath bright studio lights and told an audience about the hard things they'd survived.
I was fascinated by those stories. The pain. The overcoming. The moment someone could stand on the other side of something terrible and tell everybody what happened. So naturally, I practiced. There was only one small problem. None of it had actually happened.
I would stand in that bathroom and act out these dramatic stories of everything I'd supposedly endured and how I'd overcome it. At the time, I assumed this meant I was destined to become an actress. Looking back now, I'm not so sure it was the acting that fascinated me. I think it was the testimony. Funny how sometimes you don't recognize what's been woven into you until you start looking in the rearview mirror.
Years later, though, telling my actual story was a whole different matter.
You've already met that version of me. At the Bench, I was much more comfortable listening to other women share their stories than sharing mine. I was carrying betrayal, shame, questions, and plenty of things I wasn't ready to say out loud. The little girl who could give an entire imaginary interview to a bathroom mirror had grown into a woman who wasn't quite sure what to do with a real story.
But something began changing after that retreat. I started finding my voice. Not all at once. More like someone slowly turning up the volume on something that had always been there. And then Radiant began sharing stories. Real stories.
Not people on a television stage whom I'd never meet. These were people sitting in the same congregation I was—people willing to stand up and tell the truth about painful places in their lives and how God had met them there.
One story in particular stuck with me. I watched someone I recognized from church openly share something painful and then point directly to what God had done with it. There was something incredibly powerful about that. Not because her story looked like mine, but because she was willing to tell it.
Then, at the end of the series, Radiant extended an invitation: Do you have a story to share too? If you did, write it down and send it to the church.
Well...apparently they'd just handed the girl in the bathroom mirror a microphone. So I wrote. I told the truth about betrayal. About loss. About a marriage that had been broken. And about the God who had somehow begun putting broken things back together.
What had once carried so much shame became something I willingly handed over for someone else to read. And they published it. Radiant Stories #001.
There it was. Our story. Our pain. Our redemption. Our God.
Something changed in me through that experience. I saw firsthand what could happen when somebody was willing to stop hiding the painful parts and instead let God use them. My pain could have purpose. The ugliest parts of our marriage could point toward something beautiful. Things I once would have done almost anything to keep people from knowing could now tell somebody else: Look what God can redeem.
How could that possibly be bad? It wasn't. That's important. The testimony wasn't the problem. God really had redeemed something. He really was restoring something. And telling people about what He had done really did matter. I think somewhere along the way, though, something very subtle began growing alongside my willingness to testify. I just couldn't see it yet.
Then came Asbury.
In February 2023, something was happening at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, that had captured the attention of Christians around the world. What began during a chapel service continued for days as people came to worship, pray, repent, and simply remain in the presence of God. People began calling it the Asbury Revival.
And somehow, Nick and I ended up there. I'm not going to take you all the way inside those doors just yet. That's another story—and trust me, there are a few threads we need to pick up before we're ready for that one. For now, what matters is what happened after we came home.
We didn't pull back into our driveway until around midnight. After everything we'd experienced and the long trip home, we weren't exactly jumping out of bed the next morning to get ourselves ready for church. We stayed home and watched Radiant's Sunday service live online instead.
And then someone who had also been at Asbury got up to share their testimony. Something inside me immediately stirred. I need to share mine too. Of course I did. Apparently I'd been practicing for this since I was eleven. I opened my laptop and began writing.
By then I'd developed a habit when I wrote about God. I would ask Holy Spirit to lead me, and then I'd write. When my thoughts started wandering or something intrusive broke my focus, I'd stop, back up, and read what I'd written. Then I'd pray again: Holy Spirit, lead me. And I'd continue. I wanted what came out of me to be His, not simply mine. And I had quite a testimony to tell.
I'd gone to the Asbury Revival believing God might heal my hearing. And if He did...oh, the testimony I could tell. My family would see that God was real. People I loved who didn't believe would have evidence they couldn't ignore. My healing could help lead them to Jesus.
Even writing that now, I can still see the beauty in the desire. I wanted my family to know Him. I wanted people I loved to encounter the God I had encountered. I wanted my story to point people toward Christ. There was nothing wrong with wanting that. But somewhere between wanting God to use my testimony and believing what my testimony could accomplish, a line had gotten blurry. I didn't know it yet.
Because pride doesn't always walk into the room announcing itself. Sometimes it comes carrying something holy—a calling, a gift, a testimony, even a genuine desire for somebody else to know Jesus. And that's what makes it so difficult to recognize.
I had never considered myself a prideful person. If you'd asked me then, I probably would have told you pride was one of the last things I struggled with. But I was about to discover something terrifying about pride: You can see it clearly in someone else and be completely blind to it in yourself.
The little girl in the mirror had finally gotten a real testimony. Now God was going to teach her Who it belonged to.
Maybe humility isn't pretending there is nothing worth telling. Maybe it's remembering WHO wrote the story.