I have believed in God all my life, I grew up in a Catholic Mexican family and attended church every Sunday.  I knew of God but I didn’t really know God.

After yet another break-up I found myself down in the dumps feeling completely hopeless.  I had gone through so many relationships, never taking the time to heal before jumping into a new relationship. I couldn’t even remember the last time I was actually by myself and single.  With some added disappointments to a recent job change I had made at the time, I found myself on my knees in complete surrender, tired and frustrated with life.

In my moment of deep hopelessness and feeling completely cursed as it relates to men, I didn’t ask the typical questions people ask God like; 

“What am I here for?”

 “Do I matter?”

 “Am I loved?”….. 

That night when I genuinely sought God for the first time in my life I asked him the question “Am I beautiful?”.

It’s amazing how a pile of multiple failed relationships can make one feel undesired, cursed and completely hopeless.

What God showed me next was amazing….

It took me time, I mean A LOT of time spent with God to even begin to hear the gentle whispers he placed in my heart. You see I couldn’t hear his truth in my current state, my heart was too callused.  God knew he would have to meet me where I am at, he started speaking to me through healing.  He had to heal the deep wounds that 28 years of bad relationships with men had left in my heart. My heart was so callused at the time, I had no idea how wounded my heart truly was. I learned so so so much from the healing process. It took years, 10 years to be exact.  You know what’s crazy I read a research study once and it said that it takes 1/2 the time you had been in a relationship with someone to heal from it after a breakup.  That’s crazy because when I reflect on my healing process I realized that the study was about accurate. I had a snowball of hurt that piled up over the years, so much undealt-with pain that I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.

One lesson I learned from the healing process, is how God designed our hearts. Our hearts were designed for pureness and unconditional love and it is so very very very important that we guard our hearts and take good care of them. He doesn’t tell us to guard our hearts to avoid us from living life, he tells us to guard our hearts so we can live our lives to the fullest because when we feed our hearts, unconditional love, our possibilities in life are limitless.

Proverbs 4:23

Above all else, guard your heart,
    for everything you do flows from it.

Okay, I don’t want today’s post to be a Debbie Downer.  Nonetheless, I wanted to take the time to communicate how bad my pain was, I learned after years of therapy and the community of God’s people continually praying over me that the reason I was in so much pain rooted down to one important relationship and that was my relationship with my father.  The pain was real and it was deep.  We all suffer losses in life and the loss I was severely hurt by was not being treated like a princess when I was a little girl.  I fully remember those times before I dealt with my pain, I would cry at the drop of a dime when I saw a little girl being treated like a princess by her daddy. I could not hold back the tears, whenever it happened and I was with friends it was so embarrassing.  I didn’t understand what was going on with me.  But after years of therapy, I now can see God was healing my heart from this loss so he could begin to answer my question “Am I beautiful?”

That is the beauty of God, he will meet you right where you are at, during this time he brought so many amazing people into my life who demonstrated to me what a father/daughter relationship looked like.  I was mad at God for a very long time for not sending me a Godly father figure. I prayed over and over again that he would send one in my life, but it never happened.  Then one day God revealed this to me, He said how much more will I be glorified in your testimony to see a girl completely healed and now able to fully know and understand how to be loved by a man when there was never a man in your life to show you?

In these upcoming posts, I will show how God answered my question “Am I beautiful”, through the healing power of our heavenly father, and the beautiful pursuit of our groom Jesus.  I learned a couple of things in my journey and that is you can be fully healed from past emotional pain and secondly that you can never be fully healed from past emotional pain until you let Jesus heal you.  You cannot do it alone.

Thanks for allowing me to share my story, I look forward to seeing you in the next post.

Love in abundance,

Jamie