This may be a bit long due to the fact that I think the steps leading up to my conversion are very important, to show that only God can take a life, broken and bruised and make it into something beautiful and precious!!

I don’t remember much of my childhood, I suppose I blocked a lot of it out when I was young in an attempt to cope. I was an extremely sensitive child and very shy. I spent the better part of it trying to be as invisible as I could due to my fathers vicious temper and physical abuse. I spent the first seven years of my life in Iran where my mom (an American) and Dad had gone to meet his parents and then just stayed. My mom was and still is the sweetest person alive and the best mom. She tried her best to compensate for how my dad was. She had classic battered wife syndrome and was just too afraid to leave. When I was 4, my moms dad died in the states and she was desperate to go to the funeral. She was very close to her dad who was a gentle sweet man. My father told her he could only afford to send her back now and that he would bring my brother and I back to the states with him as soon as he saved the money in a few weeks. My mom was terrified to leave us there knowing in the back of her mind that my dad may be lying and that she would never see us again, but she had to go. Months and then years went by and we were still there with my dad and grandparents. My dad was taking the opportunity to live like he was single I guess. There was always a huge party going on with lots of my dads friends and the stuff they smoked. At 5yrs. I was molested by one of my dads party friends. It was so traumatic that I didn’t even remember it until well into my early twenties. My dad finally had enough of Iran and we all went back to the states when I was almost 8yrs. old. I had no idea who the lady clinging to my neck and crying hysterically was until someone told me it was my mother. Growing up, I basically lived in my room and only came out to eat and go to school. I escaped into books and would stay in my room reading as many as two or three thick romance novels a week. LOL I was desperate for male attention and love and became sexually active at 13yrs. Needless to say, things just went downhill from there. At 17 I got pregnant and had planned to get an abortion but praise the Lord!! God intervened. I had taken a blank check and forged my moms name in order to pay for it but my boyfriend wanted the money instead and suggested we go ahead and have the baby and get married (neither one of us realized what being a parent would mean) I thought my dad would kill us but I was glad I didn’t have to get rid of my baby. After lots of screaming and threatening to send me to a boarding school in Switzerland, my mom was able to calm my dad down and talk him into letting us get married.