God's first question after the Fall wasn't "what did you do?" It was "where are you?" He knew where they were. He wanted them to name it. To see themselves clearly enough to say: I am hiding. I am ashamed. I have been lied to about who I am. That question is still the first question. It has always been the first question.

I spent most of my life building a self out of the wrong materials. Rejection from my father. Bullying that taught me my presence was a problem. Adultification that made me responsible for everyone else's feelings before I even had language for my own. By the time I was old enough to choose who I became, I was already made of borrowed pieces — most of them broken.

I called that self me. I defended her. I performed her. I built a whole life around her. And none of it was actually mine.

The Identity I Built to Survive

When you grow up learning that your needs are inconvenient, you find other ways to matter. You become useful. You become the one who holds it together. You build an identity around your function — around what you do for other people — because simply being yourself was never enough to guarantee you'd be kept.

I also sought love in other women. This is the part people will want to isolate and analyze. I'd ask you not to. The longing for love and belonging is not unusual. What was unusual was the shape my wounds had given me — the specific architecture of hurt that made me reach in that direction. The longing was human. The path it took was the result of not yet knowing who God said I was.

I got married. It was emotionally and financially abusive. For seven years I stayed in a situation that was slowly dismantling what was left of me, because leaving felt like failure and failure had always felt like proof — proof that I was exactly as insufficient as I'd been told.

The Journal Entry

On August 5, 2024, I wrote in my journal. I was crying out — not quietly, not with composure — for help getting out. I needed God to do something I couldn't do myself. I made Him a deal. Get me out of this cleanly, and I will live according to your design. I meant it as desperation. He received it as covenant.

On August 5, 2025 — exactly one year later — I filed for divorce. And I recommitted my life to Christ.

The coincidence is not a coincidence. I don't have a theological word for what that kind of divine precision is called. I just know that when I saw the dates side by side, something in me understood: He had been tracking this the whole time. I was not lost to Him. I was never lost to Him.

What Men Do and What God Does With His Daughters

There's something I've noticed in Scripture that has wrecked me in the best possible way: when men needed God, they went looking for Him. But when God needed His daughters to know they were seen — He came to them.

He came to Hagar in the desert when she was abandoned and alone. He came to Mary with an announcement before she asked for one. He came to the woman at the well — not to condemn her, but to name every hidden thing and then offer her living water anyway. He came to Mary Magdalene first, after the resurrection. First. Before the disciples. Before anyone.

I was not searching for God. I was searching for myself. I had been searching for so long — for who I was, for whether I was enough, for someone to tell me I was worth being kept. And the searching was the very thing that was making me unfindable. You cannot be found while you are running.

What Stillness Did

I left the country. I went to Costa Rica for over two months. I sat in a rainforest and I stopped moving. Not physically — but internally, in the part of me that had been striving since I was a child. I stopped performing. I stopped trying to construct a version of myself that would be acceptable. I made a vow. I was done living in confusion.

The day after my divorce was finalized, I woke up and I was different. The attraction I had carried — the part of me that had oriented toward women — was simply gone. I did not manage it away. I did not white-knuckle my way out of it. It was taken. The way you take something from a child gently, replacing it with something better before they even notice what's missing.

He began a good work. In me. In the wreckage of everything I'd built wrong. He started something in there and He is not going to leave it unfinished.

The Answer to the Question

So who told you that? Who told you that you were too far gone? Who told you that your history was your destiny? Who told you that what you survived was the truest thing about you?

Because they were wrong.

God looked at the woman I was — the one who had been bullied and rejected and adultified and married to someone who was destroying her — and He saw someone He came for. Not someone He fixed from a distance. Someone He came to.

Does anyone see me? That's the cry I'd been making my whole life without knowing that's what it was. And God said — not only do I see you. I'm going to use what tried to erase you to make sure other women know they're seen too.

This essay is part of the Faith + Formation series on Redefining Self — an ongoing collection of essays about identity, transformation, and what it means to be known by God.