How one girl lived through incest…and came to know real Love on the other side of it all.
My virginity was stolen from me at nine years old and I didn’t even know it. My cousin was living with my mother and me, at the time, and he would tell me, “Come play these games…†I guess when I knew it was really gone was when I overheard girls at my school saying that they “gave up†their virginity. I felt angry about it…that I didn’t have a choice. That affected my actions but I didn’t even realise how it did.
My outlet was on the dance floor. I got to be this “dancehall baddest girl†which was so not me…but I loved to dance. Loved dancehall. Loved soca…and to captivate the men on the dance floor was me. In the midst of that, I met this boy and we got together. I was still battling with those sexual desires from being molested and so that led me to becoming pregnant at age 16.
It was a lot to deal with. My mother always used to tell me “books before boys†and so getting pregnant in school was the worst nightmare ever! How am I going to deal with this? How am I going to get rid of this? I’m thinking my life is totally destroyed at this point. Now my only thing to think about (which I used to be the advocate against) was to have an abortion but this was detrimental for me because I would be the first one to jump up in school and say “How DARE you have an abortion! That’s MURDER!†Now look at me….I wanted to resort to the same thing, to commit that murder on the inside because I was panicking. The reality is my mother would have literally killed me if she found out I was pregnant. I would have brought shame on my family, on her and everybody. Disappointment gripped me… and, you know, pride. I needed a way out and so, I did it…
Taking whatever I took caused me to begin to haemorrhage. I really thought I was going to die…to bleed to death. In my sneaking around and going through the process, I was bleeding so much one day that my mother found out and, like they say, “All that’s in the dark came to the light.†I felt so ashamed. I felt like I had no choice in the matter. I felt damaged. I felt unworthy. In the religion I belonged to, you had to marry in white, but I felt I would never be able to marry in white because I was full of sin. It was a depressing, dark time…
Now, in the midst of the turmoil, I had some friends that called themselves Christians. They invited me to a play, “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames†and I was like, “Okay.†The way I felt on the inside, I thought I would just go see what it’s all about…plus I like theatre. We went to the play and I saw displayed before me that my sins (the things that I did wrong) had a consequence, and the only way to get to God was through this Jesus Christ. I mean, I knew about Jesus before but I didn’t know He died for me. I didn’t know that sin had a consequence and that He went on the cross and the only way to get to the Father God, who we say is Creator, was to go through Jesus.
That was my point of decision. What should I do? I felt so dirty on the inside. I felt that since my virginity was taken away from me, how would it be replaced? But having my sins and all the things that I did before Him, He said that if my sin was as red as crimson—you know, as obvious and dirty as it was to me—He would wash it and I would be as white as snow. I’d be washed clean. And that word “clean†just stood out to me because, in His eyes, I would be as pure as a virgin again. I just had to surrender my life to this truth.
And, on top of that, He was a man.
A man that died for me and loved me and didn’t want to steal anything from me and take advantage of me.
He just wanted to love me.
So I just had to surrender my life, leaving everything behind, all the things that I would have liked, and just give my life to Him.
