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Her Femininity Restored After Act of Kindness

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“I felt abandoned. Like, ‘Okay, God, why did you take my mom? Everybody else has a mom,” Lakeishion Ganhs says. She spent much of her life struggling to find her identity. Until she was 9, she thought her grandmother was her mother. “She sat down with me and two of my siblings to let us know that my mom had passed away when I was two. And that she was actually my grandmother. I felt like I was lied to, like, ‘How come you waited this long?’”

After her grandmother passed away, Lakeishion was passed around to different relatives. She was supposed to receive a monthly inheritance check, but someone would often confiscate it. “When I found that out, I was like, ‘Wow, it wasn’t because you just wanted to take care of us.’ I was very hurt and that caused a lot of bitterness and caused a lot of hatred toward my father, toward my aunt,” she says. “I was already dealing with rejection way back when I was younger, so now it’s like, that’s getting fed even more.”

With no strong male figures in her life, Lakeishion began to assume that role for herself. “The enemy really began to put lies in my mind and make me believe like, ‘Ok, well, you wasn’t born to be a girl. You were born a boy.’ I would still sneak, though, and put on my brother's clothes. My cousins and them, they were always calling me tomboy and I didn't know what that was, but I was like, ‘Oh, well I'm a tomboy.' So I took on that, you know. I took on that identity. I did.”

Lakeishion sometimes attended church with relatives but felt Christians were judgmental. “Coming across Christians that are supposed to, you know, love and all of those things, it did affect me real bad because that was my perception of who God was. So I'm like, ‘Okay, if God is like this, I don't want Him.”

In her teens, she began to drink heavily and smoke pot. “I would literally drink a pint of Seagram’s every single day. The alcohol would be the one that gets me pumped and then if I wanted to calm down, the marijuana.” 

Lakeishion began dating a woman and moved in with her. She continued to cover her emotional pain with drugs and alcohol. “In that lifestyle, you know, I was considered what they call ‘a stud.’ A stud is one that portrays to be a male, dominant one. And so you would dress literally--I would dress like a man.”

One night, she was invited to church by a friend. “I'm like, ‘Nah, I'm good. I would never step foot in another church.’ But she was very persistent.”

She relented and agreed to visit church, but had her guard up the whole time. “I’m dressed like a guy, a dude,” she says. “I have a button up, a tie, the dress pants--all of those things. So when I walked in there, man, when I walked in there, I felt like an overwhelming love, where everybody was coming up, hugging me.”  

Pastor Derick Jones recalls, “I think it kind of took her by surprise because she probably wasn’t expecting that behavior because of some of the past experiences that she probably ran into.”

“They were saying, ‘Thank you for being here.’ He said, ‘Oh you dress real nice.’ That shocked me. Like what do he mean, ‘I’m dressed nice?' There was the praise and worship. They were singing about how Jesus loves us, and I’m like, ‘Hold on,’ she recalls. “After the praise and worship, the pastor gets up and he literally begins to talk about the love of God. And I'm crying, sitting there crying, and I'm mad because I'm crying. I'll never forget Pastor Jones, he pointed out at the audience at me and I'm like, ‘Well, here it goes.’ And he said, ‘You,’ he said, ‘God has a purpose for your life.’ He said, ‘He loves you so much. There's things that He's gonna do in your life that you don't--it is just gonna just blow your mind.'"

Over the following weeks pastor Derick Jones and his wife cultivated a relationship with her. “She kept coming back to church and that caught my attention, and that caught my wife’s attention,” Jones remembers. “So we started to see Kiki over a period of time changing. And we did everything we could to just minister love to her. Because you know, you could tell there was some level of brokenness, there was some level of rejection there, but we could tell there was something more inside of her that was waiting to come out. We started seeing how God was working in her heart, working in her life.” 

Eventually, love broke through. “I went back another Sunday and he was saying, ‘Jesus, the love of Jesus—like, He's not looking for you to be perfect.’ So I accepted Him in my heart that day, not knowing what that really meant, but I accepted Him, like, ‘Wow, You accept me? I accept you!’” Lakeishion says. “At that time, I was living with the girl that I was with and everything. I woke up the next morning, and I looked at her and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I left everything. Everything. Internally, there was no more desire. There was more like, ‘I just want you, God.’” 

Lakeishion thrived in her new faith. She later met and married Brian and they moved to Texas to pursue ministry. Today, they have two beautiful children and she has a new identity in Christ. “I currently go to a seminary school where I'll be graduating in May,” she says. “Then the Lord connected me to a community group. We have Bible studies on Wednesdays, we gather together. Those relationships that I felt I didn't have, He restored that with Kingdom family.”

Pastor Jones adds, “To see her now as this beautiful young lady, you know, who is a published author, you know, she ministers, and she shares her testimony with other people and young people. It is just absolutely amazing to see.”

“I just want to tell people about Jesus, even it just touches one person,” says Lakeishion. I want people to know what the love of God can do. I thought there was no way at all that I could get out of something that I didn’t even know I was bound in. Now there is a permanent peace that I have that literally, no matter what I face, nobody can take away this peace. Nobody can take away this joy.”
 

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About The Author

Randy Rudder
Randy
Rudder

Randy Rudder received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Memphis and taught college English and journalism for 15 years. At CBN, he’s produced over 150 testimony and music segments and two independent documentaries. He lives in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, with his wife, Clare, and daughter Abigail.