Lifestyle Choice Becomes Nearly Fatal

“I literally remember being on my knees begging her, ‘What can I do so we can just have peace? I'm tired, what can I do?’ And she got, she got down to eye level to me and told me I could help her by blowing my brains out!” recalls Laurynn.

By her early twenty’s, Laurynn had been in several lesbian relationships. Each one promising love and each becoming physically and emotionally abusive. She remembers, “I was looking for just unconditional love. I was looking for to be accepted. I wanted to belong to somebody, you know, really be wanted.”

Her desire for unconditional love began when she was a young girl - desperate for her mother’s affection. She says, “If I do enough, if I achieve enough, then she'll love me. Then she'll see me. Same thing with my father. If I learn a new thing, if I be the son he never had, if I'm the best daughter out of the three, then they'll love me. It was a unattainable goal to have to try to earn another person's love.”

For Laurynn, the only time she ever felt seen by her mother was when she was being punished. And the beatings were severe. “Beat to your skin is split open,” says Laurynn. “Beat to where you're hidden so that no one sees how bad you’re beat, or beat so bad that you get sent out of the state to another relative's house to hide that.”

In her teens Laurynn thought she found an escape from the trauma when a lesbian friend opened her arms and offered her attention and affection. She says, “It was unhealthy from the get go. It was another, I attracted someone that I had to work for. That I had to show why I was worth loving.”

When that relationship ended, physical and mental abuse from her next partner became even more severe than what she’d ever experienced at home. She says, “Verbally abusive, physically abusive, sexually abusive, I literally remember being on my knees begging her, ‘What can I do so we can just have peace? I'm tired, what can I do?’ I’m worth nothing at this point.” 

At the prompting of her partner, Laurynn attempted suicide by overdosing on anxiety medication. She woke in the hospital ashamed at what her life had become. “It was just embarrassing,” says Laurynn. “It was very hard for me to deal with the choices that I had made and then on top of that deal with other people’s judgement as a result of the choice that I had made and had failed at. So, it was hard.” 

Then one day, while visiting her grandmother at church, Launynn was embraced by a different group of women - Christians, who loved her and prayed for her. Laurynn says, “It just seemed like all these people came to lay hands on me and I just broke down and just remember just listening to what they were saying and how they were praying for me just really was speaking to my soul. And I got...I got deliverance that day. And how I know I got delivered is it was the first time I was aware of my sin. The first time I felt God's presence. It felt amazing because it was, it was real to me. It was really real to me, you know, to hear people say, ‘Oh, Jesus is real. And oh, God changed my life.’ I've heard it. But to experience it and to have that moment where you feel like you've been seen, it was a big deal. It was a big deal for me. It was refreshing. It was frightening. It was exciting.”

Laurynn left the lifestyle and was radically changed as she began to experience the unconditional love of God. She says, “When I first came to Christ, I didn't understand how someone would love me without me having to do anything to earn it. Now I had an understanding that I'm loved, and I don't have to do and I don't jump through any hoops and hurdles for anyone to love me back because God loves me. The maker of the universe, I look at the sun and be like, wow, the God who created that is crazy about me. He loves me and that He loved me before I was even in my mother's womb.”

She says she has also been set free from any shame from her former life and choices. “There is no condemnation because I'm in Christ Jesus. All I got to do is just keep my eye on the prize, keep going forward, keep walking in this faith walk out. He's going to take care of the rest,” she says. 

Laurynn encourages others who’ve experienced similar fruitless searches to turn to God as the true source of love and emotional healing. “You're never too far. You're never too far gone. You're never too deep in your pain, too deep in whatever choices you've made that God can't bring you out and redeem your life, make it into something that you don't even recognize,” she says, “He takes everything and turns it for His glory when you give it to Him.”