Tonight, the non-profit I founded, Wonderfully Made, is partnering with the Mission North Shore to host a Wonderfully Made Young Women’s Gathering at Sunset Recreation Center. To say it’s a full-grace-full-circle moment is an understatement. The week after I graduated from high school, my best friends and I came to Oahu to celebrate. It was a week of partying, kissing Coast Guard Boys (as a jelly fish stung my foot!), tanning, and living it up. I was on one of the most beautiful islands in the world and was living the kind of life the world idealized.
But I was empty. I was dying inside. I recall driving on Kam Highway in the back of some guy’s car we had met. The darkness that had been following me since I was a girl engulfed me, and by the fourth day of our trip, I was so depressed I couldn’t speak. It was only a week later that I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital because I didn’t want to live anymore.
But today, here I am, twenty-four years later — alive, free, with hope in my heart, and I have the honor of sharing my story and the radical love of Jesus with a room full of young women. Only God. Tonight, I will tell the girls everything I wish someone had told me about their value, identity, purpose, and the radiant and overflowing life Jesus came to give us. Previously, I’ve also had the honor of speaking to brave survivors at Pearl Haven, a refuge for girls who have been sex trafficked.
So, friend, whatever you are walking through, this is not the end of your story. Believe in your heart that your pain will never be wasted when you surrender it to God. That one day, if you hand Him all the pieces, He can use your story and your life to give others hope:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God (2 Corinthians 1:4).
With Aloha,
Allie
