Marley's Testimony

Growing up, my family looked like every other Christian family in the area. We went to church, youth group, my brother and I attended a Christian school through eighth grade, etc. We did the typical things that you would expect to see. God provided most of my friends that I am still very close with today through my church community and my school. I am extremely grateful to still have such strong connections to all of them and I definitely would not be who I am today if I had not gone to that school or that church.

Sadly, my story is not all happy times and good friends and trusting that God is really on my side. During my brother’s junior year of high school, while I was still in middle school, his best friend died in a car accident. I have never seen my brother so incredibly shattered. To cope with this loss, my brother very quickly turned to drugs and alcohol.

After several visits at midnight from the cops, calls that my brother had been arrested, and hours in the car searching for him in the middle of the night, I began to wonder why God would ever let something like this happen. Why was he punishing me and my family when we had already suffered from a huge loss? It was difficult for us to have hope that my brother would ever be clean, or that he would make it out of his addictions alive. (Spoiler: God super answered our prayers for my brother and he just got married at the end of December and he has been clean for a while now!)

Looking back on those few years, I think God was teaching me to lament. I hadn’t seen it in that way until very recently when one of my friends was talking about her devotional through Lamentations, but it matches up with how I felt my relationship with God was for a while. I would fight with Him because I couldn’t see the work that he was in the process of doing. There were so many places that God was working in my life and so many people that he was using that I just couldn’t see until I take a look back on those years. Going through that time taught me to rely on God, but I didn’t make any big movements in my life until I surrounded myself in a community that was beneficial for me and my faith.

I am currently in my sophomore year at Virginia Tech and let me tell you - moving to college is tough. I absolutely love Tech, but leaving home was hard. I don’t think I would have survived if it weren’t for the church community that I found. I started attending a church on campus called New Life Christian Fellowship and immediately felt like I was right at home. I truly didn’t understand that having a relationship with God included daily time with Him until the right people were placed in my life and constantly encouraged me to strengthen my relationship with God through devotionals, new ways for prayer, and being completely honest with those around me. Before my freshman year, I wasn’t convinced that I would find a church and continue seeking God, but like normal, He changed my plans and I became closer to Him than ever before.

I could not be more thankful that His plans are greater than mine because, in March, my parents told me and my brother that they were getting a divorce. This changed my entire world and it was something I never saw coming. But the community that I was surrounded by and the friends that I had grown so close to were there right away to comfort me, be a shoulder to cry on, and again, constantly encourage me to seek God.

Even though there has been a lot of hurt and times where I feel like God is not on my side, all of this has somehow led me much closer to Him and has taught me that if I trust in Him, in the end, everything will be okay, no matter how bad I think it is.

“More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Romans 5:3-5