Donna's Story

“Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so …” I can remember singing this song as a child and singing it from the bottom of my heart in Sunday school. I can remember playing the role of Mary in a Sunday school concert. I don't really remember much more about my Sunday school experiences but I know I truly loved Jesus.

I can remember a specific day in grade school. The teacher, I do not remember but I believe it was when I was in first or second grade and I definitely remember the event which transpired. My teacher asked the class if anyone knew how long it took for the world to be made. I raised my hand and waved it anxiously in the air, because I knew the answer! I could answer the question because I had learned all about this at Sunday school. I was chosen to answer the question by my teacher and I proudly replied, “Six days”. My teacher just laughed and said, “Oh no, it took millions and millions of years Donna”. My classmates all burst out into laughter and I was so embarrassed as well as confused. I knew my teacher in Sunday school had said it only took six days. I thought that my school teacher must have made a mistake so I decided that when I got home I'd ask my dad about this since I knew he'd know the correct answer, because Daddy always knew what was right! Well, that evening my dad informed me that the school teacher was right. This made me angry. I asked him why my Sunday school teacher had lied to me. My dad said that she hadn't lied because the stories she had taught me were exactly that, “stories”. He said the stories in the Bible were good stories but they just were not true. I was angry at those stories because I had believed they were true and because of that I had been laughed at by all of my classmates. The last thing I remember about this day was a picture that I saw in my mind. It was a picture of Jesus behind a glass frame and all of a sudden the glass shattered and the picture shredded into tiny little pieces, and then “poof” he was gone. Inside, my heart felt shattered and torn. I continued on in school of course and I was now really interested in learning the truth: like how the earth took millions of years to be formed and that it happened from a big bang. I also learned that I had evolved from an ape, in fact; I learned how first we started off in the water and then moved up onto the land.

Junior high came along and I remember feeling like my childhood was coming to an end. It actually saddened me. During these next years of my life I battled with a low self-esteem. I didn't feel like I fit in anywhere, I just existed in this so called world of life. So often I felt like I was invisible and I remember deciding that I was going to become a disruptive student to make myself noticed. It didn't feel very good getting into trouble all the time but it did make me feel noticed and for some reason that was more important to me. When I got disciplined I'd act like I didn't care but deep down inside I really did and I was deeply hurting.

High school years eventually came along and by now I had very low self-esteem. I was also experiencing panic attacks which were occurring quite often and I knew absolutely nothing about what they were. I never told anyone about battling this; somehow I just fought through them alone and scared. My parents decided to put me into a city track and field team hoping to help build up my confidence since I had won many medals in school tracks meets. I did very well in running during my high school years and was chosen to represent the province competing all across Canada . In grade eleven I was the second fastest woman's 400 meter sprinter for all of western Canada . I enjoyed running but I was always trying to win the approval of my coach which turned out to be an impossible endeavor. I would win a gold medal but it was never good enough. My coach always said that I was too heavy and that if I were thinner then my time would have been faster. If ever I had an injury it was because I weighed too much. Anyone else on the team could get injured and it was just an athletic injury. The sad thing about this was I wasn't even overweight. I looked up to my coach so much and worked so hard yet she was never satisfied with my results. I just couldn't understand how winning gold couldn't be good enough. So much for building a healthy self-esteem, I was just never good enough for her no matter how well I performed. At the end of my grade twelve year, my coach decided to tell our team that she was no longer going to coach anymore. In that moment my desire to continue competing was gone; I would never be able to hear her say, “well done”. I was offered a full scholarship at the University of Manitoba in Physical Education if I would run for the university but I turned it down. Inside I was absolutely devastated. Instead I went to another University and entered the faculty of education. I began taking aerobic classes to keep in shape and eventually became a certified instructor and began teaching classes to make some money while I was going to school. Ladies in my classes who were thinner than me were always talking about how fat they were. Add that with wearing Lycra while looking into a mirror everyday and you have a recipe for disaster. I now believed that my coach had been right and that I was fat and needed to lose some weight. I started by cutting out dessert after dinner and lost a few pounds. People noticed and told me that I looked good so then I started skipping meals. First I skipped breakfast and lost weight and people kept remarking how great I looked. I then started skipping lunch and eventually dinner. It began with everyone saying how great I looked but then I was getting told that I was getting too thin. At this point I was practically living on lifesavers, fruit, coffee and cigarettes. Often throughout the day I had fainting spells. I ended up in the emergency ward on several occasions too. One day my mom walked in on me while I was trying on some clothes and she broke down in tears. She said I was skin and bones and needed to eat. I was so scared to eat because I didn't want to get fat and I believed I still needed to lose more weight. Seeing my mom crying about my not eating really upset me so I started to eat for her but then would go and throw it all up. Yes, hello bulimia my new found friend, so I thought. Things seemed better because mom was happy to see me eat and I wasn't gaining weight. Some of my friends figured out what I was doing and told me that I needed to get help. I told them that I was in control of things and that I could stop doing it when I wanted to so it wasn't a problem. I remember thinking, “Why can't people just leave me alone, why were they trying to make me fatter and ruin my life?” One morning my mom came into my room worried sick, she said my room always stunk in the morning and insisted I make a doctors appointment or she would drag me there herself. I went and the doctor ran some tests which came back saying that my body was burning ketones, meaning I was starving my body and it was eating my muscle tissue to survive. The doctor informed me that I was slowly killing myself and that my heart would eventually give out if I kept starving myself like I was. The last several years of battling with an eating disorder I was depressed and just wanted to die but I was too scared to end my life because I didn't want to hurt my parents. I battled anxiety attacks daily for years as well and that is what really made me want to end my life. I never heard of anyone else ever battling anxiety so I kept this battle to myself. I was convinced that if anyone found out that I'd end up in a mental hospital. During this time the eating disorder was the only thing going for me. I hoped that I would die from a heart attack so my parents wouldn't be disgraced by having a child who committed suicide and I would for once be at peace. All I wanted in life was to die. It was in the final year of my education degree where I cracked. I was behind in my assignments and finals were only a week away. One particular evening I was studying at the university and just wanted to end it all. I phoned a girl whom I hadn't spoken to in over a year because of a fight we had had. I chose to phone her because I believed that she wouldn't care about what I had to say. Well I was wrong; somehow she managed to get me to agree to stay at the university so we could talk. She drove me to her house and we talked for several hours. She finally got me to agree to go to the hospital and get some help. I was pulled out of school and put into an outpatient eating disorder program because the hospitals waiting list was over a year long. I was also put on drugs to try and control the daily anxiety attacks I had battled for so many years.

At age 27 I moved to British Columbia still battling anxiety and bulimia which still had total control over me. My belief in God was still the same from after that experience in elementary school but God had a plan for my life and here in British Columbia it was beginning to unfold. Everywhere I went I ran into Christians. In fact a neighbor across the street heard that I was new to BC so she invited me to a young adult's Bible study at her home. I didn't really want to go to a Bible study but I was very lonely so went. One day I decided to go to a salon and get my nails done and I ended up being a regular client of this one lady. At one appointment I asked if I could ask her a question. I told her how I really liked the people at this Bible study I was going to but it was becoming awkward because they kept trying to push Jesus on me. I told her that I could accept that maybe there was a God but believing Jesus is the only way to heaven I just couldn't accept. I asked her why they couldn't leave Jesus out of it. She shocked me because she too said that I needed Jesus in my life in order to spend eternity in heaven with God the Father. Here I had thought she'd be able to help me get these people off my back in a nice way and now she was saying the same thing as them. It was on this day that I shared with her how I really wanted to die but now I was really scared because I didn't know what to believe. How could I accept Christ as my Savior when I didn't even believe in him? I couldn't lie to God if he was really real I thought. This woman saw the desperate place I was in so she asked me if I would allow her to call the church she attended and see if I could talk with a pastor. She told me that I really needed to talk to someone and she didn't feel she could answer all of my questions. She said she'd drive me there and introduce me to the pastor and if I didn't like them then we could leave. That sounded fair to me so I agreed. She called and amazingly a pastor was free to see me. I continued meeting with this pastor and shared how so many doctors and counselors had promised they could help me but eventually over time said there was nothing more they could do for me and sent me on. She assured me that she wouldn't do that to me and that she wanted to help me learn more about God and his Word by doing a Bible study with me. As time went on I believe I was starting to look to her for help rather than the Lord. Of course I see this now but didn't at the time. I believe this is what she saw because one day she informed me that she could no longer meet with me. I was devastated and wondered how she could ever do this to me. In fact over time I became so angry I actually went to see her at her office and asked her how she could even call herself a pastor and as far as I was concerned she was no different than all the counselors I had seen in the past. Time went on and I was feeling so helpless and scared that I finally decided that I'd accept Christ as my Savior since I knew there was no one else on this earth that could help me. I was desperate. It was on Thanksgiving day October 11 th 1992 that I decided to phone the lady who worked on my nails and told her that I wasn't phoning for an appointment but that I wanted to accept Christ as my Savior but didn't know how to do it. She prayed with me on the phone and I accepted Christ as my Savior by what I was told was by faith. Time went by and nothing seemed to change in my life, I kept saying I believed in Jesus but it was just words to me. I battled my mind constantly, it was always saying I didn't really believe in Jesus, it was just a lie and who was I trying to fool. However, I chose to stand my ground and say by faith that I believed.

One night I was at a church and at the end of the service they had an alter call for people to go up and pray for a loved ones salvation. There were many who stayed and went up front to pray. Let me paint a picture here, this wasn't a little church. There were hundreds of people up front and filling the aisles, all on their knees praying out to God. I had gone up as well because no one in my family was saved so I thought; why not pray for them along with all these other people. I was only up front a few minutes, when “BAM” an anxiety attack reared its ugly head. I called it a 10 on a 1 - 10 scale of fear. I remember actually feeling something in my mind snap. I said to myself, “I can't go on any more; I am going to take my life. I drove here alone so tonight I'm going to do it”. Nothing seemed to matter; I didn't even care if I hurt my parents. I just knew that I couldn't go on living for them anymore. I decided to pray and silently said, “God I am here on my knees and I can't go on in life any more, people have told me you love me and can heal me so if you truly are the living God then I need you to prove yourself to me tonight or I am getting up off of my knees and walking out of this church never to be seen again”. I had tried everything, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, pills you name it, all tried to help me but nothing and no one had been able to help me. I just couldn't go on like this any longer. I quietly asked him in my mind that if he was truly real and a God in which absolutely nothing was impossible for him to do then I wanted him to have the pastor who would no longer meet with me come on over and pray for me. That was the actual prayer that I silently cried out to him.

I have to change the scene here for a moment because remember, the service was over and those who wanted or needed to go had been released to do so. The pastor I had asked God to send over had already left the sanctuary. She had gone down the hall to a prayer room to be alone with God concerning a personal matter of her own. While she was on her knees crying out to the Lord for some answers, he kept telling her to go into the sanctuary and pray for me. She kept seeking the Lord for answers but this impression would not leave her. She knew the service was over and didn't even know if I was still there. However, she was obedient and got up and went back to the sanctuary. She looked in through the doors and the churches platform, and aisles were full of people down on their knees praying, but among the entire crowd she noticed me down on my knees as well. She worked her way through the crowd and came up behind me just as I had cried out to God asking Him to prove Himself by having her come pray for me. The instant I prayed, I felt some hands go onto my shoulders and someone began to pray for me. I was amazed yet confused. It wasn't the pastor I had prayed for I thought but the timing was just to incredible because it was when I prayed the final word of my prayer that they laid hands on me and started to pray. I cried inside saying, “God are you really real because this isn't pastor so and so but the timing was just too incredible for it to be a coincidence. I thought maybe she wasn't even there so God sent someone else over to pray for me. I battled with, now do I take my life tonight or not because if God isn't real then I truly want to die? I initially thought the lady that was praying for me was Chinese but it turned out she was praying in tongues because all of a sudden she was now praying in English and it was the pastor I had asked God to send on over to me. I turned around looked her in the eyes and burst out into tears screaming, “He is real, He is real, I know He is real” over and over and over. I think the pastor was concerned with how much noise I was making because she said I don't know what you're talking about but come with me to the prayer room so we can talk. It was there that I shared my story with her of what I had asked of God and she shared how she wasn't even in the sanctuary but felt she was to come and pray for me while she was praying to God in the prayer room. I have never forgotten that night and I know I never will. I know that God heard my cries and saved me from taking my life that night as well as saving my soul.

The story doesn't end here though (even though I will finish it in as few sentences as possible since this is getting long). After that evening of revelation and answered prayer I never battled again with an eating disorder. The bulimic behavior was absolutely gone. Food was no longer my enemy. I just began to eat normally. God had instantly healed me from the deadly grip of an eating disorder. I don't think one can truly understand the miracle of this unless they have battled with this disorder. I had tried to stop many times because I was tired of living with my head over a toilet bowl but in my strength I just couldn't stop. I still had to walk through a mental battle of believing that I was fat but over time this battle lessened in my mind and I came to a place of peace. To this day I have never binged and purged again.

I am so thankful for God answering my cries and for the pastor who was obedient to the prompting of the Lord. Praise God I am alive and healed. The following scripture verses describe what I went through that night (Feb 21, 1993) that I was up at the altar crying out to God.

“I called on your name, O Lord,

From the depths of the pit.

You heard my plea: ‘Do not close your ears

To my cry for relief.'

You came near when I called you,

And you said, ‘Do not fear.'

O Lord, you took up my case;

You redeemed my life.”

(Lamentations 3: 55-58)

My prayer is that my testimony first and foremost gives God all the glory! And then of course I pray it can be used by Him to give others hope or to even help someone to accept Christ as their Savior because I know that I know, God is alive! Know this, He hears your cries, yes He hears your cries! He answered mine and I know He will answer yours. People have often asked me if I was angry at my father for robbing me of my belief in Jesus but I can honestly say no, because without this experience I wouldn't be who I am today and more importantly this miracle in my life was used by the Lord to bringing my dad to the place of being able to accept Christ as His Savior.

To contact Donna: feedback@heartbeatthemagazine.com