AMAZING STORY
When God's Love is the Only Answer
By Christine McWhorter
The 700 Club
CBN.com - At 4 years old, Marcie Schneider didn’t really understand what divorce meant. All she knew was that both her parents started new families, and she missed their attention.
“I remember thinking that, you know, I wasn't a big deal to my parents,” she said.
She became a Christian as a child, but it was her grandfather, who gave her the affection she longed for.
“My grandfather was everything to me. And probably someone that I really felt like gave me unconditional love,” she said.
Then her grandfather passed away, and Marcie found love elsewhere.
I lost my virginity when I was 15 at a party. I think it was a lot of that just emptiness and trying to fill it, trying to fill, you know, feeling like sex meant that someone loved me or someone cared enough to have sex with me. That's the one thing that made me feel wanted and, you know, useful,” she said.
By 16 she had become pregnant. She told her mom, expecting she would give her support. But her mom only wanted a quick, quiet solution, and arranged for Marcie to have an abortion. “It wasn't even really a thought process. It was like, you know, ‘We're going to fix this because no one can know.’ It would have been a disgrace to the family for anyone to know that I was pregnant.”
“I think that her responding like that kind of added to my emptiness of, you know, ‘there's another void. There’s another place that I just need someone to love me, you know, unconditionally,’” she said.
Six months later she became pregnant again. This time, she kept it from her parents, and went in for a second abortion. “I felt like there was no other way. And I felt like there was nothing that anyone could have done or said to change it.”
Later, she married someone from school and they had a daughter, Britney. But the marriage didn’t last more than a year.
After a few years she met Mark and fell in love. It wasn’t long before she was pregnant once again. “I didn't want him to leave. And I thought that if he felt tied to me from a child, then he wouldn’t want to stay,” she said.
So Marcie had another abortion. But this time something was different. “I had a lot of shame. They showed me my baby on the ultrasound. And I didn’t think that there was any other choice and I went through with it even after that. That’s really been the hardest one to deal with.”
Marcie tried to push her thoughts aside and move on. Eventually she and Mark married and had a son, Brock. Now that she had a family Marcie started going to church like she did growing up. But that wasn’t enough to ease the burden of guilt she was carrying. “In my heart I knew it was wrong. Everything I did was getting me a little further from God,” she said.
Marcie learned about a group called Conquerors. They help women who've had abortions find healing and forgiveness through Jesus Christ. It was there that she found hope. “God was trying hard to say, ‘let Me heal you. It’s okay. I’ve forgiven you.’”
She rededicated her life to Christ. “I learned that God does forgive and I also learned that God is a comforter and He’s not a person, and so for me to try to figure it out, analyze in my mind “how can He forgive me over and over again?” I quit worrying about that,” she said. “It totally changed the way I thought and I surrendered myself to the Lord and just said, ‘Do with me what You will.’”
She also forgave her mother.
“She said that she was sorry for what she had done. And it really opened the door for our relationship. Our relationship is a lot better; it's wonderful now.”
Over the years, Marcie has grown in Christ. She stays busy with family, church and her new job - at the Arlington Pregnancy Center.
She hopes that sharing her story will help young women make a better choice
“I do feel good about being able to connect with women. Someone can sit in there and read them information about abortion and read them information about premarital sex and all of that. But for someone to talk to them and say, ‘I would give anything to go back and change it,’ that's different,”
Marcie says not only has Christ given her freedom from shame, He also gives her unconditional love.
“God has definitely filled voids in my life by just spending time with Him and getting to know Him. God is my Savior, my Redeemer, Provider – everything.”
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