AMAZING STORY
Akilah Answers the Altar Call
By Dory Nissen
The 700 Club
CBN.com --““The first time it happened, I was six years old. I was sharing a bed with this person who fondled me in the middle of the night”.
Akilah Brayboy was just 6 years old when another young girl first touched her. “The initial reaction was, ‘What’s going on here?’ I had not been touched in this way before. It felt strange. It felt awkward.”
She didn’t tell her parents but continued to see the girl often. A pattern of fondling lasted for years.
As Akilah got older, she wanted to like boys, but gravitated to girls.
“I definitely had girl crushes. Some of my friends, in school, I would see them and be attracted to them but I would never act on it out of fear. Everybody had boyfriends and no one who had a girlfriend. So I would just have the feeling and I would internalize it. But I wouldn’t do anything about it.”
In college, Akilah partied and drank heavily. She discovered when she was drinking; she had the courage to act on her feelings for women. “The drinking helped me to be a little bit more outgoing. It just made me less inhibited. It was a way to be a little more liberated.”
Eventually, Akilah had a steady girlfriend. “We were definitely emotionally connected. It was like a real relationship. We did everything together. Something inside of me kinda thought it was wrong, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care because I felt like I was doing what I needed to do to be happy.”
One day, Akilah learned her two brothers had become Christians. They told her about Jesus. “They were very zealous and very passionate about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And they knew I was partying, I was drinking, I had a girl friend and so they would have their Bibles and sit me down and go over scriptures about salvation and about homosexuality, and how God felt about it - an abomination - and how it was wrong. At that time I didn’t really care. I was like, ‘Whatever, I’m out of here.’”
Her brothers didn’t give up, and kept talking to their Akilah. “All of a sudden I started to feel guilty about what I was doing and where I was going. And I knew God was somehow dealing with me about it. About drinking and about being with my girlfriend. Things just started to shift. There was a major shift in my life. I started these guilty feelings about it like, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this.’”
One night, Akilah drove home drunk. The next morning she could not remember the drive. It scared her, and she knew her life had to change. “Everything that my brothers had been talking to me about was coming to the forefront. So I was weary at that point. I felt like I needed something else. Because everything I was doing was not giving me the peace that I thought I should have had.”
The following Sunday Akilah went to her brothers’ church. “The pastor was preaching a word that seemed to fit my situation all the way around. Every word out of his mouth pierced my heart. I started trembling. It was an overwhelming presence of the Lord. I could feel Him around me. I heard the Lord say to me ‘If you are going to come and walk with Me I need you to give Me 100 percent of who you are.’ And in that moment I realized that I could do it. I had peace! There was a sense of peace I had not experienced before. I knew that if He was calling me, it was for a purpose. So I surrendered all, and I went down to the altar.”
That day Akilah says she accepted Jesus Christ as her Savior. “I asked for his forgiveness. There were so many things I had done wrong and I wanted His forgiveness, and His acceptance and His love. So I definitely laid everything down on the table. He knew anyway. But I had to release it for myself.”
Akilah broke up with her girlfriend, stopped drinking and began a new life. “I felt like a new creature. I felt new. I felt refreshed. I felt like God was teaching me how to walk with Him. That meant daily prayer, daily study of the Word, fasting, everything just started evolving really quickly. “
Today Akilah is married and has two daughters. “It’s been a process of Him re-newing my mind. A daily process, an ongoing process of Him showing me His way and what it means to be a woman of God and what it means to be a wife, what it means to be a mom.”
“It’s just not possible to clean up your act on your own. You need God to show you how to do it. A lot of people say, ‘I want to get it right before I go to the Lord.’ But only the Lord can help you to be different. It takes His power to change you to want to be different. Only He can do that.”
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