AMAZING STORY
Mending All That Is Broken
By Michelle Wilson
The 700 Club
CBN.com -Rachael shares, “I felt like so dirty. I felt so defiled. And I felt like all the innocence that I ever had was taken from me.”
Rachael Havupalo was just 12 years old when two teenage boys lured her into a home and raped her.
“It crushed my heart. It broke my trust in men and of people,” says Rachael.
The two were arrested and convicted of rape. But that did little to ease the pain. At 14, she started cutting and dove into the gothic lifestyle. She dabbled in Wicca and fantasized about death.
Rachael recalls, “On the inside I felt so dead and so numb. So I really wanted to die.”
Throughout her teens and 20s, Rachael was in and out of jail on drug-related charges. Then at 21, she had a daughter and became a single mom. She married the following year and eventually had a son. After she and her husband divorced Rachael lost custody of her son and turned to harder drugs like meth.
“My heart was really broken,” says Rachael. “There was an emptiness that came that’s indescribable.”
One day, Rachael went to a friend’s house and when she arrived he barricaded the doors and for three days, pumped her full of heroin and sexually abused her.
Rachael says, “Any amount of peace I had in my heart and any hope that I had of anything that would ever get better was completely taken away. I was so terrified and I asked God, ‘please, please God, don’t let me die.’”
Finally after three days the man let her go. Rachael says shortly afterward an even darker door opened up in her life. She started cutting even more.
Rachael remembers, “Here is where I sliced through my arm with a knife. It was a way to release pain and the bottled up emotions that I was feeling. I didn’t know how else to get it out so I would cut myself.”
She finally realized neither the drugs nor cutting would bring relief.
Rachael says, “I just cried out to God and I said, ‘God, please help me. I need a miracle. I need You to send Your angels to help me. There’s no way out of this situation except if You help me, God. And I’m sorry for fighting against You all my life. I’ve been fighting against you.’”
A few days later, Rachael and her daughter met a couple who told her about Jesus and that she needed to put her trust in him.
Rachael says, “I confessed that I was a sinner and that I needed Jesus. And that I needed Him to come and take over my life. I surrendered everything to Him.”
She still needed to be healed from the wounds of abuse. She soon met Scott and Sandy Boyd. Both were pastors who spent the next 30 days helping Rachael find freedom in Christ.
Rachael recalls, “He led me through several renunciation prayers to renounce drugs, alcohol, Paganism, all of that stuff, just to renounce things. It was a process.”
They also helped her forgive her abusers.
“And I was like, you know what, I need God’s forgiveness. And so I’ll forgive,” says Rachael.
At the end of the 30 days Rachael says she walked in a freedom she never experienced before.
“It was like I was a totally different person and I could breathe. This was my moment of like I am a new creature. Like I am a new being. And I have a whole new life like in front of me. And things just started to change,” says Rachael.
Today, Rachael is raising Ivy who’s now a teenager and she’s reconnected with her son. Rachael is married to Miika and she and her husband serve as missionaries in Finland, where they teach others about the love and freedom that can only be found in Jesus Christ.
Rachael says, “I never started living until I met Him. His love – it really does change everything. He takes the most broken, impossible, hopeless mess and He can turn it around into something beautiful.”
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