AMAZING STORIES
Stephanie Pauline: When God's Love Changes Everything
By Gorman Woodfin
The 700 Club
Original Air Date: January 14, 2011
CBN.com
– "I felt like my life was a ship. A big torpedo had been detonated into the side of it. It had a gaping hole, and it was taking on water really fast. I was equipped on deck with a plastic bucket, and it was my job to save the sinking ship."
Stephanie Pauline’s teenage years were filled with anger and pain, but her life didn’t start out that way.
"My parents loved me and my sister and my brother very much," Stephanie tells The 700 Club.
"I accepted Christ when I was four years old. We went to church regularly. I went to a good private school. It was a wonderful school, where I really encountered Jesus."
But Stephanie’s family had a dark secret.
"My father had a long struggle with alcoholism. That created a lot of chaos growing up."
Fighting and arguments filled her home.
"A series of things happened in a very short duration of time, where a lot of my parents’ stuff just erupted. The family all but disintegrated at that time."
Stephanie came home one day and found out her mother had packed up and left her husband and children. Her father’s drinking only got worse. She felt like God had disappeared from her life, too.
"He must have forgotten about me somewhere along the way. That hurt me just beyond words.
So I squared my shoulders, I set my jaw and I said, 'All right, then, forget you. Forget you.' Within like six months’ time, I went from being an honor roll student to failing all my classes."
She dropped out of school at 15 and moved in with her boyfriend when she was 16. She says, "We robbed people, dealt drugs, did some pretty crazy things."
Drugs helped deaden the pain.
"Mostly pot, 'shrooms, acid. A little bit of coke and some prescription stuff. There were no dreams, no ambitions, no goals, no conscience."
But then she got pregnant, which made her re-examine her life.
"I thought, this child didn’t ask to be born into this. This child deserves something better.
Then I had my baby boy. I stared into the face of a real, live miracle. I knew I had been expecting, but man, I had not been expecting that. [I thought] Perhaps, just maybe, God loves me still, a little bit. Maybe He hasn’t forgotten about me entirely after all."
Stephanie was alone and with a little boy to raise named Trevor. She knew she needed to return to the faith she knew as a little girl. In her brokeness she cried out to God.
"I needed Him more than I needed answers, more than I needed my dignity."
Her sister invited her to go to church.
"I remember going there. I had my little boy toddling alongside me, but I was received and loved and that’s where I received a lot of understanding for these questions that I had about what God had done.
"If the truth is that God loves us so much that He sent His Son to die for us, that changes everything. If God loves me like that, if He wants to be intimately involved with my life, with my destiny, my day, my moment right here, right now, that changes everything."
Stephanie says her walk with the Lord has been a step-by-step process.
"We were never meant to do this alone. He made us to draw on His strength, every moment. It makes sense that we’re stumbling around without Him. We were never meant to do this without Him."
Eight years later she met a youth pastor named Nathan. They fell in love and married.
"Whatever she does, whoever she interacts with, she’s wanting to do whatever she can to make that person see God more clearly," Nathan says.
Over the years many areas of Stephanie's life have healed. Her mother eventually returned home and now both her mother and father play a loving and supportive role in her life. Today Stephanie is a Christian singer and songwriter. In 2007 Nathan and Stephanie added a little girl named Aria to their family.
"If God can save me, with the devastation that was in my heart at the time, then He can save anybody," Stephanie says. "There’s nothing He can’t heal. I believe that with all my heart."
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