Christianity Wrap-up, Part III - Tilde's story of resiliance and healing

This is Tilde's story.
I guess for me my whole transformation started back in 1994. I was married in 1991 – I was 23 and my husband was 20. We were in the military, and we were really young, and I had not dealt with a lot of issues that I had growing up as a child. I was molested from the time I was five until the time I was eleven or twelve by multiple people (family members, but not my parents, they had no clue). I really didn’t tell anyone until I was seventeen, and at that time, I just told my mom about one person, not about all of it.

Keeping that to myself was really hard, so it all came out in marriage: being young, and not knowing really how to deal with all that anger and rage and jealousy and insecurity. I could be a really bad wife at times, when that side of me would come out. I hated it.


When we got married, I started having these recurring dreams and memories during the day and at night – intrusive flashbacks from my childhood. Back then, I just wanted to survive day-by-day without a memory - it was not about healing, it was just about surviving. When we got out of the military, we moved back in with my parents. We had started reading the Bible nightly. I was raised Catholic, and to deal with this emotional unrest that I was going through, the Catholicism came back to me as a way to cope. My husband and I would take turns reading out loud to each other, and I just started getting really emotional every time we read. When it was my turn to read, I would spend the entire time crying like a baby. It didn’t matter what I was reading! We would be reading Chronicles or something really boring and I couldn’t read it because I was crying so hard.

One day, I was doing situps in our bedroom and he was out riding bikes and a flood of memories started coming back and I said “Oh, my God, I can’t take it.” I rolled over on my stomach and started crying and said, “ok, God if you’re really there, then take this from me because I can’t do it anymore.” I was literally thinking about just ending my life – that’s how disturbed I was by these memories.

While I was on the floor, crying into the carpet and praying for God to just take it away, something happened. This peace and God's presence just washed over me and I felt this inner strength that I had never felt before. I finished crying, got up, and took a deep breath, then I told my husband what happened, while we were out on a run. He said that he had met one of my dad’s friends, coincidentally, that day, and the friend had invited us over to his house the next day. We went to his house, and both of us ended up committing our lives to Christ in this man’s living room. My life has never been the same.

In the military, I was a counter intelligence agent, and it turns out that doesn’t translate so well to the civilian world. We couldn’t find any jobs that were related to our military careers, so what we ended up doing was becoming a truck-driving team and we started driving trucks all over the country. It ended up being an opportunity for the most spiritual growth I have ever experienced. We would be driving for hours, listening to Tony Evans on the radio. And Joyce Meyers, and Chuck Swindoll. And I loved hearing people like that speaking about God! It really fed me where I was at that time, hearing their passion and their explanation of God and the Bible. We drove trucks for about a year, then we got on with Southwest Airlines as aircraft dispatchers and moved to Dallas.

We started going to a little Baptist church, moved from that church to a Nazarene church, and then to Fellowship church, which I loved. The worship was great, but it was definitely a mega-church. We became very involved in the church, but the longer we stayed, the more turned off I was by the corporate church mentality. I remember one weekend we were at Fellowship and Ed Young and his wife were promoting this book series they had come out with called Body by God. They were talking about it, then said it was available in the bookstore on site. Then, they said that they were now going to show the congregation the clothing line they had come out with and these models started coming out to model the clothing line, and at that moment, I turned to my husband and said we’re done here.

It was just – not enough for me anymore, and that was the moment I realized it. I was beyond a new believer, and Fellowship church is really geared toward new believers. After listening to Tony Evans and really being fed, I just wasn’t satisfied with “appetizers” anymore, spiritually. But in the process of going to those churches when we moved to Dallas, I learned something really important about myself. I saw a need for women to be empowered in church and in their walk with God, and I found that I had a passion for helping women find their voice and leading women. I led Bible studies and small groups, and women for some reason started gravitating toward me.

In 2005, I had another huge hiccup in my life that left me completely devastated. My husband left me for a friend of mine – someone we worked with. There were fourty of us who worked together, and my husband was having an affair with one of the other women in our office. When the rumors started flying about my husband having an affair with my co-worker, I went to her and I said that I just wanted to apologize to her because I knew that she would never do anything like that, and I meant it from my heart. I truly believed that she would never do anything like that to a friend. Boy, was I wrong!

It was horribly uncomfortable, working with them, especially after all that came out. We were married for fourteen years, and we had ((I thought)) a great marriage. We didn’t fight, we worked through our problems, we prayed together. Everyone came to us for advice on marriage – we had it together, then this came out of the blue and knocked the breath out of me.

There were times when I didn’t want to come to work, when I just sat in my car and cried from the humiliation and devastation. The first time I had to go to work after everything came out, I remember driving in to work and I had a panic attack – I just didn’t think I could face it. I called my friend and asked her to pray with me because I literally didn’t think I could do this. She started praying for me and by the time she finished praying, I was pulling into the parking lot at work, and I could breathe again. I walked in with my head held high, and discovered I could face it, day by day. Less than a year later, my ex-husband and my co-worker left the company. There was just so much anger in the office because of them. To this day, I am so glad that I just let God take over and didn’t allow it to become a three-ring Jerry Springer circus. The grace that I had in those moments was just God helping me through it.

Although the divorce was one of the hardest things I've ever been through, it catapulted me into making me look at what I really wanted, what I was passionate about and what I really wanted to do with my life.

Tilde & April during April's interview
Photo (c) Debra Gloria Photography

I launched an organization called Womanars, an initiative to celebrate the power of women in business. Womanars is not only a networking and partnership organization for women in business, but it offers “edutainment” – stories of women and seminars - that provide both education and entertainment to the global community of women, with the goal to take women to the next level personally and professionally in a fun and innovative way. Womanars is my passion and I don’t know that I would have been able to pursue it in the way I am today if it had NOT been for my divorce.

I began going to Irving Bible Church, but after a couple years, I ended up moving to the Turtle Creek area of Dallas, and I wanted to find a church closer-by. One of the women I met through a charity cause I was supporting was Debra Gloria, a local photographer, and she told me about the church that I am at now, Whosoever Dallas. It was so great to find a church where I wouldn’t be judged, and I could just go and be comfortable and just enjoy learning about God and participating in a loving environment.

I have to say that, even with everything that I went through with my husband, and with my childhood, I am grateful for my marriage, even though it ended badly. My husband really taught me a lot about love, and how to love someone. For many years, he just loved me unconditionally, when I was an emotional wreck and dealing with all of the demons of my past, he would just hold me and ground me. And he taught me during those years of being married to him how to love him back, and, in a lot of ways, how to get past the walls I put up not trusting men. Although it is hard to understand, I really am thankful to have had him during that time. I would still be married to him today probably, had everything not happened the way it did, because he taught me how to love.

I’m glad that things turned out like they did, though, in retrospect. He taught me skills and things about relationships that I carry forward today. I got introduced to God through my husband, and that relationship with God that I built with him is what has carried me through all the tough times I have faced since. I know that in future relationships, I can give myself ((in more than just fractured pieces)) to the one I’m with. And I really feel like God used my marriage to teach me and to heal me.

Q: What do you love about being a Christian?
A: For me, it’s the unconditional love I feel.

Q: Is there anything you don’t love about being a Christian, or about the Christian religion in general?
A: Christianity has become sort of an exclusive group instead of an inclusive group. Christianity is sometimes so legalistic, with people making up rules as to why you can’t attend one church and you can attend another one instead of encompassing everything and include everyone, like Christ did to everyone he came in contact with.

Q: What one word describes the feeling that your relationship with God gives you?
A: Love!

Q: If you had a chance and a voice to tell the whole world something about your God – the God that you’re in a relationship with – what would you say?
A:

[God] took a broken hearted, angry and very fearful girl and filled me with faith, hope, and love…
and I’ve never been the same.

***

Thanks, Tilde, for sharing your story. You can read more about Tilde's organization, Womanars, including seeing inspiring videos and learning how to be involved by visiting http://www.womanars.com/