This is Katy’s story.
I grew up in a Christian home in Southern California. My dad was a pastor from when I was a baby until about thirteen. I grew up in a family where both my grandfathers were pastors, in fact, pretty much my whole family had lineage of being Protestant Christian except my Grandma. Her parents were Mormon and then converted to Protestant.
My relationship started with God from when I was very young. My parents brought me up in it and when I was five, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. Of course, I didn’t understand it in the context of my own relationship, but I understood it in the context of my parents' relationship with God. For many years, I would rebel, come back to the Lord, rebel, come back to the Lord, because it wasn’t real for me. I think my first real experience with the Lord was when I was seventeen. I was being naughty, sewing wild oats and realized it was not where I wanted to go. I was working through my own relationship with God verses my parents’ relationship with God.
I went to college when I was seventeen, and at college, I went back and forth in my relationship with God: I always had a strong sense of relationship with God, but I wasn’t always laser focused, by any means.
When I was 20, my boyfriend at the time had moved away and that devastated my entire world. I was young, I was in love, we broke up, and my world was ruined. But it really got me thinking about where I wanted my life to go. I was finishing my junior year in college and I thought that if I really wanted to change my path, I couldn’t stay where I was with the same friends, the same surroundings.
The summer after my junior year in college, my brother ((who was going into the ministry like our dad and grandfathers)) started an internship in Texas at a church. I went and visited before my senior year of college started and it was clear that I was meant to be here. I had prophesies over me that week and this overwhelming feeling of “I need to move to Texas.” There was an open door for me and I had to decide if I should walk through it, knowing that I would be leaving behind everything in life that I knew. Three weeks later, I moved from California to Texas.
Growing up in California, and with my personality, acting was a natural fit. I loved acting and singing and I was always in plays, and I did the “Hollywood” thing. I have always liked music, so when I moved to Texas, since the acting scene was scarce, I ended up joining a band where I played and sang. I married the bass player of that band.
It was a relationship that I thought at first was very good for my walk with the Lord, but ended up years later a very spiritually oppressive time for me. Throughout that period, I formed a very close relationship with God, I needed him more in that time of oppression than any other time in my life, and I learned to depend on him, especially when my husband and I moved to Tyler, and I was alone except for ((this oppressive man)) and his friends.
I needed God every moment, but at the same time I was just being dominated by this man. I ended up leaving him at 24 and when I left, I felt like not only did I know God better, but I felt like he had proven himself to me in an unexpected way. I had a realization that it didn’t matter what my works or achievements were, God could not love me less, and he could not love me more – it didn’t matter what I did to try to make him love me. At that point, I had never felt so free to not only be myself, but to have complete freedom in God and know that anything I did, it would not affect the way he felt about me. Like a parent’s relationship – you can screw up and hurt them but it doesn’t matter they love you no matter what.
That was a big turning point in my relationship with God. It wasn’t me needing to be better, me needing to accomplish more: my “I have to do this” mentality. It was now “I am a child of God and because of this I am loved. Because of this I am free. Because of this I am saved.”
With that new freedom, I kind of went a little crazy – I had been so oppressed and held down by my former husband, that once I escaped that, my pendulum swung in the other extreme and I was reveling in my freedom. I think it was probably a good thing in retrospect, because now I’m back at center and I can have fun – its not all about what I DO - but at the same time, I have to be sensitive to my conscience and I have to do what I feel is right for me, what God wants for me – somewhere in the middle between way too spiritual and way too not.
I met my now-husband at a birthday party. We were church friends, and the moment we met, I realized something clicked in me and I thought “huh, interesting.” It wasn’t his hotness ((but he WAS hot)), it wasn’t anything I can put my finger on, but we just clicked really well – he is my soulmate. We started dating and quickly became serious. The whole relationship made sense to me. Our personalities, our values, our communication; and he was so different for me than the man I had been with before who always held me down and kept me under his control.
A year and a half after we started dating, we married, and now we’ve been married for five years in November.
Joni: What do you love most about being Christian?
Katy: The biggest realization that I’ve had lately about myself is that I am really controlling and on top of things. I can manipulate the situation to be how I want it to be. I love knowing that when all of that doesn’t work out (and it doesn’t! EVER!), God is there and he wants all of me and he wants me for ME. I feel his presence all the time ((whether I’m being rebellious or not)) and I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to have everything under control. I know that he has my back, no matter where I’m at.
Joni: What do you find most challenging about being a Christian?
Katy: The thing I like the least about the Christian church in America is the connotation that you have to be perfect, and not do anything wrong… because if you do something wrong, then “well, you’re a Christian – you should have it together!”
That’s not real life. Real life is that I’m a human, I’m going to mess up. I’m going to hurt you, you’re going to hurt me. I’m not God, I can’t buffer the whole situation. I can be judgmental, I can be a jerk, and of course I can also show love and compassion, but I am human, so I’m going to mess up and fail people, because I’m still just like everybody else – I’m still human.
Joni: Have you had any challenges being a woman and being a Christian?
Katy: I think the balance of sexuality in this culture and being a Christian is a tough thing. In this culture, to be sexy, you have to be sexual. Well, that doesn’t really fly, or match up with the Bible. The Bible says to not have my beauty in my body. Not have my beauty in sexuality, but to have it in my spirit and in my peace. That has been the hardest thing for me to balance as a Christian woman: is knowing that I have a sexual side, but striving toward being a pure woman in a culture where everything we do is sexual.
Joni: What one word would you use to describe the feeling that you have from your relationship with God?
Katy: Freedom
Joni: If you had a voice to tell everyone something about the God that you know, and your relationship with him, what would you say?
Katy: If you seek God, it doesn’t matter how – if you seek him and say “God, I want to know who you are, who you really are,” he will find you. He will reveal himself to you. I feel like there’s so many different religions, so many different sects of Christianity that all of that stuff gets muddled in legalism and loses its power. But if you seek God for who he really is, he will reveal himself for exactly who he should be to you. Everyone has a different sense of God, of who God is to them, but if you really seek God and say “I really want to know who you are,” it always comes back to God the Father.
Joni: But... how would you tell someone to go about “seeking God”?
Katy: I would say just to ask. “God, here I am. I have no idea where to go, I don’t know who I am; I don’t know who you are. Reveal yourself to me for exactly who you are.” I feel like he will reveal himself. God absolutely takes you for where you’re at and it doesn’t matter what you’ve been through, he will meet you there.
Joni: Tell me about a situation where your faith was tested and how you dealt with that?
Katy: When my parents got divorced two years ago. My dad was a pastor. My mom was the most spiritually strong person that I ever knew, and I looked up to her. She would never have strayed from that in my mind. She ended up leaving my dad for another man. That completely rocked my sense of God because that was my foundation. My sense of God and my foundation came in large part from my parents and my parents were no longer “my parents” as a plural, they were “my mom” and “my dad.”
At that point, I said, “Well, everybody sucks. No one is who they say they are. They all have skeletons in the closet” and it’s true, they do! But God meets us for who we are, where we are, at that moment.
Does he always love what you’re doing? No. But he will take you –he says come to me as you are. At the point when my parents got divorced, I had put everybody that I knew – family, husband, friends, everyone – at an arms’ length because I didn’t trust anyone at that point.
I dealt with it by letting time pass, and by forgiving my parents little by little. Forgiving my dad, who was unfaithful to my mom in their marriage. Forgiving my mom, who I thought was so perfect and above doing anything like that. It was through a lot of prayer and giving up and knowing that I don’t know anything anymore, I can’t help anything, I can’t control anything.
I don’t know how God deals with things, I don’t understand his grace, but I know it’s there. I know he loves me. I know he loves my family. And that’s how I deal with it from day to day. I’m not God ((and thank God I’m not!)) because in my own way of thinking, I can’t forgive that on my own or get past that on my own.
Joni: What is your favorite story related to Christianity?
Katy: The one that immediately comes to mind is the adulterous woman in the bible that the Pharisees brought before Jesus, and there were all these men gathered around her ready to throw a stone, and Jesus said “the first one of you who is without sin, throw the first stone.” And nobody threw a stone. Nobody was perfect, no one could live up to that, not one person.
Jesus is an ideal – that’s who we want to live towards, that’s who we want to emulate, but we can’t ever actually achieve perfection! It sounds defeating, saying it like that, but it’s not for me, it’s actually freeing because God made us and he knew how we were going to be – he knew we were going to need him to work through these things. We definitely can’t do it without him.
Joni: Is there anything you would change about Christianity?
Katy: I would absolutely change Christianity in America from being such a clique. I think a clique is exclusive and judgmental, and that’s not even close to how Jesus and God intended the church to be.
The Bible says “Don’t test the lord your God” but at the same time, I feel like there’s an open opportunity. God is at the door knocking and he says “I’m here, test it to see if I’m here. Open the door and see if I am really who I say I am.” And I think God welcomes that.
Thanks, Katy, for opening your heart to me and sharing your journey!
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