My full blown testimony of my life, and all my dirt, before I gave my life to Christ.
My pastor's wife is in the process of putting together a book about women's testimonies and she asked me to share mine. I had no problem with it because i share my testimony through spoken word in my poem called 'I Got High' and it gets down to the nitty gritty about the affairs of my life before Christ. (Listen to it Here) Outside of my poem though, I had never written out in full detail what actually got me to Christ and my struggles in the world. So I written out my full testimony about the most difficult, shameful, and ratchet times of my life, and here it is! I hope it inspires you.
I was in high school and I chose to leave the life that I had begin to build in Christ as a kid to have fun. I was raised in a church by my awesome parents and I knew the right path to go in but I guess you can say I thought there was more to life then the transformed life in Christ that I grew up knowing. So against my parents wishes of me staying in Toledo where I grew up I decided to move to college 45 minutes away from home after I graduated high school. Junior year in high school is when I start being curious about what the world had to really offer because I live such a sheltered life. I stopped hanging around my friends that were more the good girls and I started hanging out really tough with the girls that always smoked weed and partied, went to clubs and got drunk all the time, had sex with all kinds of guys; those types of women became my role dawgs. No shade to them, I did that because that was the type of life that I started wanting. So by the time I went to college I went with the T-shirt that said Jesus saves. The minute my parents left from moving me into my dorm room I took that off and put on a crop top belly shirt and some booty shorts and walked around campus with some stilettos and a new identity that I created for myself thinking that there was more to life than being a saint. My first months on campus and I already had two cheating, drug dealing, boyfriends and always got my supply of weed. I found out that one was cheating and knew the other one was no good, so I just kept em both. The one boyfriend I had I started pinching his supply to sell to my friends on campus so I got tired of people calling me saying “hey Steph where it’s at “, that I started selling weed myself from my stolen supply. When those boyfriends found out about each other they got into a fight into my in my dorm room and I almost got kicked out of campus. The minute I found them cheating, I kept them and took whatever money I could get and cars I could drive and just started dating other guys. None of us were any good! I had already built a reputation of a party girl and a little bit of a hustler. I wanted to go big and be the badest chick on campus that I started to have ambitions of being a stripper.
I was invited to a birthday party where people around knew that my friends and I were going to the strip clubs and had gotten a job to be a stripper. Now we would drive up to Detroit and I remember it was me and my best friend in the bathroom. We changed into our stripper gear and neither one of us had the courage to go on stage so we never really did it. But that was something that I wanted to do to prove how big and bad I was because growing up people always say, “you’re such a good girl you going to do so many good things for Christ,” and I sort of resented it because I felt like the worldly life style is so glamorous and I never got a chance to have that glamorous lifestyle.
I mentioned it to one of my close guy friends that I considered like a brother that I was thinking about being a stripper. Him and a couple guys took a few of my girls that time we chickened out going on stage. Well he ending up having a party in Detroit. He had a friend of his put something in a Smirnoff bottle that I just started drinking only have maybe one or two sips out of it. I didn’t even really get started drinking it like that. In the past I was able to throw a whole case back myself and keep it moving, so I knew I know my limits and I knew how much I had to drink to get drunk and I didn’t even really drink even one bottle yet. But all I can remember from that night is a maybe 10-15 seconds segments of being raped by about 6 to 7 guys. I will stop and say hey what’s going on and they would laugh and talk over me then I will go back out again then I will wake up and I’ll be three or four other guys performing acts on me and I was actually performing things to them and don’t still to this day know what they gave me but it seems like it was me doing that but I really didn’t remember any of it I just remembered maybe 10 seconds 15 seconds of it while I was in the middle and I tried to stop it when I came to but then I would black back out and then it would be well into another scene. I guess since I didn’t give him a show on stage at the strip club, he’d slip something in my drink to give him and his boys more than a private show. I don’t know who had me that night or how many. It was awful and I tried to drink and smoke those scenes out of my memory and I tried to act like it did not happen and I just went deeper into party mode.
So two weeks later I went over another close guy friend of mines house. We were just gonna smoke a couple blunts drink and I was going home. There was a couple more guys that I knew but I wasn’t as close with they were there hanging out too. So while they were rolling the blunt I wasn’t really paying attention that they were two different blunts going around and that I was only smoking the one and everyone else was smoking the other one. I also hadn’t paid attention that I was the only one that drunk the lemonade that was sitting in the kitchen. So a few minutes after I was sitting there and after I smoked a little bit I had an experience where everything kind of went blank and I had a conversation with the devil.
Now at this point in college I started looking into other religions and looking into other theories of how people believed and I had a question in my heart about Christianity as a whole and that it was just something that was said to me as a child that I live by and I didn’t want to be molded by what I came up with I wanted to find out what the truth was myself. So while I’m having this experience where the enemy is literally showing me every bad decision I made in my life and my whole entire life flashed before my eyes and I thought that I probably was going to die. There was something in me that knew there was a void that was filled before that I needed that will save me from what I thought would be my death and I dug down deep and I got it! I started saying the name of Jesus! My mind was in a battle the biggest battle I’ve ever had in my mind my whole life. I totally snapped! I went absolutely crazy. I ran down the street, I thought everyone was trying to kill me, I was screaming hysterically outside, I was gone! They were trying to set me up for a fun night for themselves! But it backfired because I almost lost my mind right then and there and they tried to ditch me in my car on the side of the highway.
My roommate came to pick me up and took me over her friends house to try to calm me down. Well the guy came downstairs in a red jumpsuit and I thought he was the devil so I busted his kitchen window out with my head and ran through the apartment complex screaming that someone was trying to kill me. I wasn’t bleeding or anything, just busted through and kept going. She called her parents because they didn’t know what to do with me, and they called my parents, at 3am, and told them I’d been drugged by some guys and had lost my mind.
When my parents got to the hospital I didn’t even recognize them. I hospitalized there for a week while they tried to get my mind back to sanity. They had to sedate me because I was so wild in my behavior. The doctor said as long as she’s been a doctor she’s never seen such a demonic attack on a persons mind from drugs. They said if I did not snap out of it within that week that I would have been put into the psych ward. That experience woke me up to the power of God because whenever I would come to from going in and out of being passed out every single time I came to it was while people were circled, holding hands, praying around me. I felt God‘s voice in the Scriptures and his presence throughout that whole experience and I knew that he was real because when I cried out for him he answered in my spirit.
When I started getting back to myself I asked my parents if I could come home. They were so relieved because they were going to try to force me to come home anyway. When I got home of course I immerse myself in the word of God I was always praying and seeking the Holy Spirit for everything. I became developed in the holy spirit and I started seeking for more. I had cut off all of my friends that were negative influences for me and I was lonely for a while until God put a friend from high school in my life that also just recently gave her life to Christ. And we began seeking God together.
I was searching for a church that I could get more in depth study of the Kingdom of God and how it operates because I felt that it was more about a godly lifestyle that I wasn’t learning and that’s what I was seeking for the beginning but had me curious about the things of God. So while I was putting on a Christian event that my roommate and I had started this cute guy, Gerod, had walked in and long story short, we began dating and eventually got married and have been for over 10 years now! He introduced me to his pastors and I’ve never left the church since my first visit. In fact I am one of the core staff members at our church and an ordained minister from there because of how much I’ve grown in the richness of the word of God where I am.
I’ve learned so much about how to operate as a believer and how to rule and reign as a queen in the kingdom of God. Pastor Claude and minister Rosa Bevier at Restore World Church have a heart to disciple people to maturity in Christ. That’s what they’ve done with my husband, that’s what they’ve done with me, that’s what they do with the men and the women and the children at our ministry. Their hope is that people would know God, would know them selves, and that they would know their purpose and I can attest that I had been able to discover my true identity in Christ with this formula that God has given Pastor Claude and Rosa Bevier. I am overcome by the Blood of the Lamb and the Word of my testimony, so here it is and I pray that you realize that you are an overcomer as well!
Please leave me a comment either on the Facebook plugin below, or send me a message on the contact form on the column to the right so I'll know how sharing my story has impacted you, if it has at all. It was scary of me to share something so vulnerable as this because of how people can be so mean and criticizing, but I figured this would probably help more people if I open up my life then if I keep it closed. Love you guys, and thank you for being a part of my life, Steph's Open Book!
Love you,
Stephane D. Sturgis