i am a sold out Christian, even though i favor a gothic look, and tend to be outside the mainstream.

i am also a displaced pacific northwest coastal girl, currently abiding in dusty oklahoma…for now…

i welcome honest questions, and have no fear of revealing who i am.

 i asked Jesus into my heart when i was 16, flollowing the realization that following the devil was truly selling myself into slavery. duh. but i was an emotional girl, and my life had been turned more upsidedown since the remarriage of my mother and the addition of a very bitter step sister into my family life. i made more than one dangerous choice during the years that followed. however, inviting the Lord into my life was the best thing i ever did. saved my life on many occasions. literally.

during that time, i also began to develope my own personal style. the time was the early 70s, and punk hadnt even come into being yet, let alone gothic. except for me, and probably a handful of others my age scattered about the planet, having no idea there might be others at all. i wore long skirts and a cape my mother had made for me. it was a wonderful cape! black jersey kind of material, light weight and flowing, hooded, with a white lining. i loved it. but i wasnt realloy the kind of kid others sought ought for companionship. i had one best friend, who wasnt really gothic, but we had so much in common that it didnt matter. it was her and me against the world.

much water had gone under the bridge by the time i was 21, and carrying my son. my friend and i had gone our separate ways, due to an abusive marriage between her and one of ny step brothers. i was in my own doomed marriage, trying desparately to hold it all together. i couldnt. when my son was born i was estatic, but also seriously afraid i wouldnt be able to handle motherhood either. i couldnt go to my parents house. i no longer smoked, and they still did to excess. and he still drank heavily. i broke under the pressure, and my baby boy went into foster care. i decided, after asking God (Who i still barely knew) to give him up for adoption, knowing he would be safer than he would be with me.

i lived alone for the next two years, barely scraping by on my military benefits while going to the community college of the small coastal town i lived in. during that time, i came dangerously close to the edge more than once. it was then that i began to call on God again, not for a solution to a problem, but for a home for my dying soul. the ‘dark side’ was beginning to pressure me to return to its slavery, and had i given in to it i would have never gotten out. instead, i went running to Jesus, Who welcomed me home with opened arms.

it wasnt all peaches and cream. life in this world is life in a war zone. i continued to make choices from an impatient heart, so bent on not being alone i was. my deepest desire was to make my Father proud of me, and to know Him intimately, but the twistes in my soul continually tripped me. still, He picked me up every time, like a father his clumsy child, until gradually i began to fall less and less. some of us are just late bloomers. but the blooms come, and then the fruit.

through all my adventures with God, no matter how painful or dire, His word has always kept me, just as He said it would. it has not been the trials i have faced that have made me whole. it has been His word in the midst of those trials. whether in feast or famine, it has always been His word that has kept me, healed me, and put me over the top. and it has been His word that has made me free to be me.