KATHLEEN'S STORY
I am the eighth child out of ten, born in a small country town, hoped desperately from the womb to have been a boy. My parents had their first born a son, then seven girls, and I am the seventh and the last daughter. Three years later, a son was born, then seven years later another son. I was not received as the gender I was, with the reaction being, "Oh no not another girl!" Adding to this when I was brought home my mother had to abdicate her role giving me over to be nurtured by my three eldest sisters, because of her current life circumstances; therefore she was unable to bond to me as a baby. I can say my same-sex attraction had its taproot from the womb.
This rejection and detachment in my relationship with my mother disconnected me from my feminine gender. I recall very clearly at the age of four being under a car with a spanner. I can even recall what could be sensed as strong supernatural power acting in my life, as I rejected my femininity and desired to be a boy. As the years went on, I became more estranged from my gender. I was dressing like a boy, acting like a boy, being tough like a boy, being affirmed as a tom-boy and given all the boy jobs.
My mother was not a verbally relational woman, affectionate yes, and I knew she loved me, but she had also been motherless. So she was bound in the cycle of motherlessness, unable to nourish or to mother adequately, with the burden of poverty that nine children brought. And then an abdicating, adulterous, alcoholic, wife-beating husband included created an atmosphere for me to grow up with fear terror and insecurity.
I feared men and vowed no man would ever hit me or hurt me, let alone control me with money. To add to this I knew many girls throughout my school years and in the neighbourhood who were subject to incest from their fathers! This was the next force that buried the taproot deeper of abandonment and motherlessness, for great fear leading to paranoia took hold. I greatly feared if I married a man, he would molest my daughters and that distanced me further from any desire of a heterosexual lifestyle.
I took Jesus as my Saviour during the three years I was Sunday Schooled from the age of ten to thirteen, at a small Baptist Church in Toowoomba. By the age of thirteen I was very attracted to the same sex, I could not relate to girls in a mature way at school and at age fourteen, I recall fantasizing about an older woman who lived on the corner of my street. Today I recognize those thoughts as a work of darkness that took advantage of the influences in my life.
At sixteen I had sexual intimacy first with a girl my age. I had dated two guys for short periods but was unable to find love or sexual attraction in them as fear had such a hold of my heart. My mother was expecting me to marry the third boy I was dating, but when I told her I was also seeing a girl and did not want to marry she said, "You will have to move out and go and live with your sisters in Perth."
I went straight into the Perth gay scene just as I was turning seventeen. The first woman who put it on me, I moved in with, as my sister required me to find a job and accommodation. Although I was seventeen, I was a naive immature fourteen year-old on the inside. She was a high-class prostitute and discipline mistress, ten years my senior, running her own escort agency of three women from her home. Well, what a pit was now being dug for me. The demons must have thought I was going to be theirs forever but God who ordained me from the womb had a purpose and plan and was watching me like a hawk.
Eighteen months later in Melbourne, I snuck away to catch a bus, taking nothing but a few clothes, to go and live with a sister in Sydney. The next woman I had a relationship with for five years was very beautiful. Yet she was a clever, skilled, possessive, manipulating, unfaithful, red-head. She represented the red-head my mother always wanted me to be! Weakened and controlled, I walked out on her numerous times only to go back. Eventually my escape was by getting hypnosis. The third and final relationship with a woman was ten years. She was an alcoholic and addict whom I was madly in lust with! I did not have a clue about the dynamics of these addictions, or the depth of her addictions and brokenness but I became her rescuer. However, I too fell into the same snare of drug addiction for the altered states of drug induced sex.
My life had become a train wreck; I was now about twenty-nine and filled with shame I bought a forty-foot bus to run away and travel around Australia, in the hope I could escape the woman I'd become. In my travels I hit thirty; it was time for me to fulfill my inner vow of getting pregnant. To follow this idea, I sought out a man for intercourse, a man who would not know my real name or I, his. I just wanted his seed for my hoped for child. Fear ruled this plan as I thought if he knew me he would want my child for holidays and weekends and it would be a daughter and of course he would commit incest with her, so he had to be faceless and nameless.
I had made an inner vow around thirteen or fourteen to have only one child at thirty, hoping I would have a girl with dark brown hair and the blue green eyes, and she has both. I also named her around that age Lillian Grace, her name is Lily-Fern Grace. I also decided I would live in Gowrie Junction just outside Toowoomba and that's where I live today and have done for the last eighteen years, in my own home. I see the sovereignty of God was in this, for if it was not for having my daughter and not wanting her to have the life I lived, I may still be ensnared on the stairway to hell.
I came home to Toowoomba from Cairns with a newborn. I was so fragmented, riddled with anxiety and fear, then after a year's breast feeding, I became a drinker from morning till evening. Then I started to suspect my girlfriend of sexually abusing my daughter! Was this paranoia or was this truth? Now I was attending Alcoholics Anonymous and in my desperation I cried out to the God of my Sunday Schooling, "You have to show me, is she molesting my daughter? I don't know if it is really true, you have to let me catch her." While on the phone to my AA sponsor I sensed to go and check on Lily - man oh man! I had no knowledge that women molest children and yes my daughter had been a victim so I threw myself onto the mercy of God and the following is how he called me back to himself.
HOW THE LORD JESUS CHRIST REVEALED HIMSELF TO ME:
"Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." Matthew 7:14
In 1995 it was around two in the morning and I woke up to go the toilet. At the toilet door was a novel called "Straight Is The Gate" by Marjorie Buckingham. The book was not there that evening when I went to bed, so sometime through the night it mysteriously came off my bookshelf to go through a locked door, to be placed at the toilet door.
I had searched for years for "the truth" through occult readings, other religions, New Age material and numerology as to what was my purpose on earth and where was I going when I died. My mind had got so darkened to the truth of the cross that I'd thought I was an old soul, who had lived before and was coming back again to obtain a higher self. Little did I realize I had a destiny and it was him "that leadeth unto life eternal" (Matthew 7:14) not reincarnation for a higher self.
At the time the Christian novel was placed in the doorway, I had still been praying to this unfamiliar higher power of my Sunday school days; telling him I wanted to go back to church so he could change me and free me from the homosexuality and make me the heterosexual woman I deeply wanted to be. My homosexual life had been such misery and filled with emotional trauma that I did not want to go back to such a screwed up world. Anyway I knew he called people and I wanted him to call me to a church that had "the truth." I was so bent on finding "the truth" for all those years, that it showed in my reluctance to get caught up with the wrong church as so many cults, religions and spiritual books I'd read claimed they held the truth. I thought it would be the same in the church denominations that named Jesus Christ and it is!
So at 2 am that morning when I found that Novel "Straight is the Gate" at the toilet door, I opened the book to the second page where there was the above Scripture Matthew 7:14 and a stamp reading South Baptist Church. At the time I overlooked the relevance of the Scripture, for I was so happy I had received my call and felt called to the Baptist church; I never took it as "go the South Baptist Church," just the Baptist church.
So I prayed again, "Which Baptist church in Toowoomba holds "the truth"?" Blindly I waited again for a "call" to a specific Baptist church to attend, then three days later in the mail came an invitation to the opening of The Community Baptist Church at Glenvale. Happy again God had called me, I went to the opening day. There I was in church with my now three year old daughter. I could not wait to get water baptized, to wash all my past away and, praise God, he gave the honour of being the first baptized in their new Church baptismal pool.
After the opening day I went for three Sundays waiting for an altar call to "get saved," like they taught me should happen when I was at Sunday school, but there was no altar call! I wanted to give my life to Jesus, to get away from the person I had become. I had so much grief, shame and no self-worth. I left that third Sunday in two minds, driving along Greenwattle Street. I was thinking "Do I drive back and tell someone I want to be saved or do I just go home?" The struggle was so heavy, "don't go back," "go back," "don't go back," "go back," "don't go back," "go back!" I thought if I don't go back and surrender I might not ever go back again.
In the back of my mind was a recent occult reading from a deck of cards "You will face a big decision soon and whatever decision you will make will be what you will be for the rest of your life." And I believed it, I did not want to be what I had been - a homosexual, a drug addict and an alcoholic. Nor did I want to be where I was "at" emotionally for the rest of my life and I had a daughter to bring up. So I turned the car around went back and grabbed a random woman and said, "I want to get saved." She got the pastor and we three went into his office, all held hands and I prayed the sinner's prayer.
TESTIMONY TO DATE:
From that date, the 18th October 1995, through to today, it has been seventeen years and it has not been an easy road. I knew my self oh too well and knew if I did not give Christianity 100% commitment I'd go back to darkness. And coming from an independent, self-sufficient, rebellious, prideful woman to a self-sacrificing, put-down-the-flesh and obey-your-God woman, it has been no easy road and very challenging and painfully traumatic, wrestling against powers and spirits of darkness.
In my early years in Christ and in church I got ensnared in deception and counterfeit spiritual experiences due to my scriptural ignorance. So between my desperation for peace from a tormented mind of fear, I went out of the will of God, wishing in those times that I had never become a Christian. In those early years I told God many times that if I had known what I was in for when I said I wanted to go back to church, I would have stayed drunk and gay. I told him many a time when I was in this period of time, I'd thought that being with him was the worst relationship I have ever lived in and if there were another god who offered eternal life after death like he did, I would go and serve that god.
Shunned and rejected by the church at large and put in the "too-hard-basket," I had to find the way of peace. So dealing with my homosexuality was buried and not an issue whilst I fought my demons of fear, the distortion of paranoia and spiritual deception. All of hell seemed to be against me! I only knew to soldier on in the strength of my "survival" by my sheer will, to fight my way out of such demonic fear and torment. So I went about it by finding what gave demon's their legal grounds and learning about the wiles of darkness. I had to know this enemy I could not see but could hear, being aware aware of the reality of psychic intrusion.
Yes, it was the long way, and yes it worked out. But, I should have learnt first about Jesus, God's covenant, and the victory of the cross and my inheritance of being delivered from the powers of darkness. I should have learnt purity of warfare, how I could use the weapons of my warfare that were mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. (2 Cor 10:4) I should have learnt how to keep my eyes on Jesus and walk in trust and faith. But for a time I couldn't, because I disliked him, because I believed he was the one who was allowing all this pain and I thought he was refining me in affliction. That belief came from a word I got from a minister who prayed for people for deliverance from demons, "you will be refined in affliction!"
The truth is when I let go of my agenda, my strategies and learnt to listen to God and discern him from what were my own thoughts, I got sharp, real sharp. It was then he brought me out of fear and out of deceptions. It was God who set me at liberty in demolishing the strongholds. And it is he today who enables me not to be ensnared again in these yokes of bondages of fear, lies, deceptions and yes, today I am free from my homosexuality.
I studied God's Word "He sent his Word and healed me from my destruction's." (Ps 107:20) I caught up with the truth, I received much deliverance, and I now know his way out, and how to use the weapons of my warfare that are not flesh but divine power. (2 Cor 10:4) It has been mainly in the last ten years that he has been healing me of my sexual brokenness and to date I am willingly intertwining in God's love, kindness and gentleness. Today I no longer have a hatred or fear of men. Today I know God's grace and love to me. Today I know who I truly am and today I am the woman in him I was born to be.
Today he has uprooted and caused me to overcome that deep root of abandonment and rejection. He has enabled me to pinpoint the causations of a twisted spirit so that I no longer seek my mother's approval or relationship or bonding with other women. No longer am I attracted to the red-head my mother wanted me to be, no longer can this hold power over me. No longer am I attracted to the feminine woman that I wanted so desperately to be; my feminine side would surface but I would always go back to the comfortableness of my masculine protective self.
He has brought so much healing and changes from the woman I was when I first visited The Community Baptist Church to "get saved" and have my past washed away in baptism. Today he has done such a great transition and transformation that it's so obvious. His beauty adorns me, his presence is with me and deep down I know I'm not that former woman any longer that ran from self in a forty-foot bus. Today I am born again. Today I am so restored, so transformed that I am so comfortable being feminine and connected with being a woman.
Today I no longer identify as being a lesbian but as a woman of God, a woman who has been delivered from darkness and set free from the chains that once bound me in abandonment fear addiction and homosexuality. Yes homosexual lust is there and it can surface. So can the alcohol addiction and the drug addiction surface if I choose to resurrect them to walk back in those areas of darkness. But I resist it and I refuse to go back to those lifestyles, I have chosen and I choose his lifestyle - his love - his way of living.
Just give me Jesus - I want no other life than the life God gives.
You can read Kathleen's full story on her website. Kathleen has written books and has a website to minister to others looking for freedom and a blogsite to help those looking for keys for their own lives:
