In a new video published by the Church, a woman named Rebekah shares how her world was turned upside down when she discovered that she had been abandoned by her birth father before she was born. Already facing an identity crisis from this news, things took an even worse turn after she was sexually assaulted by someone she trusted deeply. It was then that she began feeling like the world—and God—were against her.
“I had a really close male friend. We really trusted each other, so it hurt me a lot when he sexually assaulted me,” she says in the video. “Everything that went through my mind was, ‘I am worthless, and I am disgusting,’ and just crying and crying and crying. And asking myself, ‘Why did this happen?’”
Rebekah wondered why God would ever allow her life to be like this and reasoned that He must not exist. But that reasoning changed when she felt God’s love at a time when she needed it most. With a plan to end her life and a partially written letter, she acted upon a strong feeling to reach out to someone in her life and ask them, ‘What is faith?’
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Her friend sent her a long paragraph in return, which she describes as a wake-up call. “At that moment, I felt loved,” she says. “I didn’t feel loved by [my friend] necessarily, but I felt just love. It felt like there was a lot of warmth and comfort in the room. There was somebody there, or there was something there that was like, ‘You are okay, you are loved, but I need you to get back on the right path.’”
Listen to Rebekah’s story and learn more about how she is finding hope and healing through recognizing her true identity as a child of God in the video below.