Kimberly Smithers tried filling the void in her heart by looking for love and attention from people, but it only made things more difficult for her. This is her deliverance testimony: her story of how God turned her life around.
Finding love in the wrong places
Kimberly’s life was far from a fairy tale. She was verbally and physically abused by her own parents and the memories and scars of it would haunt her for years. She grew up with a lot of anger and pain in her heart. To her, it felt like she was not worthy of love and was a mistake to begin with.
Her parents were separated when she was just a young girl. She alternately lived with both before going into the foster care system. Then in high school, she found the love and attention that she craved through her first boyfriend who impregnated her at 15.
Like most immature relationships, they broke up, and she started jumping from one relationship to another. Finding no satisfaction because no one could love her in the way that she needed to be loved. After aging out of foster care, she and her son moved in with a new boyfriend. She got pregnant again but instead of building a loving and nurturing home, she was met with a disaster.
Since she was the only one working and her boyfriend was a drug addict, they both decided they couldn’t have the baby. So, she had an abortion, which led her to feel so much guilt and emptiness. She was so distraught that she started doing drugs with her boyfriend.
Near-death experience
Over the next 7 years, Kimberly had two more children, but there was no improvement in her life. She was still on drugs and was in survival mode with her low-wage paying jobs. One night at a party, a gang war transpired, and they were looking for a relative of hers. Out of fear, she and her cousin ran for their lives. They hid underneath a car and all she could do was beg God to spare her life.
The close encounter with death caused her to reevaluate her life, so she gradually began making changes beginning with looking for answers in the library.
Finding God
She and her boyfriend were looking for self-help books when she stumbled upon a book about renewing the mind. At the time she picked it up, she didn’t know it was written by a Christian author. She read through it and instantly noticed that it was making an impact on her. Suddenly she was not craving for drugs and the more she read it, the more she got to know who Jesus is.
She had heard about Jesus before because a former foster family had talked to her about Him and the Holy Spirit. But their faith never made sense to her until now.
“I just started crying, and I’ve seen the clouds part, that He was showing Himself to me,” Kimberly said. “I want to know this Jesus. I want to know God. I want to know Him more.”
Kimberly surrendered her life to Jesus, got connected to a church and was baptized. Since then, she has been delivered from her drug addiction and alcohol drinking, as well as her unforgiveness towards her parents and her search for love in all the wrong places. Today, she is married to a guy she met in church, and together they are raising their children in the Lord.
