What Tried to Break Me

My name is Tatyana Smith and I am 21 years old. Many times, when people share their testimony, the story begins the same way. I grew up in church and I always knew Christ. My story sounds similar, but it carries its own weight, its own cracks, its own redemption. As a child, I knew who Jesus was. I knew that He died for my sins, that He rose again on the third day. I was a little girl with big prayers a God-fearing heart, and a childlike faith that seemed unshakable. But life has a way of testing the purity of faith, of dimming the fire until it flickers low. I grew up in a two-parent household, but that doesn’t mean it was whole. From the outside, my family looked put together we were in church every Sunday, singing hymns, shaking hands, bowing heads. But inside those walls, our home was cold and dark. It felt like I was standing at the edge of a cliff staring into emptiness waiting to fall. My parent's marriage was filled with storms. Their fights, their arguments, were not hidden behind closed doors but spilled out in front of me and my siblings like broken glass scattered across the floor. My father’s unfaithfulness left deep wounds in my heart, a hardness that began to grow like stone inside me. My mother, battling her own pain from the betrayal shifted in her spirit. The divorce took a toll on her and soon the tension between us sharpened into constant odds. In the midst of that brokenness, I searched for love in the wrong places. I entered a relationship that only mirrored the chaos I had grown up in. He betrayed me too cheating manipulating breaking me down piece by piece. The abuse wasn’t only physical but mental words that cut deeper than bruises. I lost myself in the lies I believed about my worth. The pain pushed me into a darkness where I couldn’t see a way out. Suicidal thoughts whispered louder and louder, convincing me that the cliff I had once imagined was now standing before me urging me to jump. But it was in that valley the darkest one I had ever walked that God met me again. Not the God I had simply known about as a child but the God who rescues, redeems, and restores. The God who heard the cries I never spoke out loud. The God who reminded me that His love was not dependent on the faithfulness of people, or the stability of a household, or the opinions of the world. As an adult, I found Him not because He was ever lost but because I had wandered. He was the light that broke through the cold and the silence the hand that pulled me back from the cliff. What once was pain became the soil for my testimony. What once was betrayal became a reminder of His faithfulness. What once was despair became the stage for His hope. I am here today, not because of my strength, but because His grace caught me when I was falling. My story is proof that God can take a shattered life and piece it back together into something whole, something beautiful, something that reflects His glory. So, if you hear anything in my story, hear this the God who carried me through the fire will carry you too. No matter how broken the home, no matter how deep the betrayal, no matter how heavy the darkness He is still the light. And that light never goes out.