This is Erin Reece’s story before she was baptized on October 13th, 2019 in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I have a tendency to not know quite how to tell my story because there was not just this one aha moment, but rather a million different moments that show God’s sovereign and loving hand on my life and how He has and continues to capture my heart.
I grew up in a small town in Illinois and was raised in the Lutheran church. I put my trust in Jesus when I was 6 years old because I had some huge fears and my mom told me that I could pray and ask Jesus into my heart and he would protect me. Then, and for a long time after, I saw Jesus as someone who was there to help me when I was physically sick or needed help, but I had no understanding whatsoever of my spiritual sickness and therefore my deep need for a savior.
But praise God, it is amazingly evident that He had His hand on me throughout my entire life. He placed me in friend groups with Christian friends with stronger faiths than mine, he protected me from relationships that would not have been healthy for me while my faith was still immature, and he led my steps by opening and closing doors that were often heartbreaking at the time, but ultimately were for my good.
I danced ballet my whole life and left high school early to train and enter the professional field. This thrust me into an unbelieving world while my faith was still weak, and although my choices didn’t reflect my claimed beliefs, God was faithful. He used my depravity and loneliness to show me the sweetness of real friendship with him. I attended my first bible church and the word came alive for me, the music stirred my affections, and I found myself falling more in love with the Lord each week.
When I left that career to attend TCU, I was shocked by the loss of identity I faced. I not only grieved dance, which had been a huge part of my life, but I came face-to-face with the fact that I put my identity in being a good dancer and highly valued the fact that it made me feel “special.” The Lord opened my eyes to the ways that I did not put my identity in Him and used that transition as well as my transition to teacher and now to stay-at-home-mom to humble me and show me how much my heart craves praise from the world instead of peace from Him.
Colin and I got married in 2010 and had our first child 5 years later. We assumed that all of our baby making efforts would always go just as smoothly, but instead we lost our next 3 babies to miscarriage. This season was filled with grief, fear, doubts, numbness, and disbelief, but none more so than after the 3rd. I knew that God was good and I trusted that He knew best. I felt genuinely happy that He allowed us to be a part of creating three of His saints in heaven. BUT I no longer believed that He cared about me and my desires because I could not see past all of our unanswered prayers. I stopped praying. My mind kept telling me that I needed to keep talking to Him, but I absolutely could not get my heart to bend and do that. God did not leave me though. He was so steadfast. So unwavering. While I felt tossed around by my desires and heartbreaks and emotions, and my heart felt the darkest it had ever been, and broken, and hard, God was steadfast in His love for me. By His grace, He placed a sweet conversation with a precious friend and a bible study in my life to soften my heart. I began praying again feeling completely broken about how I had treated the Lord, but He was so good. He was not surprised by my reactions or my doubts and He was not only big enough to handle them and answer them, but to welcome me back into His arms without judgment or condemnation and heal my devastated heart. Then 1 year later, our baby girl was born in such a way where I saw God answer not just every prayer I had said out loud, but ones that had been hidden deep in my heart. He is a good Father, but I know that even if those prayers had been left unanswered, He is still a good Father, as He has shown me throughout my entire life.
Now I would love to wrap my story up in a nice, tidy bow, but I still deal with a lot of sin, fear, doubt, and misplaced identity. But God is not surprised by this. He loves me in spite of this and he is not just leaving me how I am right now, but he is working on me and sanctifying me, and I know that my story will be tied up into the most beautiful bow on the day when I am reunited with my babies, dancing in heaven, and praising my God.