CBN.com -“I was treated like an outcast, locked in a room. I stayed in the dark for two and a half years, yelling, screaming, just constant terrorizing me.”
Becky Hutchinson was born into the foster care system. She has haunting memories of the family that took her in when she was two. “The only thing I ate was liquid – a bottle. I had malnutrition, too. I was in a playpen like thing. That’s where I lived by myself.”
Until the afternoon Becky’s foster mother tried to drown her in a tub of scalding water. She survived, and was taken to the hospital. “I got burnt pretty bad. After that incident they put me in a new foster home, which was with the family I ended up staying with. They showed so much love. Mom always told me she loved me. Dad always told me he loved me and Mom always shared that God loved me.”
As she grew older Becky says the message of God’s love wasn’t the one she believed. “It was either, God is love or I would hear, ‘if you’re bad, you go to hell.’ And I already felt bad about myself.”
Becky was tormented by dark nightmares and constant thoughts of suicide. “I felt very suicidal, always thinking about death.”
After high school, Becky joined the Navy. By now she had developed an inexplicable fear of church. “I don’t know what it was. I would get so stirred up on the inside. My whole world would go crazy when I’d get near a church or in a church.”
Becky used drugs and alcohol to escape her reality. But the suicidal thoughts became overbearing, the nightmares more real. “On the inside I was terrorized just by those negative thoughts. I wrote my parents a letter telling them I loved them but I couldn't live any longer, took a bunch of pills, went out drinking, blacked out, ended up in a hospital.”
Her life was spared that day. But it was the death of her mother years later…that made her want to live. “She took my hand in the hospital and said, ‘I'm going to be with Jesus now.’ When she took her final breath I was like, ‘she really does have something that I don't have.’ That was the first time I really started to acknowledge that I needed something different.”
She took a job working at daycare to help out a friend. “Her helper quit. And I said, ‘Where's it at?’ And she said, ‘At the Baptist church.’ I said, ‘Naw, I don't want to go to church.’ She goes, ‘well, it's in the back room. We have the kids back there.’ So I took the job and it was a blessing. The whole time they planted little seeds of faith in my heart.”
She was also seeing a Christian counselor. That friendship led her to the very place she had been avoiding most of her life. “Once I started going to church is when I really met Jesus. Even with fear in my heart, I came every Sunday. Something kept drawing me back, bringing me back, bringing me back. And I had to fight through the fear and I’d go.”
Then one Easter Sunday she was moved by the demonstration of Christ’s love. “At the end of the service they put up a clip from The Passion of the Christ. It was like I was right there. I was in it. It was like I was right there at the tomb. I stood up. I stood up in the church and I was like, ‘I want Jesus.’ I felt a change right then. My life changed right at that moment that I prayed the sinner's prayer.”
The nightmares? Gone. No more thoughts of ending her life. For the first time in over 40 years, Becky started to love herself and she believed finally, that Jesus loved her too.
“Jesus accepts us just as we are right then. I didn't have to do any work to change Becky. Jesus changes me on a daily basis.”
