04/19/2024
It is a rainy evening in the spring of 2024 when we meet again in an Italian restaurant. Due to busy schedules, it took a long time, but finally we meet again!
I pull my umbrella and enter the restaurant, where I am immediately warmly welcomed by a restaurant employee. “I have an appointment with my friend, and I think she just came in,” I tell her. “Oh yes, come with me,” she says and accompanies me to the table where I see my dear friend and sister in the Lord sitting with a big grin on her face. I get a big hug from her, and we sit down; she had already ordered a basket of bread and a ginger tea, and I also order a ginger tea right away.
First, a quick catch-up, after not seeing each other for so long. Once the starter is finished, I start with my questions:
Let’s just start at the beginning; because who exactly do I have in front of me?
Well, I’m Priscilla; I’m almost thirty-eight years old and have been together with my husband, Mel (Melvin), for twenty years. We’ve been married for fifteen years and have two beautiful children together: a daughter of ten, Siara and a son of seven, Jaivon. I now work in the hospital, but before that I worked for many years in the notary’s office.
- That’s right, because that’s where we know each other. I was going through a divorce, seven and a half years ago, when I started working at a notary’s office. My life was in disarray, and I had a lot of questions about faith and Jesus, all of which you answered during lunch breaks. Eventually, we both went to work elsewhere but kept in touch via Facebook. During a conversation via Facebook, you invited me to come to your church with you. I accepted, and during that Sunday service I chose Jesus again and decided there and then to never let Him go. So that’s your part! But where did your journey with Jesus actually begin?
I was three and a half years old when I lived with a foster family, and this family went to church every Sunday, an evangelical church. Every Sunday I went to Sunday school and later also to teen and youth services. That is how my walk with the Lord began. Although the foster family offered me love, growing up was hard; because of everything I experienced at a very young age, it was difficult for me to receive love. Because of this, I never felt loved or wanted, and I was very depressed and downhearted at a young age.
“Thoughts of suicide went through my head every day”
As a teenager, I was an outsider everywhere, and I was alone, at home and at school. At school, I was bullied and had no friends, and at home it was also difficult. I never did anything right, and I didn’t feel good enough or wanted. Thoughts of suicide went through my head every day. I really didn’t care what would happen to me or where I would end up. I even hoped and prayed to God that He would end my life. Not only that, but I thought about the ways in which I would commit suicide; I once went looking for sleeping pills; I once stood with a knife in my hands; and I also regularly thought about going to the train station to jump in front of a train, but I didn’t dare to do any of it. I did hear God’s voice and pray with Him daily, but the feelings and conversations that I expressed to Him were mainly negative about myself and begging for Him to take me home.
I really longed for death.
In retrospect, I can recall many things in which I see God’s protection. The sleeping pills, for example; we had sleeping pills in the house and on the day that I went to look for the pills in the house, and I really intended to take them, they were nowhere to be found. I searched the entire house, but I “coincidentally” did not find them! Continuously, day in and day out, I was preoccupied with death.
The enemy had an easy prey in me at that time.
I visited my father once a month, but by the time I was fifteen, I went to live with him and his then wife. He had married in the meantime, and on those weekends I went to church with them on Sundays; this was a Molucca church. It was a beautiful church where the presence of the Lord was strongly present. This changed me enormously. I grew closer to God, could understand His voice even better, and also started reading the Bible more. God often showed me Bible texts that I could hold on to enormously. Because I was still very damaged, depressed and down, eventually there came a time when I went to live with my father and had to go to school there too.
“God showed me that He would always be with me”
- Had you also made some girlfriends in your father’s circle? Children from the church, perhaps?
Well, I was very afraid of being alone. The only thing I mainly knew before that time was being alone, being excluded and feeling unwanted. Because of that, an enormous fear of being alone had arisen. But despite the fear, after moving to my father, I was never alone in anything. In that place of residence, I quickly got some friends who were also religious, and a club of very strong religious teenagers was formed that I was part of. I already saw God’s guidance and protection in this. God gave me many Bible texts during that period in which He showed that I was not alone and that He would always be with me. In the years that followed, I grew enormously in my faith and chose God completely. I was seventeen years old at the time, but still struggled with a very negative self-image, depression and suicidal thoughts. Yet God showed me that I had to renew my thinking because the negative self-image had become second nature, and I felt comfortable and safe with it. While God was slowly taking me out of that negative comfort zone.
- You have been walking with God for a long time now, but are there still things from the past that you are still struggling with in your life of faith?
Yes, the negative thoughts about myself that sometimes pop up. In the meantime, I have learned that once the enemy knows what your weak points are, he will always try to hit you there. That can be once a month, once a year or, so to speak, once in ten years; he keeps trying.
“Once the enemy knows where your weaknesses are,he will always try to hit you there.It could be once a month, once a year, or, say, once a decade; he will keep trying.”
For me, he comes with thoughts and feelings of fear, lies in my thinking, that I am alone and have no one. And although I recognize these attacks now, sometimes it can also take a few days before I stand up to them. So I sometimes find that difficult.
- I understand. We all have to deal with wounds from the past, and the enemy does indeed like to point that out to us from time to time. Yet your faith and trust in God have always remained strong. Are there also things that have stuck with you the most that God has done for you in all those years?
Yes, certainly, many things, and they are mainly beautiful things, of course. However, there was also a very important lesson for me that was not a nice experience, but that has always stayed with me. And that was also in those teenage years. I have had many difficult moments when I cried out to God, and then He always gave me some strength to get through the days. Yet there was one moment when I cried out to God and experienced nothing. I did not experience His presence and His power, and that had an enormous impact on me, because then I experienced for a moment what it must be like when you do not know God. This realization was so impressive that it was very clear to me once again that I really cannot do without Him. I am nothing without Him, and I need His power in everything. So despite the fact that this was a negative experience, the realization that I really need Him in everything only became greater because of this.
- That is so powerful! Your dependence on Him was clear to you at a young age; you also said that in that same period of your teenage years you were already very much in the Word and did Bible studies. Was there also a specific Bible text that reminds you of that period? From which you experienced a lot of strength?
Oh yes, of course there are many, but the one that has been very important to me since I was seventeen, and this may be a cliché, but that is my baptismal text, Psalm 16:11.
“You make known to me the path of life;you will fill me with joy in your presence,with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” - Psalm 16:11
For me, this text sums it all up. In any case Psalm 16 has an important meaning for me because it tells that, despite the fact that you can sometimes be in the ‘realm of the dead’ (Psalm 16:10), God will get you out of there again. My whole life, certainly until I was twenty, consisted of nothing but misery, being depressed, being abandoned time and time again, and not wanting to live anymore. But He is that Right Hand that I have leaned on all those difficult years (Psalm 16:8).
It starts off very heavy and difficult, but when you read the last verse, “Joy is in your presence FOREVER!”, it ends so beautifully, and I see that in my own life too. How it is now with Mel and the children and my relationship with God.
God is always there; with Him there is joy!
- When did the turning point come for you that you were free from all those depressive thoughts and difficulties?
That was the moment I was away from home. I met Mel and was away from that negative home situation and the negative living environment. At that moment, God was given all the space to heal the wounds. That took years, mind you, because God often does that layer by layer.
- Yes, that’s right; you can’t acknowledge what you don’t know. That’s why God often does point out where the wounds are and where the pain is. And from there you can focus on these things together with Him, and He can heal you. Your home situations have left the deepest wounds behind, you already said you never did things right, and you never felt good enough; during your journey with God and the healing of all those wounds, have you been able to discover which talents God has placed in you?
What I have discovered is that I find it very important to use what I have experienced in my youth, so that I can help other people with it. I notice that there is some movement in that area.
- The thing I always admire about you is your knowledge of the Bible and your knowledge of the Rapture; you know and research so much!
That is true; yes, I always research everything, based on the Bible, of course. The Bible also teaches us to meditate on the Word day and night (Joshua 1:8), but if you do not read it or hardly read it, what should you meditate on? It is therefore very important to remain in the Word and test everything against the Word, but in addition, I personally also find it very important to know what the enemy is doing.
That is why I also research a lot about the spiritual world, not to give the enemy the honor, but if you play football, for example, you also have to know who your opponent is and how they play, and in this way I do gather a lot of knowledge about the enemy’s tactics, which I can also share with people or help people with.
“The world is already so hard, and sometimes things may also be presented softly”
I try to point people, who consciously or unconsciously, are occupied with matters of the enemy and things that are in the (spiritual) world, to God’s Word and what the Bible says, in love and in gentleness. I am not of the hard and radical; the world is already so hard, and sometimes things may also be brought softly.
What was the question again? Oh yes, “What is your talent?”
Other strong points that God has placed in me are, I think, communication and connecting people. In addition, I have dreamed about water all my life. Swimming pools, quiet streams or even whitewater courses come to mind in my dreams. For a long time, I never understood why I always dreamed about water, although I knew that it had to be from God.
Water stands for the living water of God, the Word of God! I now know that God wants to use me to convey the Word to people in a simple and easy-to-understand way, through me.
God’s Salvation is simple; the art is to convey it to people in that way, in love.
“God still speaks through His Word today”
I used to be very afraid to speak. I thought that what I said was not important. But God spoke to me very clearly: “I am going to put you in front.” Even though I am still more of a speaker and explainer in small groups and preferably one-on-one, God has taught me a lot, and I have been able to overcome a lot with Him in this area.
Furthermore, it is all still a bit of a journey of discovery together with God. I myself also still get a lot of lessons from the Sunday services with the children, where I often serve as a teacher.
- Can you share a little bit about what season you are in right now in your faith life? Or are you still kind of searching for that?
Well, for a long time, my role was of course to care for the children. When they were born, God also spoke very clearly to me, “This is your season of rest; these are your children,” andthat I could take all the time for that. But now that they are getting a bit bigger, I do notice that God is slowly starting to move.
- In what area do you notice that? Is that with you personally, or also together with Mel?
Both, actually. I notice that God is working with me personally, like my passion to explain God’s Word to people personally in a simple, childlike way, but also with Mel and me together. And because the children are getting older, we also notice that we are a bit searching for a new balance within the family and that God is slowly preparing us for the next season.
- Has God ever called you to take a step of faith?
“I learned that in my weakness, I could trust Him”
What were big steps in faith for me, and what I absolutely did not want at first, were the times that God pushed me forward to do the preliminary services in the church. I absolutely did not want it and found it so scary; I had never asked God for it. But they were very valuable lessons because I learned through this that I could trust Him in my weakness.
Of course, from my past I was used to hiding myself, always in the background, uncertain about myself and anxious. But God was, and still is, busy taking that away from me and showing me that I can stand and do not have to hide.
- In our weakness, He is strong.
Exactly! Because when I think back to my past and how timid and afraid I was to do those preliminary services, but by praying and trusting God, those anxious feelings disappeared again and again.
- How beautiful! Actually, only one more question remains: Who is Jesus to you?
Haha, I had a feeling you were going to ask that.
- That’s no surprise; we are one body, right, LOL.
“I AM, WHO I AM”
Yes, that’s right! So I had already thought about it!
Jesus is everything to me, and yes, people may say that very quickly, “He is everything to me.” ‘Everything’ seems like a very easy answer, but I still think about it further; why is He everything? It has been in my head for years, but it is God Himself who says, “I AM, WHO I AM.”
And that actually includes everything, “I am…” and fill in yourself:
I am love
I am faith
I am wisdom
I am strength
I am healing
I am peace
I am…….you can fill in what you need, and He is it! He is EVERYTHING.
Through Him, I have learned to always be cheerful, even when things sometimes don’t go so well.
With Him, there is Joy FOREVER!
- I can only say ‘Amen’ to that! Is there anything else you would like to share with the readers?
I think most of all, that God loves you without you having to work or earn for it. I remember so well a moment when I was sitting on the couch at home as a teenager and God suddenly spoke out of nowhere: “I love you.” Not only that, but I didn’t understand it because here I was, sitting on the couch doing nothing, and yet He kept saying, “I love you; you don’t have to do anything because I love you anyway.” He shows in the smallest things that He is always there and loves us.
Even when you are at a point where you have nothing or no one. When you don’t know what to do, where to go, or what to pray for, God is everything because He is “I AM.” You can fill in whatever you need; whatever you are looking for, He is it.
As His Word says…..He is everything!
Are you also interested in sharing your testimony on this site? Leave a comment below, and I’ll get in touch.
