The Bondage of Needing To Be Chosen: A Personal Testimony

Today I'm back with another excerpt from my upcoming release, Wilderness, which is available to preorder now.

When we look at the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness, we see they struggled the most with giving up control and trusting the Lord. What’s interesting is their struggle was not linear. They did not doubt the Lord when He said He would spare their firstborn if they sacrificed a lamb and put its blood on their doorposts. And yet, they did doubt the Lord when faced with the Red Sea. They did not doubt that the Lord was leading them somewhere. They willingly followed the fire and the cloud. But they did doubt whether that somewhere was good. They did not doubt the Lord to secure them victory in the battles leading to Canaan, but when finally presented with the Promised Land, they refused to enter due to fear.

In my own journey back to Eden, I dealt with a similar non-linear struggle with trust in the Lord. I was able to see the Lord’s goodness in certain areas of my life. I had no issue trusting Him to keep me safe while traveling, to protect me from violence or death, to give me wisdom if I asked for it. Yet I doubted Him to give me the one thing I wanted most. I doubted the Lord to give me love.

The thing we desire most is the hardest to surrender, and thus it is the foundation of our bondage.

Believing that submitting to God’s will for my life meant resigning myself to a life of scarcity, servitude, and loneliness or that I would end up in an unfulfilling marriage with a spouse I was not attracted to, kept me from surrendering control for years. I now know that this ideology was produced by Satan’s lies, that the Lord is the author of my heart’s desire, and that submitting to Him is the only way to receive the desires of my heart. But the journey to this point of trust and surrender has been long, trying, filled with heartache and uncertainty, and yes, resentment, anger, and impatience.

Having a distorted perception of love, God, and self is exactly how I found myself in the Egypt of my twenties, which included a brief, broken, godless marriage that became my holding cell. But before entering Egypt, there was the grooming, the training to become a slave to Satan’s lies—a slave to desire, to insecurity. There was the bondage. The invisible chains of Satan’s bondage began wrapping around my heart and limbs from my earliest memories, but I wouldn’t be able to identify it as bondage or spiritual attack until my thirtieth year when God lowered the veil.

As a young girl, I dreamed of love—not so unlike other girls growing up in the 90s and early 2000s. We grew up on fairytales and traditional values. Living in the South only added to the expectation that I would be married with children by twenty-five. But expectations and social norms weren’t the only contributing factors for my desire for marriage.

I was a girl who felt unseen, unattractive, and unloved, so much so I remember asking my grandmother if it was okay for a girl to ask a boy to marry her, because I didn’t believe anyone would ever choose me. Mind you, I was not even in middle school yet. The age at which this fear was born should reveal a lot about my early childhood experiences and the spiritual warfare on my life.

As I got older, this false belief of being unseen, unattractive, and unchosen continued to torment me. I constantly dreamt of losing weight, even imagining cutting off pieces of my thigh fat when I’d sit on the toilet. I thought when I’m older, I can have liposuction. Or maybe when I get to college, I’ll have more time to exercise, and I can better control what I eat. When in reality, I was already over-working myself to be thin—to be worthy of a boy’s attention—and I was barely eating.

I would guzzle lemon water—the more tart, the better—and I would eat plain iceberg lettuce, because I was told it was basically zero calories. This behavior was praised by those closest to me, because they also lived with the ideology that beauty and worthiness was attached to thinness—and ultimately, that the male gaze was the only one that mattered. They perpetuated this belief with harmful remarks such as, “No one will ever date you if you gain weight.” They praised my discipline while also threatening to force-feed me if I got too thin. It was emotional whiplash, which only scratched the scar that reminded me, “You’ll never be good enough.”

My feelings of inadequacy and insecurity held me back in my daily life, while fantasizing about the day I would finally be thin enough, beautiful enough, confident enough to be chosen allowed me to escape into a reality I questioned would ever come. I desired a husband and a home of my own. I had visions of us, our children, and even my parents sitting at a big dining room table laughing and talking. That was the dream. And yet, I remember sitting in my parent’s living room, imagining how I would redecorate after they died. Why? Because as a teenager with my whole life ahead of me, I imagined I’d be living there alone. But it didn’t stop there—or rather, Satan didn’t.

My bondage wasn’t just about unmet needs, low self-esteem, desire for love, and the fear of never receiving it. It was also about what I’d have to do to get it. The fantasies in my head turned dark. I started imagining terrible things happening to me that would finally make the boys at school see me, want me. Or maybe I just liked the idea of someone protecting me, someone saving me? But to be rescued, there had to be something or someone to be rescued from. Enter the dark fantasy, and the idea that pain is required to be loved.

If this sounds like normal teenage girl stuff, or even deranged teenage girl stuff, it’s neither. It’s spiritual warfare that began with feeling unseen and unloved in my home. And because these thoughts and visions were rooted in such deep insecurities, I didn’t speak about them with anyone. So, Satan continued to shackle me with the bondage of needing to be chosen and groom me to accept toxic, abusive, breadcrumb-love. Oh, but that was only the beginning. The bondage my future relationships would open the door to was a new level of torment.

Entering college at eighteen—having never had a boyfriend or even a first kiss—I was inexperienced, insecure, desperate for love and attention, and yet, I was not unseen. Within a few months of being on campus, I was in an official relationship with the boy who lived across the hall from me. And before the end of my first semester, I let go of my dream—for true romance and purity—and I settled for the reality I’d been given. I lost my virginity to the first boy who ever chose me.

I believed I was in love, and that we’d get married. It wasn’t completely irrational thinking, considering most of the love stories in my family began in high school. They all occurred by chance, by proximity, by convenience. Or so I believed. This situation didn’t feel so different. But my belief that he was the one was driven by my family history and societal expectations, not reality, not discernment, not God.

The entire relationship—the one that claimed all my firsts—only lasted six months. And it wasn’t exactly a romantic, loving, gentle six months. There were lots of tears and arguments—all of which I accepted as normal. Maybe it was normal, but it wasn’t what I wanted. It’s what I thought I had to settle for. Had it not been for my friends who were tired of hearing me complain about him—who gave me the tough love of don’t come crying to us when he breaks your heart again—I probably would’ve gotten back together with him when he realized he’d made a mistake and tried to get me back.

That relationship took a lot from me, but it also left me with something—an exposure to pornography and a greater understanding of my body. What began with an innocent Google-search—how to kiss a boy—stemming from my insecurity and desire to please, led to a not-so-innocent Google-search—how to look good in bed. And from there the strongest of chains took hold of me. Masturbation became a reprieve from the loneliness that followed my break-up, and pornography aided the escape. While I firmly believe all pornography is harmful and immoral, because of my desire to please, I was primed for not just any porn but straight-from-Hell content organized under the digital tab of bondage. Ironic, right?

If you’ve never heard of this, don’t Google it. Just don’t. What I will say is, Satan is a master at twisting our good, God-given desires and using them for our destruction. Submission in a covenant marriage, where your husband and God are your safeguards against the world, is a beautiful thing. When you can trust your master—for lack of a better word—submission is not slavery. But when you submit to sin, Satan abuses the power you’ve given him.

This content and this secret habit meant to numb my pain held me in chains for years. The hold on me was so strong I didn’t even realize I was a slave to it. It felt as if it had become a part of me. I believed this is who I was, and because this content was wrong, evil, corrupt, I believed I was forever corrupted. I believed I was beyond saving, and I lived in silent shame. This is not so different from the Israelites who probably questioned why they believed they could have something different, something better when God offered it to them, despite truly desiring it.

Because this demonic influence had infiltrated my understanding of physical intimacy and my view of my body at such a young age, when I finally decided to try to break free, I genuinely wondered if I’d ever be able to. This content had completely rewired my brain and crippled my ability to feel pleasure without digital stimulus. It had made me see my body as a tool rather than a treasure and had become a roadblock between me and what I truly desired—not just physically but emotionally.

Satan had stripped me of my identity as God’s daughter, my dignity as someone to be cherished rather than used, and my hope for the true intimacy, romance, and union I’d always desired. But God did not abandon me in my struggle against Satan’s bondage. In fact, I would say He is the one who ignited the struggle, who sparked the desire for change, and who inspired me to seek His help.

There were many years in which I did not feel a desire to change. Empty? Yes. Ashamed? Yes. Convicted? No. Because in my singleness, I felt escape through porn was the only pleasure I would ever have. I was resigned to continuing this habit that left me unsatisfied, lonelier than ever, and shackled with guilt because I felt it was as good as it could get. It was God who stepped into the darkness with me and reminded me—quietly, gently—that this was not what I wanted. He spoke to me before I sought Him. He didn’t just show up when I called. He inspired the call—the ache in my heart that first desired love, the ache that told me this wasn’t it, the ache that reminded me it’s still possible to change.

God begins working in us long before we ever realize it—long before our Exodus, long before we enter the wilderness. It is not we who call to be rescued. It is He who calls us out of bondage. It is He who reminds us we were never meant to be slaves to sin and Satan, striving to be worthy of man’s approval, shrinking to be deemed attractive, stripping to be loved. We have always been His—His treasure, His children. We have always been chosen. It is for those reasons that He pursues us constantly, and so does Satan.

This chapter continues in Wilderness and includes more journal prompts like this one: What good desire do you feel the enemy is using to control you?

I hope you'll check it out on release day, November 5, 2026 or preorder today.