I DISCOVERED GOD DIDN'T HATE ME AFTERALL!
(The Terri Briseno Story)

By: Terri Briseno

I was born on July 7, 1967, in Valparaiso, Indiana, with broken shoulders. Maybe I was avoiding coming out into the world.

I had pneumonia six times before I was two years old and wore corrective braces on my legs as a toddler.

My parents started moving my older sister and me around the country when I was a baby. Our young family of four lived on the east and west coasts, in the Midwest, and in the south. I had been to 12 or 13 schools by the time I started high school. Church was on and off as a young child—mostly off.

When I was nine, my parents said they would drop us off if we wanted to go to Sunday school at some church, but they weren’t going back. I never thought I could just go back alone, and later in life I thought it was too late for me because I hadn’t been baptized and I didn’t have a denomination in my family. I thought I had just missed the boat.

Also when I was nine, my father began gambling and lost everything at the racetrack. There were loan sharks after him, which led to our running from California—a place we loved—to Houston, Texas—a place we hated. My dad then embezzled money from his job and went to prison. I was a daddy’s girl, and I was devastated and felt alone. Our low-income apartment was full of large cockroaches, my school was frightening, and my sister started doing drugs and ran away and became a prostitute. My mother had a nervous breakdown, and everyone knew about my messed up family.

After that, my mom and I got help moving to Gary, Indiana, to live in my grandmother’s trailer. I had to go to another awful school where I was one of the few white students and one of the few students who could read and wanted to learn. Because I was coming from the south, was white, and I had been a good, straight-A student, I was harassed constantly, so I walked out and told my mother I wouldn’t go back. Not long after we moved to a better area and I started junior high school. During this time I also read the Bible my mother had given me as a gift. I read it like a book and didn’t know what to make of it all. My mother worked hard and sacrificed enough so that I could take ballet and modern/jazz dance lessons starting at age thirteen. She favored my sister and was used to just sending me off with my dad, so she just let me do my own thing. I was dancing and doing well in school and then my sister, Tonni, came home from Houston and found a new group of drug addicts to hang out with in Indiana.

My dad returned to the Midwest about the same time. Not long after, I started having crippling back pain and ended up needing spine surgery for a rare disorder. I was accepted as a free patient at the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children in Illinois. Dancing ended for me, and while I was recovering from surgery, my dad (who was not living with us anymore) was caught by the police breaking into cars looking for gambling money in a hotel parking lot. Rather than go back to jail, he put a gun in his mouth and killed himself. This tragedy was printed in all of the local papers. Everything was black after that, and outside of the learning, school was terrible because no one really knew me and several kids confided that they weren’t allowed to hang out with me because of my dysfunctional family. I became “popular” later in high school but really only had one true friend who also came from a poor and broken family.

During my junior or senior year in high school, my mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and she started having a lot of physical and psychological problems and continued to throw herself into my sister’s attempts to get clean from drugs over and over again. I graduated with honors and decided to go to California instead of college because my happiest times had been there.

I spent two years in California working and living in a large house with six roommates—most of them hippy followers of the Grateful Dead—partying occasionally, but mostly just reading and enjoying the mountains and beaches of Santa Barbara and lots of religious and philosophical conversations.

After two years, my step-father talked me into applying for a scholarship at a liberal arts college in Indiana—a Catholic liberal arts college. I received a tuition scholarship and spent four years there drinking a lot of beer and trying drugs but managing to graduate second in my class. I studied a lot about post-Communist countries, world religions, and philosophy and I loved the work, but I didn’t see the big picture.

It didn’t come together for me even though three of my years there I lived in a dorm called Aquinas Hall, which was attached to the college chapel. I could even see the cross at the top of the steeple from my bed and it bent down and did a little dance one night after a couple of weeks spent studying Thomas Aquinas. I just wasn’t invited inside the chapel. I think I may have told people when asked that I was Protestant because I thought I had to be something, and for whatever reason, no one ever invited me to church. I spent my time wondering whether Catholics were Christians without even really knowing what a Christian was.

After college I moved to Chicago and spent 12 years there. I worked hard and had a lot of acquaintances, but not any real friends except a guy named Jay. I don’t remember being invited to church or having a conversation about faith with anyone during that time. I did get invited to a co-worker’s wedding at his church, but I was never invited to church. Mostly, I came to know many people in academia and the arts, and I lived the lifestyle of a single urbanite in a cool city.

My second job in Chicago was a dream job: working as an editor at Encyclopedia Britannica, but a large group of us was laid off, and for months I was without work and competing for jobs with my former coworkers. During that time, my sister committed suicide: She overdosed on crack when she lost custody of her second child after being caught using repeatedly in front of her children. During my months of unemployment during this same time, I rarely left my apartment, sitting alone for days at a time.

Eventually, I was asked to return to Encyclopedia Britannica as an editor, but I was deeply depressed and empty and alone. I went to work and came home and sat alone with the blinds drawn most of the time, often drinking six to eight beers alone so I could pass out, and only doing something social about once or twice a month. And for months at a time, I didn’t answer the phone. I left the ringer off and let voice mail get the calls, returning them when I was able. I ate lunch at work but nothing else each day. I was practically a hermit, barely looking at myself in a mirror, for much of my late twenties and early thirties. By 2001, I had also given up on men altogether and vowed not to be used again.

After September 11, 2001 ... I Lost It

After September 11, 2001, I lost it and started feeling nothing but fear and despair. I recognized that true evil was unleashed in the world, and I was disturbed at a terrible “coincidence.” I had been editing articles on different countries, and on Sept. 10, 2001, I had ended my day by selecting my next couple of articles to get started on that week. They were on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I witnessed the attacks live on TV, and then I headed to work, but we were sent home because we were in a downtown skyscraper that also housed government offices. When the subway was closed down, I just walked and walked with no idea where to go. I had visions while walking that men were all over the streets and were ready to pull out knives and just start cutting peoples’ throats. It was so frightening walking in the shadow of the Sears Tower each day on the way to work. I felt as if the world was coming to an end.

Things became dark and terrifying to me in the city, and the insomnia and nightmares which had started when I was about nine years old increased and became unbearable. At this point in my life—and on and off for about a decade before that—I was often screaming out to God to let me die. I wanted him to just take me because I was so tired and empty and in constant face and jaw pain from TMJ.

The weekend before Sept. 11, 2002, I attempted suicide. Prior to that I had gone to the doctor for the first time in 12 years because I had had an anxiety attack on the subway (my first and only one), and I had not slept in weeks. The doctor gave me samples of Zoloft, an anti-depressant, and I had some muscle relaxants from the dentist and some sleeping pills my mom had given me months earlier. All together, I had a large glass full of pills and some Budweiser to wash them down. Had my friend Jay not come by and rung my apartment buzzer at 10:30 that night (which he knew better than to do but did so that night anyway), I would probably be dead. But he did stop by and kept me awake. The next day I was very ill, and Monday I went to work, but when I got home Monday evening, I started hearing voices and seeing things for almost 30 hours before I finally contacted my parents and they drove two hours to Chicago to take me to the hospital.

During those 30 or so hours, I was in the middle of a fight between evil and light. Voices were telling me that if I lay down or went to sleep I would die. Other voices told me that I was on camera and everyone around my neighborhood was watching me, as well as people on the Internet—tens of thousands of people. When I wondered out loud, “If I close my eyes, will I die and go to Hell?” a voice said “How do you know that you aren’t already there?” My whole body began to get hot, and my heart felt strange. I thought I was dying, but it had been more than two days since the overdose. The downtown hospital I went to said that the wait to admit me would be about three hours, but after they took my vitals and asked some questions, I was taken to an examining room right away and placed on IVs. From there, I went to a psychiatric hospital for three days. On the first night, demons circled my bed in an isolation room, and they taunted me about cutting my hair off and breaking out my teeth before morning. After I checked out of the hospital I went back to work as if nothing had happened. An outpatient psychiatrist diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder, but the voices were found to be an episode probably brought on by the drugs I’d combined, and they went away, but not until a month or so later.

In January of 2003, I was laid off again and spent eight more dark and solitary months trying to find the energy to get a job and hoping to find something that would make life better. I was looking for jobs and sending resumes all over the country and overseas. I had interviews and a few offers, and nothing was tying me to Chicago. During one awful but memorable day in June of that year, I found out that a co-worker and friend who worked in aerospace at NASA had died in his sleep at age 34. Earlier that same day I had been drawn to a listing for a writing job at an aerospace company in Grand Rapids, MI, and I had the feeling that it was THE job. I prayed that night and sobbed and begged for the job. Several months and interviews later, I was hired.

I hadn’t driven or had a car in 12 years living in downtown Chicago, so I had to buy one, get a license, and relearn how to drive, then I had to find an apartment in a new city where I knew no one, and I had to start a new job that I didn’t even know how to get to. It was exhausting and depressing, and I was really in a dark place. I was throwing up every couple of hours and again, I just wanted to die.

Then, in November of 2003, on my first day at my new job, a co-worker had lunch with me; asked me if I had gone to church in Chicago, and invited me to her Sunday school class. I was so excited, but I was also aware that I needed to somehow “get ready” before I could go. I bought a King James Bible, and then I checked out the church website and read something about accountability, which has always attracted me. But then I saw that they used something called a New International Version Bible. I had no idea what that was, and I had bought the wrong one—I had already messed up. I had to call a Christian bookstore and ask what an NIV Bible was and make sure it was legitimate. It then took me some time to have enough courage to go to the store and pick it up.

After a few get-togethers with my co-worker and some of her friends outside of church, by March of 2004 (months after being invited), I summoned up the courage to go to the Sunday school class, and the following week I started going to church. I sat in the very, very, back of the upstairs balcony and tried to get there early so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone and so I could find the Bible verses being talked about without anyone seeing me use the table of contents. I had studied parts of the Bible in college, but I was really quite blind by this point. If people found out that I didn’t belong there, I thought that they might ask me to leave and not come back. I was so afraid of being “found out.”

From the first visit, I LOVED CHURCH, so I started serving right away, but after a few weeks, and after signing up to help with the mission team in Sunday school, I thought I’d better let the church know my story and that I was not part of the “club”—It was all new to me, and I had such a terrible past, but they acted as if I was one of them.

On Sunday, April 18, 2004, after a sermon on the sins of the father and breaking with the past, I had a complete and total meltdown of emotion. I tried to eat breakfast at a restaurant, but I couldn’t stop crying. People were staring at me, so I paid my bill and left. I went to a park near my house and started writing out a letter telling my story to the Sunday school teacher at church. I was writing about what I knew of God and church, and when I wrote down something about not knowing what to do with the Jesus part, I read it again and scratched out the line about Jesus, thinking that I would figure that out later.

It Was Jesus I Needed!

At that moment, everything changed. I felt a pain in my heart that I will never forget and I asked Jesus to forgive me for not seeing HIM. I hadn’t seen Him. I had prayed to God, talked to God, wondered why God hated me so much. It was Jesus I needed! The scales came off of my eyes and I could see the truth. It was a night and day—literally—move from a dark and evil world to a conquered world almost in an instant (John 16:33). Jesus was there on a park bench with me, but He was also in the sky all around me and inside of me. Everything looked and felt and even sounded different.

When I went home, I just sat in my apartment staring at the walls. I had spent the whole day alone, and I didn’t completely know what had happened—everything seemed blank and simple, and I thought I was losing my mind. All of the self-hating talk in my head was gone, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Was this what “peace” was? (John 14: 27). I kept talking to God, and I went to bed with the Bible.

That day I also prayed that God would “bring it on” and do whatever He needed to do to make me useful to Him. The next day I started an introduction to Christianity class that I had signed up for weeks earlier, and I read the book of John with the Holy Spirit “unfolding” the words to me (Psalm 119:130). Every page was practically illuminated, with the truth of God’s Word coming into me as I read. I asked for forgiveness for my sins over and over again to make sure I had done it “right,” but God’s love was so real to me then that I often had trouble driving all the way to work without stopping to cry or praise or pray.

Not long after, I was sitting at work and feeling a heaviness at how unworthy I was of what Jesus had done for me (Ephesians 2:8-9), and I hung my head in despair, only to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit say distinctly and beautifully “You are clean.” God was showing Himself to me in the community of the Trinity, and I was undone that day again by His mercy, grace, and personal love for me—things I was only beginning to understand.

In the weeks that followed, I saw a number of visions and demons that confused me, but I had the new eyes of Truth and Jesus living through me. I was ready to do whatever He wanted to do through me, and seeing so many people everywhere who did not know Him became more and more painful each day. Nothing from my prior life interested me, and I only had thoughts and desires to reach others and to rid my life of anything that got in the way of sharing Jesus with them. So many adults are walking in blindness and not being targeted for evangelism—especially those in places where many fear to go or in situations that seem too difficult—and this became my passion. (Luke 1:37!!!)

I continued serving at church and started praying throughout the day for opportunities to witness to co-workers, and I studied Scripture for hours each night. I also read everything I could get my hands on about spiritual disciplines, evangelism, church revival, and especially prayer. Early on I discerned a call to ministry that was confirmed by many around me as I served, and God began to bless me with opportunities to reach those who don’t know Him daily.

God confirmed a calling to live and minister in the inner city, and He has given me a heart for immigrants and refugees—especially from the former Yugoslavia—settled in and around the city. I now live in a rough neighborhood near downtown and have been accepted for missionary service after a short-term trip to Bosnia and months of interviewing and psychological testing, but God is speaking to my heart in new ways these days as He continues to bring addicts and the homeless into my life, as well as a ministry partner, a man, who was the first to hold my hand in nearly five years.

God is renewing my mind and showing me who I am to Him and how I can live for Him in every way (Romans 12:2). I desire that His will be done however and wherever He chooses.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God  -- Romans 12:2

Had I died a physical death at my own hand, I would have remained dead in my sins, eternally separated from God, my Father. As Jesus became real to me and showed me my great need for a new life (John 3:3), He freed me from the death of living under the lie that God hated me and showed me a life lived in Him in this world and for all eternity (John 14:3).

Thank You, and God bless you!

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