Daughters of the King

Daughters of the King By Mina R Raulston 7/11/2016

I first came to know Jesus as a little girl going to church with my parents. When my mother’s mental illness caused my parents to leave church and God when I was eight years old, I refused to leave. Through the years God has always provided me a means to attend church and continue to grow in my relationship with him. My childhood was very unhappy due to my mother’s mental illness and affected how she treated me for the rest of my life. That drove me to seek out God even more and I began studying his word as soon as I was able to read his word even though it took many years for me to understand much of it.

I spent many years being made fun of and ridiculed for a variety of reasons from my physical appearance to my intelligence to my personality. My mother taught me to fear men and distrust everyone. As hard as I tried to ignore her teaching, some of her lessons managed to embed themselves in my being and I reached adulthood with very low self-esteem, strong insecurity, and few social skills. By the time I was 19 all my friends were either married, in college and or in the military, and I was stuck at home in a part-time job. Despite my attempts to overcome the loneliness, I was not successful.

As a little girl, one of my earliest prayers to God were for a godly husband and a godly home since my family had turned from God.  When I met my husband in church and married a few months later I thought that my prayer had been answered. Over the next 14 years, I learned just how wrong I was. I finally had to face the fact my marriage was abusive and my husband had deceived me from the very beginning. I divorced and tried to begin building a new life for me and my children.

For the next four years I was a post-traumatic mess, suffering from panic attacks, hypervigilance, terror, confusion, loneliness, and isolation. At the end of that time, I was finally able to receive God’s healing and deliverance. I began writing, first about domestic violence and over time about a variety of subjects until I self-published my first book, Home Should Be Safe: Hope and Help for Domestic Violence Victims. This book explained the facts about domestic violence and how to help those trapped in it. In addition, I speak to interested groups on the subject of domestic violence.

Currently, I am writing a companion book, Roadmap to Healing. In this book, I explain chapter by chapter how survivors can move beyond initial escape and survival to find total healing and deliverance through Jesus Christ. Only then can they truly build a brand new life founded on the salvation, healing and deliverance of Jesus and built with the guidance of the Word of God. Too many survivors repeat the cycle of violence, or if they remain free they live as one who remains broken. God doesn’t intend his children to remain broken when he offers healing and deliverance.

Healing and deliverance are a process, not an event. While I am writing and promoting this second book I will be posting blog entries related to the process of healing.

The first important lesson is for each survivor to know who they are in Christ. Check out the next blog entry for that lesson.