A Different Path
God’s amazing power broke the chain of dysfunction and set us on a different path to live, not perfectly, but faithful to Christ.
Tresha: Let me start by saying I am not a perfect person, nor do I come from a perfect family, but I serve a perfect God.
My story began in Houston where I was born into a family of four: my mother, father, and older brother.
My parents divorced when I was two, and I was primarily raised by my mother. While my family claimed to be Christians, their lives didn’t seem to be impacted at all by their faith.
By junior high, it was apparent that my family was “messy” and not like everyone else’s. Many of you can probably relate to the fallout to other family members if you have a “messy" person in the family. I had three of them.
Don't get me wrong—my people were likable and decent, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was loved. But their lives were a mess, and their dysfunction was significant. My family was marked by severe alcoholism, poor communication skills, and more divorce and remarriage than I could count.
And yet … I knew there had to be something better out there.
By ninth grade, I began experimenting with the ways of the world, mostly because that is what my friends were doing. But I wasn’t content. In the spring of that year, I distinctly remember sitting in the bleachers at the softball field when a friend’s older brother struck up a conversation with me.
It didn’t take me long to realize there was something different about him: he had joy, peace, and confidence that my peers didn’t have. (It also didn’t hurt he was two years older and very cute!) While I didn’t understand the source of his peace and joy, I knew I wanted what he had. In actuality, I was drawn to Christ in him. He told me of his faith and his relationship with the Lord, and it was then that I trusted my life to Christ.
“I was delighted to find a God who fully knew me and understood me, who said, ‘I have called you by name, you are Mine.’ (Isaiah 43:1b)”
Students, don’t underestimate the impact you can have on your friends’ lives just by how you live out your faith and share your story. My friend did, and it changed me forever.
Without a lot of spiritual guidance, I accidentally did a few helpful things in my new walk with Christ:
I read my Bible. My agnostic friend challenged the change she saw in me. She asked me how I could claim to follow and believe the Bible when I hadn’t even read it. So I did: cover to cover, Genesis to Revelation in two years. (That is not the way I would recommend a new believer to start in the Scriptures, by the way.)
I found other believers. It helped to have other believers around me. While I still had my wild and crazy friends, I prioritized going to youth group and Young Life.
I started serving. During college and my early adult years, I became a Young Life leader, and it was there my spiritual roots really began to deepen. I guess you learn dependency when you are trying to serve students. The greatest bonus was the amazing people that served alongside me.
It was clear to me that God literally plucked me out from the path I was on and set me on a different, better path. Psalm 40:2 says, “He brought me … out of the miry clay and set my feet upon a rock and straightened my steps.” (The ESV version is this: “He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.”) I am so very grateful He did this when I was only fifteen years old.
Right before I graduated college, I met Kyle. We probably met five or six times and had no memory of it at all. So unromantic! How did I miss this six-and-half foot tall drink of water? We later dated, married, and began our family.
At one of my extended family gatherings, my cousin told Kyle, “We are so proud of how Tresha turned out.” This is really hysterical because she didn’t mean proud–she really meant shocked because the trajectory from my branch of the family was not so favorable!
But Kyle and I purposed to do some things differently than our families of origin. Engaging in ministry was one of our family values that lead us to a pivotable moment in 1999. It was then we locked arms with seven other families who had a vision for what the local church could be: a place marked by life change, a place where members were engaged by doing more than just warming a seat on Sunday morning, and a place where its people knew they were needed and necessary on this mission to share God’s hope and goodness. We felt it should be a place marked by authenticity and forgiveness and became the inception of Watermark Community Church.
Since then, I have served in children’s ministry, parenting and marriage ministry, and have recently found my place within women’s Bible study. It has given me such joy to be on mission there. Let me tell you, finding a place you can use your gifts is both life-giving and energizing.
My current story? It’s my privilege to be on this journey with you and to call CityBridge my home.
