StoryHeights’ own Pastor Teresa Brideau shares her a bit of her story and journey to freedom. Check it out below…
Nowadays it seems a lot of people view me as a “high energy” person or “always happy”. When I hear things like, “Teresa, do you ever have a bad day?”, I laugh and tell them I appreciate the way they see me. I also let them know it’s taken a while and some (a lot of) work to see things from a positive perspective. I still have challenging days, but even then, I have a whole different way of looking at challenges in my life. I now see them more as opportunities to grow, rather than from a defeated place of wanting to stop trying.
In my childhood years, I grew up Catholic and had a lot of religious teaching that was ingrained in my belief system, even if we didn’t always practice those beliefs. I did have a catholic grandmother, though, who was a “born again” Christian and always shared with me her stories about Jesus in her life. Well, as a large catholic family (8 of us), we would do a lot of things together — including never missing a Sunday service unless we were dying! At the same time, we used to dabble in very un-Catholic things like Ouija boards, seances and other seemingly harmless “games.” One time we were all doing the seance thing and we were going to pick up my dad using only two fingers each. At the end of the chanting, we were lifting him up! Ahhhhhh!! That scared all of us! We dropped him and never did anything like that again!
When I got saved in 1982, and began reading the Bible, I found so many things in there that mentioned the soul of man. I knew I gave my life to Christ, but didn’t have any mentoring, so found myself in a legalistic church that didn’t talk about the grace of God. His grace is my point of this whole Freedom story. Without His grace, I would not be able to tell you that Jesus freed me from a tormented, addicted, suicidal, betrayed, deceived and battered soul. I learned that everything in my past was still hanging out in my soul (mind, will, emotions) until I dealt with it and allowed Holy Spirit to help me. There is a Scripture that says we are to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. It is a process that can seem pretty intense at times. But it is worth every effort! His grace allows any of us who believe Him at His Word, that He heals, delivers and restores our souls to a joyful, peaceful and trusting place, even better than before! There is nothing like this kind of freedom!!
I would encourage and invite those who really want to break free from their past hurts to join the Freedom Grow Group, where you will be in a safe and encouraging environment. You were created to live free and abundantly!
