Digging In: An HGBM Contributing Author Spotlight

Last week, we talked about using what you’ve been given—and what it looks like to actually take the next step.

This week, we’re taking that a little deeper.

Because using your gifts doesn’t just start when you decide to use them. There’s a process behind it. A shaping that happens long before anything is visible on the surface.

One of our contributing authors, Terra Kern, shares a perspective that gets to the heart of that process—what’s happening behind the scenes, and how even the hardest parts of life are connected to what God is doing in and through you.

The Backend Connection

(Part One)

By HGBM Contributing Author, Terra Kern

Gifts. Everyone has at least one. While God intricately weaves us together in our mother’s womb, He uses genetics from previous generations and interlaces them creatively to make us who we are with certain natural talents, abilities, gifts. Those specific things that are just innate within us. Those things that don’t take a whole lot of developing — they’re just there.

It’s not very difficult, with me being an author, to guess that one of mine is the gift of writing. When God was weaving me together, He had already determined that I would be a wordsmith. From the time I learned how to write, I began penning stories. I loved to do it. It was fun. It was entertaining. And as I grew, the talent naturally developed. But God gave me that gift for more than merely having fun and entertainment. He gave it to me with a more specific purpose in Him — for His purpose. However, that greater purpose wouldn’t be revealed until I was mature enough in my walk with Him to handle it, until I was developed, so to speak.

Hardship. Nobody likes hardship. Hardships are not fun and entertaining. Hardships hurt. Therefore, it’s never included in daily morning prayers. No one prays and asks God for days, let alone months, and most certainly not years of hardship. However, hardship is the backend connection to our God-given gifts growing. Hardship is what produces the oil of anointing upon them, produces the faith and trust in Him to use those gifts to uplift, encourage, and edify others and to give Him glory.

We’ll use my life as a case study to bring forth understanding. At an early age, my parents were divorced. I was soon after taken away from my mother, brother, and sister and by default, my mother’s side of the family. I was forced to live with my father and his new wife and then later forced to be adopted by her. Sure, I was included in some family functions with my mom and siblings, but never without feelings of being an outsider. Hearing of all of the fun my siblings had with them while being excluded from them hurt so deeply.

My adoptive mother turned out to be verbally abusive toward me, cutting me down and belittling me every chance she got within our home, in front of our neighbors, her family, her friends, my friends, and the parents of my friends. She also was physically abusive leaving bruises, welts, and fat lips within her wake which I hid from everyone due to the shame of being guilty of every no-good thing she spoke over me. My father didn’t like it, however he never stood up for me, but instead would clandestinely come to me, apologize, and promise me anything I wanted that money could buy to make me feel better — basically a payoff. He rarely stood up for me and never stopped it from happening in the first place. Therefore, slowly through the years, bit by bit, all self-worth within me was destroyed replaced by a self-hate I wasn’t even conscious of.

I was able to survive by pushing it down deep, so deep, that I rarely would think of or speak of it. On the rare occasions that I did, I was overtaken with such pain and agony that tears would flow, tears I couldn’t stop for sometimes hours at a time. I then would push the thoughts and memories down even deeper and even learned how to compartmentalize all of those heart wrenching memories, keeping those drawers on lock-down. I grew to be quite the expert at it and because of that, was able to move on as the great pretender that I was just fine. I ultimately even believed it. I eventually got married, had children, and portrayed my life as one with some semblance of normalcy for years. And of course, I had God, my Father, my Friend, my Savior, and the lover of my soul.

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What Terra describes here isn’t easy to read—and it wasn’t easy to live.

But this is where the real shift begins.

Because what’s buried doesn’t stay buried forever. And when God starts bringing those things to the surface, it’s not to harm you—it’s to heal you.

We’ll pick up there in Part 2 later this week.