COFFEE CHATS: TRUE LOVE with Tina Kadolph from Love Missions & Palate Coffee Brewery
HELLO BEAUTIFUL FRIENDS, I have my Palate coffee in hand, do you? I am so excited to hang out with you girls and chat. February is the month of love, so I thought we could talk about LOVE, true love. Let us start with my story and how I found love. Coming from a life of abuse, I had no idea what love looked like. From my perspective, love looked like hurt, pain, lies, loneliness, desperation and so much more. I had no idea who God was or that there even was a God. I had just come out of an abusive relationship that almost ended my life. After the police arrested my abuser, I was in a hopeless state. I felt I had nowhere to turn and that I was only good for one thing: being abused. That was my life; that is what I thought my identity was. I was tired, I was defeated, and I had given up. I had been through so much that I decided life was no longer worth living. I was planning my suicide when a friend invited me to a party. Maybe it would change my mind. Either that, or it would be the last thing I did before leaving this horrible life. I went to the party, but I still felt so alone. The atmosphere was not helping at all and I wondered why I had even gone. The more I sat there, the more alone I felt. I sat by myself
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and watched everyone around me seemingly having so much fun. Why couldn’t I have fun? Why couldn’t I be normal? Why was I meant to live this horrible life? I wanted desperately to be someone else, to disappear. As I sat in my loneliness, a guy I had seen around walked up to me. He asked me how I was doing, to which I replied, “Not very good,” but thinking, here we go again. He asked if I wanted to talk, but I said no. He looked at me with kind eyes and said if I ever needed help to give him a call. That was before texting, of course. I thought that there was no way in this life I would ever call him. There was not one man on this earth that I trusted. I knew he would not be any different. But as I went home that night, I looked at all the pills I had prepared before the party. I held them in my hands, and again considered taking them. In that moment I felt there was no hope, no reason to live.
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” (Psalm 147:3, ESV)
