At just 16 years old, Lacey Sturm decided she didn’t want to keep doing life anymore.
“Life was just too heavy, it was just too much for me…I was an atheist who had been through a lot of hurt, and who had been hurt by a lot of people, and was really self-centered and selfish, and all I thought about was my own pain, and I couldn’t get out of it.”
Lacey says that as an atheist, when life gets too hard, there’s really no reason to keep going.
So she planned to take her own life.
“The day I planned to commit suicide, I came home from school and was having a nervous breakdown, I think, and I remember my grandma looking at me and going…’something’s wrong with you and you have to go to church.’”
Lacey says her grandma “just knew.” She hadn’t acted any differently, and she hadn’t told anyone about her plan, but God was already working. He knew.
She went on to argue with her grandma about not going to church. Her whole life, she had distanced herself so far away from “happy Christians” who “never have any problems,” because she had been burned.
“I hated Christians,” Lacey says. “I hated people who talked about Jesus because they always seemed to be pointing their finger at me.” She says it was hateful speech that pushed her away time and time again. Hearing things like “God hates you because you do this,” and “If you do this, God’s going to send you to hell.”
My heart breaks, hearing the lies Lacey was told about not only herself, but about God, by Christians.
We serve a mighty, but merciful God. He doesn’t hate anyone. He created each one of us in his image, for His glory, not for His judgment.
When we sin, it breaks His heart. But no sin, and no amount of sin could ever separate us from the love of our Savior. He DIED to love us, and to save us from the shame that Lacey and so many others find themselves carrying.
Her grandma was persistent, and finally Lacey agreed to go sit in the church building as a means to get her grandma off of her back. She fully intended to fulfill her plan of committing suicide later that night.
The pastor that night spoke about people’s pain.
“He seemed to describe my whole life, my whole story,” Lacey says. It seemed like he was talking straight to me.”
Admittedly weirded out by how specific the sermon was, Lacey was ready to get out of there. But then, the pastor started crying. It got her attention.
“Then all of a sudden he says, ‘there’s a suicidal spirit in the room.’”
Lacey says all of the hairs stood up on her arms, and she started to kind of panic. “I’ve got to get out of here, this is weird,” she kept thinking.
“He said, “please come up. We want to we want to pray for you because God has a plan for your life. I know that you don’t understand why there’s so much pain in your heart but God made you and he made you to be to be connected with him. He made you so that he could love you and so that you could love him back and experience a life like you’ve never known before in him, just knowing that God is real and that he loves you and he has a plan for your life. Please come up and let us pray for you whoever it is that has that suicidal spirit,’ and he cried.”
Prideful, and freaked out, Lacey made a run for the door. She was not about to go stand in front of a bunch of Christians and bear all of her problems.
But God was making it difficult to leave.
When she reached the door, there was another man standing there and he had been crying. Lacey said it caught her attention because she had never seen an old man cry before.
She looked at him, and before she could take another step, the man said, “the Lord wants me to speak to you. He knows the pain in your heart. He’s seen you cry yourself to sleep at night and he died to take that pain out of your heart. He experienced it while he was on the cross so you don’t have to keep holding it there anymore.”
Completely in awe, Lacey just let him keep talking. He encouraged her in things that he could never have known.
“I felt like he loved me,” she says. “A stranger, he really loved me. He said God loves you and that’s why I love you and I want to pray for you.”
Lacey finally gave in. And as the man put his hand on her shoulder, she says it felt like the “God of the Universe showed up.”
It was through that prayer, that Lacey’s eyes were opened. She was able to see her sin. She was able to see that God was perfect, holy and loving.
Lacey says she felt God wrap her in His arms, and he told her, “I want to make you new.”
That night, she went home and went to sleep. Death lost its sting in her encounter with the Lord. She woke up, a new person. A saved soul, and a daughter of the King.
Today, Lacey is a Christian music singer/songwriter. She shares encouragements with her fans on the Facebook page, Lacey Sturm–Rock Princess Revelations. Check out more of her story below:
