DIANA’S GRACE STORY

I was raised in a typical Catholic Latin family where emotions other than happiness were not to be shown, emotional strength was a must to survive, and Sundays were a national event where you dressed to impress. I went to Sunday school since I was six-years-old, completed my First Communion and Confirmation, was an altar server, and even somehow helped with children's ministry at the age of thirteen.

It wasn’t until I struggled with my mental health when I was fourteen that I realized all of the strength I had been taught to have was actually never there. I felt alone and had nowhere else to go other than on my knees to beg for help from a God I’d been serving my whole life at church but never knew. 

When I was twenty-three, a week before studying abroad in South Korea, I found myself filled with doubt of my own strength once again. I had reached my boiling point and found myself under my own broom tree. I realized the God I’d been serving and the God I‘d been praying to was based on a need for a quick emotional fix and not based on sustainable truth. 

Little did I know that in a church filled with other international students, thousands of miles away, that I’d meet my Heavenly Father.

After coming back to the States, I agreed to go to a Bible study that I had been invited to by a classmate at AU the year before. Pastor Moses, Rachel, and those at that Bible study quickly became my own little family on campus. They answered questions I had about Christianity, helped me learn how to read the Bible, and offered an ear when I was weary. Most importantly, they offered a daughter of immigrants a perspective of a just and loving Son that is there for the sojourner, widow, fatherless, and oppressed.

Almost three years later, I am more than honored to be part of this church plant and able to help others know they are loved, known, and accepted by a good and gracious God even though the world, or even churches, have told them otherwise.