Pain has a way of bringing even the strongest person physically, spiritually and emotional to their knees. It happens without notice and usually without direction of just what to do next. We all wish we knew the blueprint or the strategy.

Well here it is…get up again!

I know that sounds a lot simpler than it is to implement but hear me out. Our strength comes from when we get up after we have been knocked down by life’s circumstances. Oh, and the knock down may happen one after another but we are able to rise up.

At times we will need support and that support starts with us. I vividly remember moments when I allowed tears to just fall when I had been knocked down by divorce, molestation, homelessness. Sometimes they were the only words that could form.

When I read Lucy’s story I felt the blow from each ouch she received. It made me think about the blows that I have had myself. As you read her story know that it is okay to cry…it is okay to empathize with her pain. Be sure to read til the end so you can take part in her joy as well.

Here is Lucy’s story:

The first time that I remember my head being thrown into a window I was five years old.

Even though there were many times of happiness in my childhood there were just as many bad times. When I was fourteen years old my twenty-six-year-old brother stripped my clothes off of me and beat my head to toe with a wire clothes hanger. I was only sent to lay in my bed and attempt to heal while being told that he was my brother and I must have needed the beating.

I was taught that abuse was ok. I was taught that love hurt. I remember the fly swatters in the face, being beaten bloody with an extension cord and so much more. As a teenager, I suddenly was forced to conquer cervical cancer, and within my life, I did so twice.

I thanked God that I never had to endure chemo, and surgery removed all of the cells, but it damaged my cervix to unrepair. Eventually, I became hard and almost unable to love anyone with a fear of being treated as I had as a child. Eventually, I began to date a “boy” who began to abuse me also and when I was able to finally find the courage to break up with him, I met a man who I thought hung the moon.

He was handsome, exciting, intriguing, and something about him overcame me and my thoughts. I fell madly in love and soon we were married. There were times he was considered abusive but the first time he beat me was the night that we got married.

 Before long, I had lost myself in the abuse and even more when we were expecting our daughter and he beat me so severely one night that he beat me into labor and our daughter died. I had no idea who I was from that moment on. I allowed him to use me as a punching bag and a doormat because I believed that abuse was love.

I struggled hard but through all of this, I refused to lose my faith.

I begged God for help, I begged him to take my pain away. But before I knew it, I was holding our precious son as I watched him pass away in my arms. Before I knew it, I fell into addiction so hard that I had no idea how to crawl my way out.

Suddenly I suffered an overdose and to this day I actually thank God for it. He allowed me to have a vision of where I was headed and that was Hell. Whether it was a hallucination or a dream it was real to me and changed my life forever. Before long I gave my heart back to God and when My husband beat me with a golf club and I made it out with my life I finally decided that I had chosen to live life through all of the trauma I was forced to live through and I made a choice to live!

I left him for good even though through trauma bonding it was actually hard to accept the end of the relationship. Soon God answered all of my prayers and he sent me an amazing husband who has never laid his hands on me in anger, and after four miscarriages, and the hardest pregnancy EVER, he blessed me with a living son.

Life was great but I miscarried again and through that miscarriage, we discovered it had been twins. I carried my youngest son until one night I accidentally went into labor in my bathroom and before I could make it to the hospital, I delivered my son all alone in the bathroom and he was stillborn.

My life became even more traumatizing after that, and I admit it was harder than ever before. The death of my youngest son, the way that he died landed me with many mental illnesses. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, depression, PTSD, and bipolar disorder.  Learning to accept, treat, and live with these disorders was torcher with all that I had dealt with previously.

I struggled even harder with my faith when one day I made a choice.

I decided to CHOOSE happiness, love, joy, and most importantly LIFE! I choose to get out of the bed every morning, I choose to laugh. I choose to live life. And I choose to live with the trauma and mental illnesses that I have. I have made a choice to go on with my life and I choose to acknowledge the beauty that surrounds me, it is the sky, the stars, my living son, my loving husband, or whatever it is in my sight daily. I choose to allow God to give me the strength and ability to live life and move forward with all that I have been dealt with.

I discovered that my pain was helping others in their pain and I realized that my story is all for a purpose. To help God change the world with what I have been forced to live through. I use my story to uplift, encourage, and empower others and I have the honor and the blessing of helping others see that they can make it. And that they too have the strength to keep going when they feel that they don’t have a voice or the strength to crawl.

Lucy Irving is a woman on a mission to give a voice to other’s that feel that they don’t have one. She is the author of the true story “My Cry to God” She is a survivor of child and spousal abuse, the death’s of three of her children, five miscarriages, cervical cancer twice, addiction, mental health and so much more. She show’s other’s that they have a choice to have happiness after trauma, and that no matter the struggles, we all have the strength deep inside of us to keep going!

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