My Story: How Jesus Transformed My Life

My Christian Testimony

My name is Belinda. Online, I’m known as Bible with Belle, where I share encouragement to seek God, grow in faith, and understand His Word.

Bible With Belle was born out of my own journey with God. After everything I had experienced in my life, I began searching for answers. I wanted to know who God really was, whether He was real, and whether He could truly see what I had been through.

Today, my life is centred around Jesus Christ. I am currently studying a Bachelor of Theology at Alphacrucis University College, with the hope of continuing my studies further and eventually becoming a theologian. I want to spend my life learning God’s Word, growing in my understanding of Scripture, and helping other people find the truth, hope, and encouragement that I have found in Him.

Why I Created Bible With Belle

Alongside my studies, I created Bible With Belle as a place where people can come with their questions about God, the Bible, faith, and life. I know what it is like to be searching for answers, especially when you are going through something difficult, and I want this website to point people back to Scripture and to Jesus.

A large part of why I feel so strongly about this comes from my own testimony.

Why I Am Sharing My Testimony

I am sharing my full testimony of how Jesus Christ saved me from decades of abuse.

I’m sharing it for three reasons. Abuse happens far more often than most people realise, and I know there are people who will recognise parts of their own story in mine. Most importantly, I want people to know that God is real, He sees suffering, and He is able to bring freedom, healing and hope.

When you are living in abuse, it is very easy to believe that God is distant, or that He doesn’t care about what is happening to you. I believed that for a long time. But I now know that God sees everything. He cares deeply, even when we cannot understand why He allows certain things to happen, and He can bring a person out of even the darkest circumstances.

A Note on Privacy and Truth

This testimony is my lived experience.

Because my story involves other people, I have taken care to protect their privacy. I do not use real names or unnecessary identifying details. Where I have documentation to support events, I state that clearly. Where I do not, I am sharing my own memories and experiences, while acknowledging that other people may have different recollections of what happened.

Since coming to faith in Jesus Christ, my life has been fully dedicated to God and to truth. I would never lie about what happened to me. What I share here is honest and prayerful, and I am sharing it because I believe my story can glorify God and perhaps give hope to someone else who has spent years suffering in silence.

Growing Up in Abuse

I grew up in a deeply dysfunctional and abusive home. There was addiction, violence, neglect, emotional cruelty and manipulation. The most serious abuse I suffered was sexual abuse by my father, beginning in early childhood and continuing for many years. To my knowledge, my mother was aware of this abuse and helped conceal it.

Alongside this, I experienced ongoing emotional, psychological and physical abuse, particularly from my mother. From a young age, I was silenced, intimidated and conditioned to believe that speaking up would only bring more harm.

This grooming and intimidation followed me into adulthood. Abuse was hidden behind public appearances, while privately it continued unchecked.

Like many survivors, I stayed silent for decades. It wasn’t because the abuse wasn’t serious. It was because fear, manipulation and conditioning can have a powerful effect on a child, particularly when the people who are supposed to protect them are the people causing the harm.

When No One Protects the Child

One of the hardest truths I’ve learned is that many victims end up protecting themselves because no one else will.

I experienced moments as a child where my behaviour changed drastically. Looking back now, there were clear warning signs that something was wrong, yet those signs were ignored or explained away.

This is something I feel strongly about because children don’t always have the words to explain what is happening to them. Sometimes their behaviour is the only way they know how to communicate that something is wrong.

If you ever see a child suddenly change, become withdrawn, frightened, angry or behave in ways that seem completely out of character, please don’t automatically dismiss it as bad behaviour. Sometimes there is something happening underneath that needs to be understood.

Sometimes the danger isn’t outside the home.

It is the home.

When the Lies About Me Became Part of the Abuse

The False Stories My Abusers Planted About Me

Another part of my experience that is important to explain is what happened to my reputation and relationships.

Throughout my life, my abusers told other people false stories about me. They told people how much they had supposedly done for me, how much they had supposedly helped me, and how badly I had supposedly treated them. These stories were not true and did not match what was actually happening to me.

They did this not only with family members, but also with my friends and partners.

This is a common tactic used by abusers. They tell people around the victim false stories so those people will believe that the victim is the problem. They can make themselves look like the caring person while making the victim look difficult, ungrateful, unstable or cruel.

How I Was Isolated By My Abusers

The purpose of doing this is to turn people against the victim. If people believe the abuser’s stories, they are less likely to believe the victim, listen to them, or help them when they speak about the abuse.

It can also leave the victim completely isolated because the people around them have already been given a false story about who they are.

This happened to me.

I wasn’t only dealing with the abuse itself. I was also dealing with the false version of me that my abusers had created for other people to believe.

That made it much harder to be believed, supported or understood, and it made the abuse even more isolating.

My Abusers Tried To Frame as Mentally Ill

My abusers also tried to frame me as having approximately eleven different mental illnesses in an attempt to hide their abuse and make people question me rather than listen to me.

This is a common tactic used by abusers. They try to convince other people that the victim is mentally ill, unstable or the problem, so that when the victim speaks about the abuse, they are less likely to be believed.

It got to the point where multiple psychiatrists assessed me and verified that I have Complex PTSD from childhood trauma, with genuine symptoms resulting from childhood sexual abuse. They also verified I do not suffer from any of the mental illnesses they were trying to frame me with.

Having false stories planted about me, being framed for different mental illnesses, and being deliberately isolated from family members and friends are very common tactics used by abusers to hide their crimes, most victims of childhood sexual abuse go through these types of further abuse.

Evidence, Records and Speaking the Truth

As an adult, I went through the proper channels to obtain my childhood records. These include documentation of:

• Being removed from my home and placed into foster care due to abuse
• Social workers determining that my parents were unsafe and unfit
• Emancipation as a minor due to extreme circumstances
• Reports made to child safety by third parties
• Records supporting that I fled my father’s home due to abuse

Like many survivors of historic childhood abuse, I did not see the kind of justice that I would have hoped for. Criminal charges and convictions are difficult in historic abuse cases, particularly when so much time has passed and the victim was a child who was never protected in the first place.

A lack of criminal conviction does not mean that abuse did not happen.

Truth does not stop being truth because justice systems fail.

For many years, I carried the belief that I needed other people to acknowledge what happened before I could move forward. Eventually, I realised that I could speak the truth about my own experience without allowing other people’s denial or opinions to control my life.

When I Finally Turned to God

I had always known of God. But I did not know Him.

After decades of abuse and overwhelming anxiety, I reached a point where I could no longer live the way I was living. I began crying out to God, not just once, but daily. I started praying every day and reading the Bible, even when I didn’t feel anything.

For months, there was silence.

But I kept seeking Him.

I wasn’t just asking God to fix my circumstances, I wanted to know Him. I wanted to understand whether He was really there and whether He really cared about me.

Scripture says:

“And you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
Jeremiah 29:13

I kept coming back to God, even when I didn’t understand what He was doing. Slowly, something began to change.

God Answered Me

There came a point where I was so overwhelmed by the anxiety from being around my family and everything I had experienced that I knew I couldn’t keep living the way I had been living.

The Prayer I Prayed

I prayed to God and told Him that I couldn’t live with the anxiety anymore. I asked Him to come into my life, to free me from the abuse and the anxiety, and to change my life. I told Him that I believed in Him, that I believed in Jesus Christ, that I believed Jesus died for my sins, and that I needed Him to save me.

The difference this time was that I didn’t just pray once and then go back to my life. I genuinely wanted to know God. I started praying every day and reading the Bible every day, even if it was only for five minutes. For months, I felt like I wasn’t hearing anything. I didn’t know if God was listening to me at all, but I kept going because I wanted a relationship with Him.

When God Answered My Prayer

During this time, I was also seeing a psychologist because I was desperate for the anxiety to stop. Unfortunately, after I told this person about the abuse I had experienced and how I had been groomed, they took advantage of my vulnerability and asked me to have an affair with them. I became caught up in the situation and was willing to do it, which I now look back on with a lot of regret.

The day the affair was meant to begin, I prayed to God about it. I said, “If this person is not good for me, show me. Please show me.”

When I met that person that day, their behaviour was completely different from what I had previously experienced. I found their behaviour deeply disturbing and, in my own words at the time, I could only describe it as evil. I remember sitting there in shock, but what shocked me most wasn’t even how they were behaving. It was the realisation that I had just asked God to show me if this person was not good for me, and I believed He had answered me.

That was the last time I saw that person.

I later reported what had happened to the appropriate authorities. During that process, I also learned that another woman had previously made a complaint of the same nature about that person, describing the same kind of behaviour, wording and body language that I had described.

That night, I broke down crying.

The Message I Saw

I had been praying and reading the Bible for months, wondering whether God was actually hearing me. And suddenly I was sitting there thinking, God heard me. God answered me, God is real.

It was difficult to even process. I remember thinking about how enormous that was. If God was real and He had actually heard my prayer, what did that mean for my life?

I sat there trying to take it all in, and then I opened my phone.

I didn’t open an app or intentionally start a video. A video simply began playing on my phone. It was a video of a man in his thirties crying, and the message was about having seen all the suffering I had been through, loving me, always being there, caring about my suffering, and telling me that I was chosen and always had been.

I want to be very careful about how I describe this because I know there are different ways someone could interpret what happened. It could have been a glitch. Someone could call it a coincidence. I cannot prove to another person that it was a supernatural event.

But I believe God made a way for me to see that message.

What made it even stranger was that I couldn’t save the video or replay it afterwards. It was simply there in that moment, when I had just been sitting there crying because I believed God had answered my prayer.

I believe that message was from God, and I believe I was meant to see it that day.

That was the moment my faith became something very personal to me. I wasn’t just someone who believed there was a God. I believed that God had heard me personally.

How God Continues to Speak to Me

And since then, I have continued to experience God speaking to me in many different ways—not necessarily through experiences like that, but through the words of the Bible, through other Christians, through circumstances, through things that happen in my life, and through the way Scripture speaks into situations I am facing.

The Bible has become something I can turn to when I don’t know what to do. When I feel alone, I can go back to God’s Word and remember His promises. If I am afraid, I can read what Scripture says about fear. When I don’t know which way to go, I can pray and seek Him.

That is why I believe seeking God matters.

When I was younger, I would sometimes pray for God to help me, but I wasn’t really seeking a relationship with Him. I would pray, wait for everything to change immediately, and then feel disappointed when it didn’t.

This time was different.

I kept praying, I kept reading the Bible and I kept seeking God even when I felt like He wasn’t answering.

And over time, I began to know Him.

Finding the Strength to Speak

As I grew in my relationship with God, something changed in me.

For the first time in my life, I began to find strength that didn’t come from fear or simply surviving. I found the courage to speak up about what had happened to me and to confront things I had spent years trying to bury.

I stepped out of the silence.

That strength did not come from pretending the past didn’t happen. It came from knowing that what happened to me was not going to determine the rest of my life.

I believe God gave me the strength to finally speak.

Forgiveness, Freedom and Faith

Forgiveness has also been a part of my journey.

I choose to forgive my abusers—not because what they did was acceptable, and not because forgiveness means pretending that what happened didn’t matter. It doesn’t. What happened was wrong, and it will always be wrong.

For me, forgiveness means choosing not to allow hatred and bitterness to continue owning my life. I have entrusted justice to God and chosen to follow what Jesus taught about forgiveness.

Forgiveness also does not mean allowing people who have harmed you back into your life or removing boundaries that are necessary for your safety.

I can forgive and still acknowledge the truth about what happened.

I can forgive and still believe that what was done was evil.

I can forgive without forgetting.

Most importantly, I don’t want my life to remain defined by what other people did to me.

I do not carry hatred. I carry clarity.

I do not want to live in fear. I want to live in truth.

I do not belong to my past.

I belong to Christ.

Jesus did not erase my story—He redeemed it.

Why I Created Bible With Belle

My journey is a large part of why I created Bible With Belle.

I know what it is like to search for God when you are hurting. I know what it is like to have questions that you don’t know how to answer and to wonder whether God is really listening.

As I began reading Scripture and growing in my relationship with Jesus, I realised how much there is in the Bible that speaks directly into the things people struggle with every day.

That is what I want Bible With Belle to be about.

I want to share God’s Word and help people understand what Scripture says about real questions and real situations. Whether someone is struggling with fear, grief, forgiveness, suffering, sin, purpose, relationships, or simply trying to understand who Jesus is, I want them to be able to come here and find something that points them back to the Bible.

I don’t have everything figured out, and I don’t believe anyone ever stops learning when it comes to God’s Word.

That’s one of the reasons I chose to study theology.

My Theological Journey

I am currently studying a Bachelor of Theology at Alphacrucis University College.

I hope to continue my education beyond my undergraduate degree and pursue further study in theology, with the long-term goal of becoming a theologian.

For me, studying theology isn’t about collecting qualifications. It is about wanting to understand God and His Word more deeply and learning how to handle Scripture carefully and responsibly.

The more I study, the more I realise how much there is still to learn.

That is something I am grateful for.

Bible With Belle will continue to grow alongside me as I learn. My hope is that what I study will not simply stay in a classroom, but will help me communicate biblical truth more carefully and help others grow in their own relationship with God.

Is This Your Story Too?

If you are suffering, I want you to know that you are not alone.

If you feel unseen, God sees you.

When you feel forgotten, know that God has not forgotten you.

If you have been silenced, what happened to you matters.

And if you are searching for God, keep seeking Him.

The Bible tells us:

“The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”
Psalm 34:18

I cannot promise that following Jesus means everything will suddenly become easy. I cannot promise that healing always happens quickly or that God will answer every prayer in the way we hope.

But I can share what I have learned through my own life.

God sees us.

He hears us.

God cares.

And our past does not have to be the end of our story.

My Full Testimony

If my testimony encourages you, please consider sharing it with someone who may be suffering in silence. You never know what someone else is carrying or how much they may need to hear that there is still hope.

My story is not a story about having an easy life, it is a story about what God has done with a life that was deeply broken.

And that is why I am here.

To keep seeking Him, to keep learning His Word, and to point others toward Jesus Christ.