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Hello, my name is Joel Barrientos
I am 28 years old
and since my early years
God started to do very important things
I want to share with you that when I was
two years old
I was sexually abused by my cousins
they were teenagers, and I was a child
I didn´t
know this until years later
Throughout my childhood
I started to develop
female behaviors
with which I identified.
In my life
I didn´t have a father.
My mother told me all the time that I was the product of ***
and she
in some form
reflected in me all the hate and pain she held for my
father at this time.
As my life went on
I had
situations that destroyed my heart
when I was seven years old in school,
in third grade,
my art teacher
sexually abused me
and this was one of the things that
split my life in two
Because I didn’t have a father to share it with, because I didn’t have a mother with
who I could talk to about it,
I had to
I had to confront the situation alone. I had to
take a break in my life
to become
a responsible being at an age when I didn´t have the capacity to be one.
I remember when I went to
the school, to the director
and I told him a little of my story, they said ¨Don’t tell anyone about this
we are going to handle it.¨
That “don’t tell anyone about it”
was getting stronger inside me
Fifteen years later nobody knew of the situation.
Throughout
my life
my mom was not there to confront the pain with me.
She had enough problems
which caused her
to be focused on herself all the time.
I was the oldest son
of five siblings
in a totally
disfunctional family
where my step father was an agressive man
compulsive
not only physically, but psychologically.
He used to come
at night and when he came to the house we would run under the beds
because a lot of times he hit my mom in front of us
and as the oldest child I had to face the situation
without knowing how to do it.
In my life
God basically started calling me since I was
eleven years old
but I didn´t know how to come to him
I encountered
pain
on a *** and relational level.
An experience that marked my life was
seeing my mother crying
in a moment of rage
and saying words that destroyed my life
like ¨damned ***¨
¨why didn´t they let you die¨
and all the pain that she had
she reflected it on me.
Here
I was alone
I didn´t have a father. I didn´t have
uncles
I was the oldest
and I didn´t have anyone that would have came to defend me.
At eleven years old, God started to give me an invitation to come to Him.
In this invitation
He had
a gift for me, but I didn´t know how
to describe this gift, it was the gift of His love.
My model of a father didn’t exist, so I couldn´t see God as a father
In my life all that had to do with a father was hopeless
The only thing that I knew was that he had never been with me
that he had never cared for me, that he had never protected me,
that he had never went
to the school for me,
that he had never given me the love that we need.
I came to Jesus
at eleven years old and there
all my life started to change
I joined a Christian church and started to know a little about who God is
but even so, I was missing something in my heart
At 15 years old
while part of a large community
in Medellín
I had a homosexual experience with a leader
with the associate pastor of the church.
It destroyed my heart and my being
I started to realize
that Christianity lost
all sense to me
I didn´t have anywhere to go
when
I started to look for help
the only thing people offered was liberation
they wanted to liberate me from demons
they wanted
to do shock therapy, they wanted to force me
and all they looked for was
to not feel uncomfortable
with my feminine attitude in front of
acquaintances or social gatherings
at church.
I was feminine
and I didn´t understand why.
I never
thought that I would be gay
and I started to generate attraction for the same gender
and that started to confuse me
after this experience with
the leader, the associate pastor
the situation worsened in me, and I had no hope.
When I was eighteen years old
having
walked
about seven years in a Christianity,
I thought death was the
solution to my feelings
and I tried to kill myself. Here
you can see
some
cuts
and I said
I didn´t have anywhere else to go
On that path God came
again
through a person that loved me since I was eleven years old, a leader of another
church
and this person started to look for help for me
after ministering to me without results
he offered me money so that
I would look, he offered to pay for
a boys´school.
In Medellin there are no boys´schools, in Colombia there are no
boys´schools
but neither are there fathers ready
to support
their sons,
nor fathers that want to walk with their sons
on the road to masculinity.
Today I can say that I am part
of a kingdom much bigger.
It is the kingdom where there is a loving Father
that tells me
that He wants to bring hope and life
for the victims
of whips that
destroy the soul
and as they destroy the soul they become part of the destruction of the body
I can understand the parable of the Prodigal Son much better now.
Before
finishing my testimony
I want to share something that God has done these past few years.
I didn´t have the oppurtunity to know my father
I was the victim
of *** abuse
not only me
but my mother as well.
She felt violated by my father
and as a result this made her distance herself
and I remained in the middle
thinking my father is an abuser
my mother is a victim
and I identified so much with my mom
that I ended up hating my own gender
because of the hate towards my father.
In 2000...
2008
God did something marvelous.
God dealt with my heart in an unforgettable way
... and so
while on
vacation
from the company where I worked I met
my father
in a miraculous way
At 9 o´clock at night I was in a place
in Antioquia
where I had always wanted to go, there
at the same time
the person that helped me find a hotel
received a call
from a man
that was a friend of his
this person was a cousin of mine
and this man
had a good relationship with my father.
Without knowing it
I was in the same place
as my cousin and he was talking to my father.
At that time
certain information was exchanged
which resulted in
a supervised meeting
with my father.
After being in years of therapy for forgiveness
from a paternal wound
from healing the aftermath
rather than
leave the damage
for the first time I could see him face to face
and say that I forgave him and I loved him, that
Jesus
healed me
that God loved me and because of that love I could love him.
We came together
through forgiveness
It was not easy and the relationship is under construction
but from that moment
I not only knew a Heavenly Father
but now I have an earthly father
and my realtionship with him is much better
not only with God, but with my earthly father.
We can say that it is being built better
year after year
and since then I stopped being
a victim of *** abuse.
In that moment I understood that my identity,
which the Heavenly Father gave me,
became much stronger,
much stronger.
I started to understand myself as a beloved son
of God
and as
beloved son of a father that looked for me
without knowing about me.
Since then, I am no longer the victim of *** abuse
I am no longer the victim
of the
wounds from others.
Now I am
a messanger of hope,
repairer of hurts.
Now I testify
as a WOUNDED HEALER and as
a FREED LIBERATOR...