Assuming that God was indifferent towards her after all that she'd been through, a former porn actress named Alia was astounded to discover that God wanted nothing from her but wanted everything for her.
"The enemy tells me every time I share my story, that I will be rejected," Alia shared in a 2020 article for XXX Church.
In her testimony, which she also shared with Brittni De La Mora in the Let's Talk Purity podcast, Alia said that now, she gets her value from what Jesus thinks and says about her.
"He has given me the gift of walking into each new opportunity and taking that risk of being rejected. That risk is there, it is real. But the Lord's unparalleled approval and acceptance are greater than any rejection," she asserted.
Her Bitter Beginnings
As a little girl, her perception of herself was that she was worthless even for the moments when she was sexually abused. She felt unappreciated, unloved, and unvalued as a kid. That she was merely inconvenient, disposable, and interchangeable. She received attention only when adults complimented her on her beauty or when her abuser shared how well she performed during her exploitation.
Her core was rife with a sense of otherness. This sensation tied her to trauma and the enemy's lies far beyond the length of her abuse. As a teenager, she places herself in positions that perpetuate this victimization pattern. Her self-esteem was completely reliant on what her abusers thought about her.
As a young woman, she found the sex film industry more supportive of her individuality. Beauty and value blossomed in the entertainment industry she was raised in. She says of her early acting days that they included hanging out during a shoot with the rest of the "talent" and team and wondering if this was what being in a family was like. She realized for the first time that she had the power to choose for herself over what happened to her body.
Re-discovering Love
On Easter 2013, she was first taken to church by a friend who operated an adult film production business. She was indifferent to God, and she supposed that he was indifferent to her too.
"I had no anger towards him, and I blamed him for nothing," she recalled. "I understood there were so many who were worse off far more deserving of his love. My understanding that Jesus died for my sin was a proclamation of guilt, not a demonstration of immeasurable love. This one encounter with the cross set into motion a series of events that would eventually lead me to freedom."
"That Easter, the Holy Spirit exposed a piece of herself I had boxed up with my childhood dreams, the idea that there could be something better, something more," she said.
"What I saw in the families of the pastoral team at this church destroyed my world view. I saw families that loved each other, men that valued their wives, daughters, and other women simply because they existed simply because the Lord created them to love and be loved. Christ loved them as he loved me. I was exposed to love," she added.
She was both angry and offended. For the next three years, she ventured further into the industry, allowing herself to stray beyond all boundaries in the hopes that she could heal in the process.
She was prepared to die by New Year's 2017. She was alone, heartbroken, and desperate. This urgency compelled her to agree to do whatever Christ desired of her. Afterwards, she finally understood he was offering everything to her, and that his motivation is pure love.
"What Jesus offered needed only to be taken once," she said. "Staying in Godly boundaries for our lives may take daily, sometimes hourly, work as we unlearn destructive or worldly habits, but his one-time gift of grace is sufficient to cover every failing."
Reclaiming her identity in Christ
"You know it's so hard to recognize your identity in Christ when you didn't grow up with Christ," Alia told host Britnni De La Mora in an interview for "Let's Talk Purity." She said that this is the reason why many settle with abusive relationships and circumstances.
"So, my last six months to a year in the industry, I was really disenchanted with it. I've been in it for so long that I just, I could see it for what it was," she said.
Since breaking up her then-partner, she recalled a location where a friend who quit the business in 2012 went that was expressly designed to assist women in healing, following Christ, and exiting the industry. As a result, she traveled to this location in Chicago.
The women there prayed for her and over her.
"And so as (they) were praying over me, I physically felt that the water's coming over my face, over my head down into my body and I felt myself coming back up for air, and I had this woman... The Lord that everybody's been looking for. All of the answers are in Scripture and it's all real!" she detailed.
"And I remember asking them like 'I need a journal because I need to write this stuff down that's going on in my head right now.' And I still have that journal and it's something along the lines of, 'I feel like I'm out of my mind.' But I believe all of that, all of those things I've been hearing. It's all true," she added.
She equated her conversion experience to that of the Samaritan woman at the well who met Jesus.
"It was absolutely the Lord being 'like we need to catch up so that you have an understanding so that you can reach your hand out to the next girls that are coming out.' That is so beautiful," she continued.
The following years, she listened and learned from other women who had been walking with Jesus for a long time.
On the process of healing, she said: "I just don't believe that it's possible to find the healing from the sexual trauma that we've gone through when you're trying to live your sexuality out in the way that the world is telling you is healthy. Because our ideas of those things have been so distorted. We can't come into the middle; we have to go into the fullness of what God has told us."
Alia explained that much like Jesus did not cure anyone instantly in the Bible narrative, he did not heal her right away. She had to go to counseling and follow her Christian therapist while they unearthed any aspect of her life that needed to be addressed.
On the matter of money, Alia said that "no sum of money, no amount of approval" can purchase the overflow that comes to one's soul while living a life with Jesus.
