By Buddy Beachey –
After the shattering of her parents’ happy family facade, Elisea Valle fell into drinking, partying and fornication as a way to dull her pain.
“I became very bitter and angry towards my parents, and I kind of took on the independent mindset, like, No one’s gonna tell me what to do,” Elisea says on Faith with Vivian. “My parents weren’t there for me; they didn’t give me any direction, so I’m going to give myself direction.”
In terms of economics, her family from Riverside, CA, was stable. They went on vacations together, went to Catholic mass together. They put on a good show.
But behind closed doors, there was a lot of fighting and abuse. “Rally there was no Godly example in the home,” she admits.
When she was 15, her parents divorced. Shortly thereafter, he mom went to jail for a year and a half.
“That was probably the most devastating time of my life,” she remembers. “I was like 15 going on 16 with not having your mom you’re in a transition of going into a woman. You need a mother figure. I didn’t have that at that time. When she left, I held a lot of resentment against her.”
Dad started to turn his life around and attend a Calvary Chapel Church. He took Elisea. She responded to God – halfway. She liked salvation and church. But the world was already exercising a huge gravitational pull. She started smoking, drinking and doing drugs.
“The Lord would always speak to me when I was younger,” Elisea says. “I just didn’t know how to get close to him.”
Her dark moments included an abortion at age 16. She was in a tough spot. She was too young, her boyfriend irresponsible, etc. She cried out to God when she aborted. “Lord I’m sorry because I knew it wasn’t right,” she says, adding she carried the spirit of condemnation for years.
To the old sins, she added new ones: going to raves and taking ecstasy. More boyfriends.
She wasn’t the type to dump boys. She actually wanted long-term relationships because she was trying to fill her insecurities with affirming love. But when one boy dumped her, she went off the deep end, getting really drunk and fornicating blindly.
“I started wilding out,” she says.
Still, she kept going to church and to Bible studies, though Sunday morning dropped off because she was hung over.
Breakthrough came when a friend from a modeling job invited her to a Bible study. “When I first went there, I rededicated my life to God and I just broke down crying,” she says.
God prodded her to move into a discipleship house.
By persistently and patiently repenting of sin, she eventually overcame it. Today she is married and a leader in her church.
Her testimony, she says, encourages leaders to be patient with their flock.
“Don’t give up on the ones that are wild because I was just like that,” she says.
