When a visitor comes to my blog, I want them to see who I am, right from the very first thing they’ll notice–my blog name.

This Redeemed Mama.

It sums up who I am as a person, my identity. I am a wife. I am a mother. I am focused on living healthy and I have a passion for changing lives. I am a child of God. But why redeemed? As I have been helping other moms begin their own working-from-home adventure, many have expressed interest in blogging and have asked me where I came up with my domain name. Honestly, it took very little thought; This Redeemed Mama was my very first idea, actually, and as hard as I tried I never came up with anything that better described me.

One of my passions in life is empowering mamas to stay at home with their littles. I couldn’t imagine having to leave my sweet baby behind day after day for someone else to half raise him, and I understand–sometimes a family needs two incomes. That’s where my passion comes in! The business opportunity I have found allows me to stay home, work my own hours, be flexible, and earn the income my family needs while building relationships with other moms and keeping my family healthy. My goal is to reach other mamas–hence the mama part of my name.

And then there is redeemed. I am a child of God, and when I chose to accept Jesus as my Savior, he gave me a new identity. I am inherently selfish by nature and when Jesus died for me, it redeemed me and because of his death, my sins are forgiven. That is the truth by which I live my whole life.

Still, there is more to the redeemed part of my blog name, and it’s this: when I was in high school, I did a really great job of screwing up my life, and God redeemed it by taking all the mess I had created and using it to create beauty.

One day I’ll detail it in a blog post, because retrospectively if you weren’t personally involved, it’s a pretty funny story–the kind of thing you would see on a sitcom about a teenager making terrible decisions only without the live audience laughing in the background and with the real, legitimate consequences.

It was a rough few years for many people, and if not for the grace my high school showed me, I wouldn’t have been able to graduate at all. However, instead of simply expelling me, they let me work my way through the rest of high school and take online classes, and then they gave me my diploma anyway. I still got kicked out–twice–but they let me return for my senior year the first time and after more terrible decisions on my part when they decided to kick me out the second time, they still gave me a way to graduate. I moved out of the house at 17 to the Malaysian ghetto and worked as an English teacher at a Burmese refugee school and trained in Muay Thai in my free time. I lived there for six months, learned how to do a mean high kick that I now routinely love to scare my husband with, developed a heart for those who have so so little, made friends I’ll have for life, expanded my view of the world immensely, and still got to shake Mr. Steinkamp’s hand and get that diploma at the end of it all.

People, I got kicked out of high school twice.  If not for my parents who both worked at the school and my siblings who all attended as students, as well as the fact I lived in Malaysia and there weren’t other school options, I would have been flat out expelled because that’s the kind of decisions I was making. And while there were serious consequences to my actions and those consequences affected many people, God still turned it into a good thing. That’s how amazing God is!

When I was kicked out of high school the first time, I lost most of my friends. To this day some of those friends still have no interest in talking to me because I’m “that girl.” I lost the trust of my parents so I wasn’t allowed to leave my house unsupervised, I wasn’t in school anymore and had nothing to do until I started work as a barista at a local coffee shop (best job ever!!), I struggled with shame over the choices I had made, and my boyfriend at the time moved back to the United States and I wasn’t allowed to have any contact with him whatsoever for what was supposed to be until the end of time.

Yeah, it was a rough year…

But none of that is the point. I share all that to lead to what my real point is–God redeemed me through those experiences. I had no friends, so I turned to Jesus for everything. He was literally the only thing I had in my life that was steadfast and it was amazing. I realized I absolutely adore coffee from my job as a barista and I discovered my love for Muay Thai, I found some of the best friends in the world, I worked through my identity being in my relationship God and not my past, and best of all–

–I married that boyfriend of mine and now I’m his wife and the mama to a spitting image of him, personality and all.

We have a ridiculously strong marriage because we spent two years apart and it gave me an appreciation for him I know I wouldn’t have otherwise. We got married at 18 because we knew it was all we wanted. My time not being in high school gave me new passions, I had the most amazing experiences traveling and working with my sweet Burmese kids, and I have seen firsthand God’s faithfulness in my life over and over again.

I made quite a mess of my life in high school but God turned that mess around and gave me a great story, a great testimony, great relationships, great passions, and a great family.

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Every day I’m amazed by God’s redeeming love, and the story He’s given me is why I am this redeemed mama.