Tuesday Testimonies: God Moves Mountains in His Perfect Timing

Ashleigh Martin met God in a summer camp bathroom stall surrounded by concrete walls. 

I had met Ashleigh a few times, first through Forensics Speech and Debate and later as my RA. The night she told me her testimony, she was hosting an informal dance class on the roof of DeMoss. We stepped aside to talk as the group was transitioning into swing dance and the sun was setting behind the mountains on the horizon.

Ashleigh’s story began before she was born. Her mom and dad worked together at Olive Garden, and her mom, 15 at the time, asked her dad, who was 10 years older and unaware of the large age difference, to go on a date. Nine months later, Ashleigh’s oldest brother was born, and her parents were married. Her father grew up a Christian but had stepped away from the faith.

“When he got into the world, he was like, ‘I don’t need God,’ and that’s when my family started in that ‘I don’t need God’ stage,” Ashleigh said.

When Ashleigh was 9, her parents wanted her and her siblings to have a foundation in the Christian faith, so they started going to church. At that age, Ashleigh found the Christian world new and exciting and desired to fit into it. She went up in front of the church and prayed, asking God the Father to enter her heart.

At home, however, father meant something different. Her dad had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which came out in constant anger and explosions.

“All of that time, I had a very skewed idea of what God was,” Ashleigh said. “I didn’t want God the Father because of that and that aspect of His character.”

At 15, Ashleigh received an internship position at a Christian camp and found herself in charge of 20 elementary schoolers.

Ashleigh would take her campers through stations every day and began to get in the groove of camp. But one day, when she walked in to a sermon, something was different.

“He picked up a chair and he said, ‘Is God sitting up here on this throne? Is he sitting here? Is everything else under him?’ 

And for the first time in my life, I was like, ‘No. I’ve never heard about that characteristic of God where he is over everything that I have… He’s protecting me. He’s sitting up there watching me.’

And in that moment, I knew, I have to make a decision,” Ashleigh said.

That is when she ran into the concrete bathroom and knelt down in a stall.

“Jesus save me,” Ashleigh recalled praying.

“My outlook on life completely switched,” Ashleigh said. “I never felt that when I was 9 years old, and I gave my life to Christ but the relationship, everything, my whole everything, everything changed in that moment. So, I came home from that a different person.”

Her home life, however, had not changed. At the end of that summer, she began school at Liberty at the age of 15. Two years later, her parents divorced. Her mother moved out in March and by the end of the year, her father left Lynchburg, where Ashleigh’s family had lived since she was 13.

“When everything is stripped away from you, parents, relationships, everything, it puts you in this place where you are like, ‘All I have is You and that is all I need,’” Ashleigh said. 

From then on, her view of Father and father continued to grow and develop. In her Father, she has found peace.

“I have a good Father that is always here and that’s my joy,” Ashleigh said.

In her father, she has seen a transformation only possible through the hand of God.

“Within the past two years, it’s like a complete 180 of the man that he was,” Ashleigh said. “There are things that he says and the wisdom that he has that (it is evident that) he is in the Word and the Lord is working in his heart and it’s not just surface. This is in the depths of his heart. I can see it. I couldn’t be more grateful to stay faithful to Jesus and then to see a miracle, in my mind, happen like that It is incredible.”

Ashleigh’s story touched me in two ways. First, she provided a reminder, from 1 John 3:1, that God is our Father — A Father who loves unconditionally, cares constantly, and is present all the time. 

Second she challenged me to start seeing the power of God for what it truly is. 

Mark 11:23 says with God we can move mountains. 

As the sun dipped behind the mountains while Ashleigh shared her story, she showed me that my God has power over those peaks in the distance. He also has power over my heart and the heart of those I sometimes doubt will ever come to know Him as truly Father.

What mountains do you doubt He can move? 

He can, all in His timing. Remain faithful. 

Jacqueline Hale is the Feature Editor. Follow her on Twitter at @HaleJacquelineR.