Great is Thy Faithfulness

by Stacey Hoffman
(600 Gregg Street, Shillington,PA 19607)

I was born to a 19 year old mother who was suffering from mentally illness. Troubled, and always in trouble,she felt condemned by her family and felt hatred for them when each started to assert how they felt, that medication was needed to treat her disorder. A disorder she didn't, and still doesn't, believe that she has.

Because of her illness, I suffered quite a bit as an infant and until I was 14, when I finally broke down and betrayed my mother by telling her secrets, but only to my two best friends at school. Later on that day they broke my confidence and told the guidance counselor about what I was going through at home.

With a call from the guidance counselor, the police came to my school that day. I told them it was all true, but that I was scared to go home because she would find out that I had told, and there was no telling what she would do to me over this.

The police officers drove me over there in the stuffy backseat of their police car with not even a crack open on the windows and forced me to go into the apartment, get a garbage bag and fill it with my things, all while they told my mother. I was finally overhearing that I was going to be removed from her apartment!

I wanted to go so badly, yet I was torn because I had been the only one taking care of my two step-sisters many days and nights when she was too drunk to do it, they were only 2 years and five months old, to make the matter more dire. I told the officers this. They said that didn't have any reason to suspect or proof that they were abused or neglected like I was, so they had to stay.

I wanted to scream, every part of my heart and my body was on fire!! Why was the world so unjust???Why??? I stopped trusting the police; even though they were MY way out, they had left me sisters THERE.

Troubled and scared, I was taken to a foster care facility nearby. I remember how the mean girls there went through my bag and stole whatever they felt I had that was of any value. I was too tired emotionally to fight back.

They transferred me a few days later to another foster care facility and then another until my mother, as crazy as she was, somehow managed to convince a social worker that I was the problem. I had put those bruises and burns on myself. I was a pathological liar. I was making up abuse stories for attention.

That night they let her and my aunt come to take me. I didn't know where I was going, or what they would do to me. My aunt wouldn't let me mother deal with me, she herself pushed me into the backseat of her big black sedan and she drove me to a mental hospital for teens, where she marched me in and left me standing in the hallway in my pajama gown. I was admitted at 3:30 a.m.

I won't go into what it was like having to live there for 6 months while they figured out that I wasn't crazy, that my mother was, and that all the crazy accusations she made against my father and grandparents were baseless.

I will tell you that God worked it out so that my father would come out of the woodwork (he'd left my mother when I was 2, I hadn't seen him since)and he came to rescue me from this place.

He called me on the pay phone there, where I was allowed to have 30 minutes of phone time each evening to talk to my family. He promised me that I could stay with his mom while the police cleared my grandparents, whom I knew and was more comfortable with, for me to eventually live with them permanently, until I was an adult.

I gave you my beginnings to point to a faithful God, great is His faithfulness: I was unsaved, merely a child baptized by water at my grandmothers wish when I was eight years old but not changed in my heart. I prayed when I got scared, which was a lot whenever I had to live with my Mom, but other than that I saw God as my nun teachers in the school my grandparents had sent me to one year had described Him: "He see's all the wrong you do, He's just waiting to strike you with lightening...."

But as I have learned all my life since then, and I am still learning now at 33 years old, great is His faithfulness! THAT is His true character: merciful, faithful, powerful, Almighty.

He got me out a living hell, twice, He placed my feet on solid ground (at least physically, because I wasn't seeking Him in my heart yet.) Despite my lack of crying out to Him, He heard my hearts cry and did these things for me. It could only have been God that anyone even believed a mangy, skinny 14 year old kid swearing to them that their mother was ill and abusive when she was telling them that I was a pathological liar.

I was 18 before I knew it. I married a guy who promised my own little pink house with a white-picket fence, a baby to call my own and the American Dream as far as an 18 year old and twenty-one year old could live it. I got the house(a rental), got the baby(a boy), and kissed the American dream good-bye when he cheated 2 1/2 years later and my divorce was final when I was 21. I had left that house with a lot more things than the first time, a whole 1995 Escort full, and a two year old toddler.

My grandparents let me stay with them. I went to college. I fought hard for financial aid but I still believe it was God who opened doors for me there. Lots of other kids I knew had fought hard for aid and they didn't get it many times. Almost every grant I applied for I got, and being a single mom didn't hurt. I did well, went on to a 4 year college and did well there too, to my surprise.

I went on to work as a social worker myself, hoping to help kids who were like me. I met my now-husband when I was 22 and in the tail-end of the year of not even a date as I had promised myself. I decided to forget that rule and give him a shot. 6 months later I let my son meet him and we both fell in love. We would marry not too many years after that.

He took me to this state, where he found the church I love now for me. I was 26 when God started pulling at my heart-strings. He led me to Joyce Meyer on Tv, and then she kept saying not to use her show as a substitute for going to a church. I shared my desire for a church with my husband and the Lord worked it out that he would be handed an invitation to this church just a week later on a routine run to K-Mart ;)


God met me where I was at this church. This is why "Come" is one of my favorite songs, and we played it at our wedding ceremony. The words say "Come, just as you are, to worship..." that's what I did. God loved me into forgiving my mother, forgiving myself for leaving my sisters, and He helped me raise my son with this provided- father as only he can.


Today, I tell people that my testimony is this: God pulled me out from the pit, the slimy pit that kept me captive was no match for Him!, He broke my bondages and set me FREE!, He showed me who I was IN CHRIST. He taught me how to really LOVE His people. He is still teaching me every day, and He will be until the day that my hair is all-gray and my days here have come to an end. GREAT is His FAITHFULNESS!

I will share the first picture God gave my heart, shortly after I was saved: It was specifically His comfort for what my heart needed. He showed me a lighthouse, tall on a gig rock in the middle of a big ocean. He said to my heart,"I never change."

I needed to know that- that He would always be my guide in darkness, that He would never change as so much had in my lifetime.


I needed to know that he was God.



"Pull me out from the trap my enemy has set for me, for I find protection in You alone. I entrust my spirit in your hand. Rescue me, O Lord, for You are a faithful God.... I am overcome with joy because of Your unfailing love, for You have seen my troubles, and You care about the anguish of my soul."

Psalm 31:4-5 and 7