Not ‘hot girl summer’ but ‘healing girl summer’

By Donny Ndoka —

When saw the messages and images in her boyfriend’s phone, it was over — finally.

For seven years, ever since she was 13, Johnna Nichelle Wilks found validation through her boyfriend. She called it quits once and forever and got on her face and sought God.

“You know how they say hot girl summer?” Johnna says. “This was very much a healing girl summer for me.”

Johnna Nichelle Wilks grew up spending six months with her dad in Texas and six months with her mom in Florida. She developed a chameleon identity, she says, adapting to every situation.

“I was always in a place of seeking validation from people,” she says. “I could literally shapeshift and adapt to meet virtually any environment, but in doing that it became really hard to understand who I was.”

She found Jesus at age 13 at church but quickly put Jesus into the backseat when she got a boyfriend in the eighth grade. He was very romantic and became the easy supply of validation she craved.

They were both athletic, good students, etc.

But he cheated on her. They would break up and get back together. Finally, at age 20, she saw his phone unattended and discovered the whole horror of the truth.

She dumped him once and for all.

“It really just led me to a place of severe isolation and depression, anxiety, you name,” she recalls. “I go to Texas for the summer, and every single day I was on my face crying out to God, asking him what was the point of all of this. Why he would take me through all of this I could not fathom.”

Slowly, God helped her understand that her desperate quest for others’ validation is where she charted a wrong course. She understood that in Christ alone was love and acceptance. She didn’t have to perform to please people.

Eventually, God told her to reach out to a rival, one of the girls who cheated with her ex. She wrestled, then relented and texted:

Hey, God’s been putting you on my heart. Just so you know I left that situation. I’m completely done with it.
But I wanted to apologize for holding this resentment against you. I hope you can forgive me for this resentment against you. I pray that you find your own peace.

She hit send.

A week later, a text comes in. It was from her from a unknown number. It was almost the same message, asking for forgiveness. But here’s the kicker: She hadn’t seen her first message. She had changed phones.

“For the next year, we did not go a day without talking,” Johnna says. “We actually started diving into the scriptures together. we started watching YouTube sermons.”

Her enemy became her friend.

Today, Johnna is married with children in Dallas.