By Jasú Diaz –
Trish Chokye’s dad sent her to school dressed as a boy. He beat her, punched her and demeaned her.
“You’re stupid, you’re never going to amount to anything,” Dad told her. “I wish you weren’t born.”
Eventually, Trish became a man, dressing like one, acting like one and loving women. She had walked away from God and drowned out her fears of going to Hell with an abundance of liquor.
Her only relief from her father’s torture was her 26 year old step-brother, Paul, who acted as a protector. But he committed suicide when she was 12, and Trish’s life soon went into a rapid decline.
She married just to get out of the house. But after four years of tumultuous and violent marriage, she was thrown through a 90-gallon fish tank. The marriage was shattered.
Afterwards, she began to cut her hair like a man, dressed like a man and went to bars to hook up with women.
“I lusted after women. I was obsessed with being in their life,” she says. “I also was obsessed with what a man should be like and what a man wasn’t like in my life. And so, I set out that I was going to be that man to them. That I was going to love these women the way that they should be loved.”
For the next 14 years, her life consisted of sex, failed relationships, addiction to drugs and alcohol, lost jobs and a suicide attempt.
As someone who had grown up in church, she feared she was destined to eternal punishment.
“Your going to hell,” was her thought. “There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve lived your life this way. And that’s it.
“I would wake up with the shakes and the tremors and I would grab that bottle and I would chug it down just to hope that it would just dilute these thoughts in my head and in this terror, in this panic,” she adds. “And it would do nothing,”
But her mother and sister continued praying for her to one day come back to the lord, and her true self as well.
Then her mother passed away in 2010. And that same year, a 38-year-old Trish was diagnosed with kidney and liver problems. Finally, she reached out to her sister.
“I’m in the hospital and the doctors are saying, I’m going to die, Ruth,” she pleaded with her sister by phone. “I don’t want to die.”
“’You’re not going to die,” her sister told her. “You call out on Jesus; you call on the Lord and He is going to save you.”
Trish called out to Jesus in the hospital.
“I felt this heat, this warmth, this peace, this fire shoot through my entire body from my head to my feet,” she remembers. “It just kept coming more, more, more. All those years that I didn’t feel God, I felt them in that moment, just the fullness of Him came on me.”
She gave up drugs, her engagement to a woman and began going to church, “I began to feel, just, the love of the father” Trish recalls.
“Joy just began to come into my life. Purpose came in my life from Him,” she says. “I knew that every lie that I believed, was buried now. I’m really saved and I’m not going to Hell. God really saved me. I began to feel that love of the Father.”
Her pastor prophesied to her and prayed for her to be healed of the childhood traumas.
“It took away from me every desire for the same sex attraction,” she explains. “It really did.”
Today she is married to Jack.
“My confidence is in Him – no longer in the masculinity, the things that almost killed me,” she says. “My identity is in Him, that I’m beautiful in His sight.”
Source: CBN.
