Hello! My name is Ryleigh Contino. I'm 19 years old, and I was born and raised in Decatur, Indiana.

I grew up in an abusive and toxic household where a cross hung on nearly every wall. On the outside, it looked like faith was everywhere. But behind closed doors, I was hurting in ways I didn't have words for. My mother identified as a Christian, and my abuser was Catholic, and I grew up caught in the middle of that contradiction. It left me confused about God, about love, and about what true faith was supposed to look like.

I attended a Catholic school until 8th grade, and instead of learning about a relationship with God, I learned rules. Instead of seeing freedom in Him, I saw confusion and pressure. I didn't know what genuine faith looked like when lived out, and I didn't know how to separate God from the pain I was experiencing around Him.

By my sophomore year of high school, I was removed from my abusive environment, but what followed wasn't healing. It was a deep spiral. I became more depressed and hopeless than I had ever been in my life. It felt like everything inside me was breaking all at once, and I didn't know how to hold myself together.

I began coping in ways that only hurt me more. I turned to self-harm, partying, and anything that could make me feel something, or nothing at all. For years, I bounced from house to house, never really having a place to belong. I was constantly running from my past, from my pain, and from myself.

Eventually, I reached a point where I couldn't keep going the way I had been. After a painful encounter with a man, everything in me felt like it collapsed. I quit my job. A few weeks later, my grandpa called me and told me about a program that could help me start over. Not long after, my aunt told me I only had a month left to live with her. It felt like the last piece of stability I had was being taken away.

I remember dropping to my knees and crying out to God for help. It wasn't a perfect prayer, just pure desperation. I didn't have anything left in me but surrender.

And in that moment, I had a choice. I could keep surviving in chaos, or I could choose to live. For the first time, I chose to live.

I prayed and told God that if He was really calling me into something different, He would have to make it undeniable. And He did.

When I first arrived at the program, I honestly had no intention of staying. I didn't think I was capable of changing, and I wasn't sure my life could be any different from what it had always been. But over time, I realized that nobody was going to do the work for me. I had to make the choice every day to keep showing up. Through it all, the Lord was with me every step of the way.

From that day forward, something began to shift in me. I went from being the most broken version of myself to allowing the Lord to heal places I didn't even know were still bleeding. My heart, my mind, and my identity all began to change.

I'm still growing, and I still have healing ahead of me, but I am no longer living in lies or survival mode. I am learning what it means to live in truth.

If there is one thing I want people to take away from my story, it's that God can meet you at your absolute lowest point. The girl who felt hopeless, lost, and broken is not the same person standing before you today. Not because of anything I did on my own, but because God never stopped pursuing me, even when I was running from Him.

One verse that has carried me through every season of this journey is Romans 12:2:

"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

And Proverbs 4:23 says:

"Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it."