Nothing to Prove by Jennie Allen

Author:Jennie Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

Maya was born and raised in India. She grew up in a good family and married a man her parents believed to be good and respectable. The wedding was a beautiful occasion, and her mother cried tears of joy.

Just days later Maya was being physically abused. Over time she suffered a broken neck, cracked spine, broken teeth and jawbone, and more. With her theater background, she was good at masking her grief and fear, but there was no peace, sleep, or security in her life. She started to experience blackouts. At first they were minutes, and then the gaps stretched into longer chunks of time.

One day, her abuser handed her the phone and said, “Call your dad. Tell him all that I’m doing to you.” She begged her husband not to make her reveal her shame. She knew it would kill her parents to know of her pain. When her father answered, she later said, it was “the darkest moment of my life.”

At that moment, she decided to run away. She managed to flee to Mumbai with few clothes and little money. To support herself, she would do street theater with street kids. Local traffickers who abused and exploited the kids thought Maya’s teaching was interfering with their business. One day these men beat her.

She fled again.

The blackouts continued, and she ended up in a wheelchair, totally broken in body and spirit. She couldn’t speak and she couldn’t stop drooling. From her perspective, “Every shred of dignity left was lost.” Eventually, she was reunited with her family, and they helped Maya to heal in many ways.

Today, Maya uses notes to speak. She’s lost the sharp memory of a theater performer who could memorize all her lines. But when she speaks, she speaks of the One who knew her, who saw her, who loved her through every one of those dark days.

“My testimony is this,” she says. “It was God, it is God, it will always be God all the while. Like you and everyone else sitting in this room, I wanted it to be simple. I wanted a normal life. I just wanted to be happy. Don’t you want to be happy?”

Then she says, “Maybe God didn’t want something normal for me. Yes, it was a terrible story, but He’s using the story that I am still struggling to be proud of to bring me to a place where I’m rescuing slaves from bondage.”

Now Maya leads a team with International Justice Mission, the world’s largest international antislavery organization. They work in a nation where 11.1 million people are enslaved, and Maya and her colleagues have freed more than ten thousand people in their country alone.

She bravely shared her story at IF:Gathering in 2016, where she said, “Ten thousand names and faces I may have never known or seen if my life had been totally normal and going perfectly well. Ten thousand individual human beings with stories of pain turned into hope.”

To see her share with boldness on that stage was breathtaking.

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