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The Storytellers Project, 10881 Tierrasanta Blvd, San Diego, CA (2026)

06/19/2017

"If today's scrolling breaks your heart a little bit or leaves you thinking about your babies in heaven, or your own dad and your relationship with him, the lack of a "dad" in your life, or the hard seasons you're walking through, I am here to remind you that you're not alone, you're deeply loved, and there is more to your story." // Jenna Kutcher

04/07/2017

"I had a wonderful childhood. There were six of us kids plus my two parents, and dozens of cousins on top of that, so our house was always noisy and fun and full of banter. Us kids were rowdy and always playing, and that led to some injuries, most of which ended up falling to me. I was hit by a car when I was six and every year after that for ten years I had more accidents, usually head injuries, so my dad nicknamed me "Dizzy." I also had a speech impediment that was very significant when I was young, and my dad would pick me up at lunchtime from my private school to take me to a speech pathologist at the public school and then back for the rest of my lessons. Those injuries and the speech impediment were significant as I grew up, but we were a resilient family so I kept living life. I loved spending that alone time with my dad because in a large family we didn't get that very much, so those physical struggles weren't too bad.

We grew up Catholic and went to Confession on Fridays, Mass on Sundays, and a private Catholic school every day of the week. I grew up knowing God and I felt I had a relationship with him, but it wasn't until I returned to church in adulthood that I discovered my relationship with Jesus. I picked up my son from preschool one day and he said, "Mom, why didn't you ever tell me about my other father?" I was so confused so I looked back at him and he said it again, but was pointing straight up when he said it, and I realized it was time to start looking for a church again.

Going back to church was amazing. The people laughed and enjoyed their faith and community, and I really found joy and freedom in my relationship with God. I met my husband Steve and it has been such a wonderful marriage, and we have been actively involved in our church family for many years. Over the years I have come to experience the promise of Philippians 4:6-7 deeply, and it has been so sweet in my life: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”"

03/22/2017

"My involvement in choir and the women who have nurtured me have been so important throughout my life. Though my childhood was turbulent, marked by my father leaving our family and the presence of violent and alcoholic stepfathers, I ended up in church with some neighborhood friends of mine at a young age. I began singing in the choir in 8th grade, and the older women involved in the choir mothered me in many ways. The time I spent with them fueled my love for music and showed me the blessing that mentoring can be.

I was married young and spent the first season of our marriage living with my husband’s parents because he was in the military and went overseas. They went to church every week so I went with them, and again I had an older woman, a Sunday school teacher, take me under her wing. She sat with me every week and was an example of Christ’s love. I was sitting next to her one Sunday morning and the pastor gave an invitation for people to give their lives to Jesus. I remember feeling like I was being lifted up out of the pew and walking to the front of the sanctuary, and there I saw Jesus with his arms outstretched. It was the first time that I ever felt that much unending love, and all of those years of wanting love at home, though they were still painful, were overwhelmed by all the love God had for me.

I have felt that love through the women who have cared for me over the years, and it is why I am so passionate about loving my daughters and granddaughters well and investing in other young women. I want to be able to share the love that I feel with others and let them know that they are loved unconditionally forever. There have to be so many people in this world who need that love, and I want to share it with them."

03/22/2017

"This is what God says,
the God who builds a road right through the ocean,
who carves a path through pounding waves, the God who summons horses and chariots and armies—they lie down and then can’t get up; they’re snuffed out like so many candles:

“Forget about what’s happened; don’t keep going over old history.
Be alert, be present.
I’m about to do something brand-new.
It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?
There it is!
I’m making a road through the desert, rivers in the badlands."

// Isaiah 43

03/17/2017

"People have always been a really important part of my story. I always want to be learning about others and learning together with people I am connected to. When I was little my parents would drop my siblings and I off at church every Sunday and we would spend the morning in Sunday School. It was there, when I was about 5 or 6, that I gave my life to Jesus. It was also there that I met some of my best friends and grew up with them in my life. We had tons of fun together and I remember all the crazy fun we would have in high school, especially at our summer and winter camps. During those years we were given opportunities to lead the younger kids at our church, and being given some responsibilities and opportunities to work with kids had a big impact on me, so I continued to help with kids ministry at church.

College was a long process for me, but while I was at SDSU I got plugged into AGO, a Christian Fraternity. Those guys were, and still are, some of my closest friends, and I lived and learned with some of them until I married my wife. Dating and being engaged to my wife was another sweet, and busy, season of life for me. While we were planning our wedding I was commuting to Fresno every week for work and my wife was in school and working, so there were some tough times there. In the midst of all that prayer was very important for me, and I tried to keep my ears and heart open to listen to God. It ended up working out though, we've been married for 15 years and have 4 awesome kids!

My wife and I have worked with kids for most of our marriage (and now have our own), and I hope that they learned how to be loving and kind towards others from me. I'd want them to know nobody's perfect, but it's important to treat others the same way you want to be treated. Honestly if they learned ANYTHING positive from me, if I had any kind of positive impact on their lives, that would be really special."

03/14/2017

"It was Palm Sunday and my mom was visibly upset as we stood in the empty parking space in the church parking lot. We were a close family, active in our church and our life was picture perfect. But where was dad, and where was our car? The picture changed that day as we learned my dad had left for San Diego to be with his girlfriend. He returned a week later and life felt “normal” again, but just a few years later the family moved to San Diego. As he left us for the last time, I sobbed and begged him not to go. His parting words to me were, “You’ll get over it”. My heart broke into a million pieces.

I spent my teenage years looking for perfect love. At 22 I married and Matt was born a few years later. He brought much love, joy and the realization that I needed to leave a dysfunctional marriage. As Matt and I moved to a new place we literally met the “boy next door”. He was kind, fun and adored Matt and I. Two years later we moved in together and planned to be married. It was January when a neighbor came to ask if I was alright. She’d seen my fiancé’s wrecked car on the news. He’d been hit by a driver who was fleeing the police and had been Lifeflighted to a hospital. It was hours later when we learned (along with the rest of San Diego) that the man I planned to marry had died.

Through the numbness, anger and emptiness I still believed in God, but I was crushed. Love didn’t seem to be in His plan for me. I replayed the list of losses in my life as I perfected the art of bitterness and sarcasm until I no longer liked the woman in the mirror. Then my friend Gail invited me to church. It had been years, and this time something clicked. I realized God’s love is the only love that is never-ending, and that changed my heart. With a new heart and God’s strength I began to trust again and the walls I’d built began to come down. That’s when I met my husband and best friend, Ed. He is unwavering in his love and trust of God and has been a constant example of God’s love to me - it’s why I call him “Steady Eddie”! My life has been marked with pain and loss but now I can also see how it has been marked, through every season, by the never-ending love of God. He is faithful."

03/09/2017

"One day in college I was studying at Caje, a local coffee shop in Santa Barbara, and I noticed a group of people I knew gathering at a table nearby. I knew each of them from different places, so it was strange that they were all together, and even more strange that I overheard them talking about Jesus. They invited me to join them but I politely declined. Though I was raised a Christian, at that time giving up MY life and MY fun was too high a price to pay to follow Jesus.

But as they started their discussion and I went back to studying, for the first time in a long time, I got a clear message from God: GO SIT DOWN. I knew I couldn't ignore something like that, so I sat with them. They talked about how they had been connecting with God most lately, and I thought, "I haven't. I'm so far from him." I had become so dissatisfied with my spiritual life, but that conversation gave me hope that I could know joy and peace again, and I knew I needed Jesus back in my life. I gave my life back to him before I left Caje that day. I'm so glad that while I was far away from him, he was not far from me."

03/09/2017

"Every giant will fall, the mountains will move.
Every chain of the past, you've broken in two..."

// Rend Collective

03/07/2017

"I grew up in an exciting but unstable family system. My parents were professional Country Western musicians, so we were constantly on the move and always had people in the house, and most of the those people were drinking heavily. My father was in and out of the house for periods of time, and my mom was more interested in entertaining than nurturing her kids. That combined with the fact that all 5 of my siblings had musical talent and I didn't have an ounce left me feeling very inadequate and ashamed, like I was not good enough, couldn't fit in and unloved.

I went to a youth convention with a friend of mine when I was twelve and gave my life to Jesus, but that didn't solve all my problems. I still had feelings of shame and inadequacy, so I looked for love in relationships. Unfortunately most of them were with men who were unhealthy, and my daughter and I felt the effects of that. I ended up in a marriage for ten years with a gentle and fun man who wrestled with alcoholism, but our relationship began to unravel. I was determined to fight for the marriage because I believed God would want me to, but I couldn't save it and we ended up divorcing. On the outside I said all the right things, but inside I was mad at God. I was mad that even though I did and said all the right things the marriage failed, and it triggered in me all those feelings of shame. I decided I would live my life correctly and avoid making mistakes, but I would stay mad at God. I stayed that way for twenty years, but God was still at work.

Several years ago my niece wanted to find a church when she moved to San Diego so I went church shopping and found Legacy. I attended with her and ended up in the Celebrate Recovery group. It changed my life. There I realized I was desperate for love, searching my whole life to find something that would quench my shame and prove that I was good enough. God worked through that group and the ministry of Legacy to help me to put aside my shame, and I haven't picked it up since. God has done all of this late in my life, but these past two years have been full of pure joy. I see how he has been working all along to write a story of redemption with my life."

03/03/2017

"If there were a keyword to my life it would be logical. Everything I do is centered around what makes the most sense, to the point that my personal agenda is scheduled every single day to the hour. My parents raised me Christian, but had always told me that everyone has to make a decision sometime in their lives about what they're going to follow, and whether they are really going to follow it or not. When that moment came for me my freshman year of high school, I decided that I wanted to be an atheist, but because I am so logical I wanted to make sure I had made the most logical decision before I announced it to anyone.

I began researching: talking to science teachers, reading books, and watching debates online. I was taking in every belief system I could find, and pitting it against each other. I even made a bracket to keep track! I determined that it was most logically correct to believe that some sort of God existed, and when looking at the belief systems it came down to three major religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. After spending lots of time looking into all of them, I determined that Christianity made the most sense archaeologically, historically, and geologically. I arrived at this conclusion, but it wasn't until I was sitting in my room one night, staring at the stars, that it hit me that God is real and that Jesus is who he said he is. After that I gave God everything.

After that I saw God's fingerprints all over my life. One of the biggest ways God used me was in leading a Christian club at my high school, and with a big red box that we called The Question Box. Every week anyone could put their questions in, no matter what they were, and I would research it and present the next week. God used my logical brain during that time to connect with other students who had questions and wanted to process Jesus logically. Since then God has continued to work with my logical brain, but has been blowing me away by his love. It's so incomprehensible and in some ways illogical, and I can't help but be led by his love into joy."

03/02/2017

"I was in third grade when it started. I began staring at lights for a long time, or clapping really loudly at inappropriate times, or randomly jumping up in the air, or grunting constantly. And while that might be the normal behavior of a hyper third grader, it wasn't normal for me, and the weirdest part about it was that I couldn't stop doing it. It wasn't until I saw a doctor a year later that he told me that I had motor ticks, or these little random habits that I couldn't control. I started taking vitamins to help them out, but that didn't do very much, and it changed the way that I was seen by others. Teachers thought I was just being disruptive, other kids thought I was strange or looking for attention and bullied me, and, before they knew what it was, my parents thought I was disobeying them or intentionally irritating them.

After a while I didn't know what to do about it, so I started making a joke out of it. When I would jump up in the air I would pump my fist and yell, "Yeah!" That made other kids laugh and made it easier to deal with, but before I knew it the fist bump and yelling became a motor habit too! Finally I decided I was going to start telling people what it was, and while some people didn't understand and still didn't want to hang around me, others began to bully me less and became my friends. Getting it out there helped normalize it.

While I was going through all of this I kept wondering why God would let this happen to me, and wanted him to prove himself by taking the motor ticks away. I kept praying that one day God would make them stop entirely, but he didn't, and while they are better now, he still hasn't taken them away completely. But now I realize that God answered my prayers in a different way than I was expecting. Because of all the bullying and being misunderstood, I now find myself gravitating to the people around me who others think are different and don't want to hang around with. I love sitting with the kids who are sitting by themselves, or introducing myself to my new classmates who are from different countries. Since I know what it feels like to be different, God has given me the ability to relate with others going through that, and I see how he is using my struggles to help others with theirs. Dealing with the motor ticks is still hard, but I'm glad God has shown me how to use them for good."

02/28/2017

"I grew up in a Christian home and I’ve always thought that was a very boring story to tell. I accepted Christ at age five, I was a good person, and I went to church - blah, blah, blah! Little did I know that God was at work, writing HIS story, using ME as the central character! I have no great story of redemption to tell. I don’t remember a day in my life where God and church were not a part of it. Aside from my parents’ divorce when I was 13, my life was fairly uneventful. It seems like my story began to take off at the birth of my son, Caleb, who spent his first 28 days in the NICU at Sharp Mary Birch. Caleb would eventually be diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy. But before his diagnosis, I was in store for one of my own. Three months after Caleb was born, I began to get very sick and was eventually diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. The disease progressed very quickly and I spent the next several months in the hospital which included a very extensive surgery that would change my life forever. Illness has a way of seeping in to the darkest parts of your mind and soul and I allowed that darkness to get a hold of me. I remember finally being well enough to go to church and so I went, feeling completely empty and totally numb. During the worship time, I didn’t have the energy to stand so I just sat there, moving my mouth to the words of the song, “I surrender”. It was in that moment, that God reached out to me and I finally reached back. For the first time in my life, I surrendered everything to Him. So, what I saw as a boring story was actually God’s plan to prepare me for the next twenty years of sharing in youth ministry with my husband, raising the most amazing boy, and now being a part of His exciting work at Legacy Church."

The Storytellers Project

06/19/2017

04/07/2017

03/22/2017

03/22/2017

03/17/2017

03/14/2017

03/09/2017

03/09/2017

03/07/2017

03/03/2017

03/02/2017

02/28/2017

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