Purpose Driven Hope
Annie Marek-Barta Instagram: @anniemarekbarta
“No one has ever wanted you here. If you find a family that will actually love you, go be with them.” Those were the very words spoken to me like a broken record, repeatedly reminding me that I was was unwanted, abandoned, and despised. The very humans who brought me into the world were the ones who seemed to stop at nothing to try to get me to want to take myself out of it. I was born into brokenness. I can’t remember exactly when the abuse started because I truly can’t remember much of my life before it. What I do know, though, is that I never thought it’d end. It was at home where I endured pain, suffering, and hurt at the hands and words of the people who were meant to love me most. I was so confused as to why it was happening to me. Instead of hating them, I started to hate myself. I was a free-spirited child who increasingly became a broken and shattered middle schooler and eventually ended up as a suicidal and hopeless high schooler.
The abuse was an almost daily occurrence. It came as bruises on my body and cuts on my heart. Without fail, words of brainwashing and fear-instilling threats came soon after each episode. Some days it sounded like, “Get in the car and let’s go tell your counselor at school what I just did to you!” Other days, it was, “Let’s get in the car and go to the police station to tell them how I hurt you!” I would cry in fear and shout, “No! No!” Then she would carry on knowing that I was too afraid to tell anyone. I suffered in silence for so many years. I had no voice. It was completely stolen from me, and even when I did speak, it was truly just me saying what my abusers wanted to hear. I said what I had to in order to survive. I had no grid for what love was. I don’t think I even believed in it. My chase to find it in boys, acceptance, and temptations only left me empty. I was enamored by the way my friends spoke of baking with their moms, going to dinners with their families, and watching sports with their dads. I’d watch the movie Annie over and over again as a child, not moved by the big mansion or costly possessions this once orphan was given, but being jealous of her Daddy Warbucks, of her family, of her being invited into belonging.
By the time I was in 7th grade, I had felt the touches of false love and had witnessed the fragility of human life. It was the summer before 8th grade when I had my first encounter with Love. A friend of mine invited me over to her house with one requirement – we had to go to youth group first. I had absolutely no interest. I didn’t believe in God, nor was I open to the idea of Him. I thought that if there was a chance that He was even real, He must really hate me based on the life I was living. I was hardened. I had never heard people talk about God. I was skeptical about anything that could be “good”. I only agreed to go because my friend promised that we would get away with signing our names in and then we would hang out at McDonald’s with our other friends until her mom came to pick us up. It sounded like a fool-proof plan to me.
That night we walked into a large warehouse where teenagers were playing video games, foosball, skateboarding, and a rock band was practicing. The environment itself didn’t seem very “church-like” to me, but the big wooden cross in the middle of the room was my sign that this wasn’t the place for me. Little did I know that that cross would soon become the very thing to symbolize my very place in life.
It was in an ordinary moment, soon after we walked in, that I fell to my knees and started sobbing uncontrollably. As my friend bent down to ask me what was happening, all I could mutter between tears was, “I feel love. I feel love. I just...I feel like something is hugging me and it feels like love.” There was nobody physically hugging me. There was no one who told me that His nature was love. There was nobody who explained what real love should feel like. In that moment, what I never knew became all I knew. He met me in emptiness and filled me with His love. I was forever changed. I came face-to-face with my Maker who came to put me made back together. I didn’t believe in Him but He believed in me.
From that day forward I was hooked on going to youth group. I wanted to know everything and anything about Jesus. Only a few weeks after my first week of going to youth group, my birth parents banned me from going to church. They saw the joy and excitement in me. They saw the sudden hope I had. They saw it and they had to put a stop to it. For the next few years, I lied my way to youth group, willing to do anything to be with the people who knew me and loved me. My youth leaders cared about me. They knew my name. They were interested in my life. This became the first taste of family I had ever experienced and I knew that I belonged every Wednesday night. From making fake “math club” flyers to creating false “school retreat” pamphlets, I did what I could to convince my birth parents that I had to be at school. When my sneaky ways worked, my youth leaders were always willing to come and pick me up from school to take me to youth group.
A day soon came where I was banned from going out at all. This was when all of the hope I had was completely stripped from me. It was a night in late May 2010 that I decided once and for all that I was finally going to go through with ending my life. I had wrestled with self-harm for quite a while, too afraid to truly end my life in fear that it would hurt the people who I had finally felt cared about me. I told myself that tomorrow was going to be my last unless a miracle took place. As I went on with what I thought was my last day at school, I was called into my school counselor’s office where she informed me that she’d received concerns from multiple people about my safety and well-being. I played it off as if it was actually a friend that was in danger and there I sat in her office as she called DHS on speakerphone to ask what they could do to get “this friend” into safety.
I was so afraid of getting found out, so it was a relief that she seemed to believe my lie about having a friend in danger to deflect from the truth that it was really about me. I thought I’d give my life another day as we expected a call back with answers from DHS and because this unexpected turn of events gave me the last ounce of hope I could hold onto.
When I got home that day, a life-altering incident occurred as my biological mother attempted to choke me and succeeded in injuring my face. She chased me out, and in pain, I ran to the nearest store with a black eye and blood dripping from a cut beneath my eye. A good friend happened to be at the store, and when she asked what happened, I lied and said I had fallen and a branch hit my eye. She didn’t believe me for a moment. We got into her car. “Did she do this to you? I always wondered and was worried she was hurting you. Annie, this is the third time I’ve been at the scene of a crime where a friend was abused. I know this isn’t chance that I was the one who saw you just now at the store looking like this.”
I knew I couldn’t argue with the divine intervention that just happened. She called our youth pastor and a youth leader of ours and there I found myself on that day in May 2010 in the middle of an Albertson’s parking lot surrounded by police cars and firetrucks, a scared and confused 17-year old who was suddenly realizing that the escape I dreamed of was finally here and yet I was petrified and frozen because I had never tasted of it. Abused, neglected, unworthy, rejected, and abandoned was my normal. I had no grid of what a life outside of those titles would be. I was put into the foster care system in the state of Oregon that night.
My youth pastors got emergency foster licensed for me to stay with them and I spent the next 4 years in their home. I was experiencing so much newness, and at the same time, I was learning how to walk through life while feeling the effects of a lifetime of trauma. That trauma was evident in my behavior, in my words, in my emotions, and in my views of the world around me. This brought layers of difficulty and misunderstandings that eventually led to relationships changing. I felt rejected yet again. I aged out of foster care without being adopted at 18 and then voluntarily signed myself back in right away because I needed the support of the state.
I attended one of the nation’s top private Christian universities completely on scholarships and in 2015, I became one of the less than 3% of foster youth to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. Some days the pain was crippling and as if I couldn’t see an end to the torment and others it felt almost like a faint whisper with just a trace of the past. Studying and focusing in class seemed like an almost impossible task. It was the village surrounding me that cheered me on to the finish line. I was surrounded by people who would not let me give up because they saw what was in me and called it out. I had professors who gracefully worked with me to succeed. I began to choose the strength to push through and that’s when I started seeing my resilience and finding my identity as His Beloved. I began to believe that surely my life had purpose if He caused all of this to happen on my behalf.
My dream of having a forever family didn’t come to an end just because my time in foster care did, though. I lost hope that I’d be adopted because I had aged out and I did all I could to put that dream to rest. Little did I know that a couple that came into my life as the worship pastors at my church in 2012 would become the God-answer to that dream. I built walls up to keep people out, especially those older than me. I tested boundaries and challenged authority. As these two entered my life, they so easily and naturally walked through every wall I put up. I began to trust again. We were all a part of the same church so naturally, we spent more time
together. My little foster brother at the time called them our “sisters” and we started identifying as siblings. I was very vocal about my distaste for the labels of “mom” and “dad” and often shared about how I would never use those words in my life nor would I have those figures. We carried on as me being their little sister for years and on May 31, 2017, we went to court to get my last name changed to theirs to legally identify as family.
As time went on, I started seeing how sensitive my heart had grown towards adoption. I’d weep at movies with an adoption storyline and I’d see viral stories of adoption and wonder why that couldn’t be my story. I noticed a longing for parents for the first time, and not just parents, but for the two consistent adults who were 10 years older than me to be just that. Their families have loved me and included me in everything. Their friends have also welcomed me as if they’d always known me. They had taken me in as their own since the beginning. They have played those roles all this time. It just took years of healing for my heart to be able to dream of that and accept it. After these realizations, I decided I’d keep my desires quiet and take them to the grave with me because I couldn’t take the risk to make them known.
But God! It was just earlier this year that I was driving with my (now) mom when she was consoling me about my insecurity of forever being a part of their family. I was scared they’d leave me. I was afraid I’d be replaced. I was fearful I’d be without a family. “We’d adopt you!” Tears flowed down my face as the person who has nurtured me most in my life spoke words that I thought I’d never hear as a 26-year old, an aged-out foster youth, and a formerly abandoned child. I quickly learned it was something that they’d carried in their hearts for years.
On May 31, 2019, I was legally adopted in a courtroom surrounded by loved ones, followed by a party to celebrate. I became a daughter that day in a courthouse that historically was an orphanage. During the hearing, the judge wiped away tears and took a pause to thank us for letting him finish his week with us. As we were ending he declared, “This is a happy day for the [foster care] system.” A happy day, indeed!
A courtroom, once a place I despised, became a redeemed place where I have now chosen to serve as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA). I vow to spend the rest of my life sharing my story that He has written for His glory. I will spend my life advocating for foster children, youth, and adoption. I longed to be seen. To be noticed. To be embraced. To fit. But most of all, I longed to belong. I dreamed of meaning something to someone. I dreamed of a mom to hold me and tell me everything would be okay. I dreamed of a dad that would protect me from the men who only ever tried to harm me. I dreamed of being a daughter. Belonging was my greatest dream and the common theme in my story because though many other desires came and went, this was one thing I couldn’t give up. It carried me to where I am now because that longing for belonging first and foremost was fulfilled by the only one who could fulfill it, the very one who created that desire in us – Jesus. I was found by a Father. Formed for a family. The same goes for you.
I was once so afraid to believe life could have any ounce of goodness, scared to dream of a happy ending, and doubtful that my life had a purpose. It’s been such a healing season now, getting to meet so many people whose hearts are for those in the foster care system and those who have aged out. I’m here to tell you that there are people you may never meet who are giving their lives to stand with you, people who believe in you, and a village that fights for you.
Please hear these truths:
You were created with a purpose.
Your life was a dream that God placed in a womb.
What has happened to you does not define you, but it also won’t go to waste.
You have a voice worth hearing.
Your story is still being written.
In it is woven purpose, destiny, and a divine narrative.
The world is waiting to read it.