Abandoned by her biological father, she was later molested in fourth grade. When she finally told a friend about the abuse a year later, the friend told the entire school.
After this, the pain in Nicole Crank‘s life only continued, she tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. Raped at 13, pregnant at 17, she “went looking for love in all the wrong places,” she says. Her pain eventually moved her into a marriage to an abusive man and ultimately, a flight for her life from Oklahoma to Florida.
But today, Crank, now an author and co-founder and senior pastor with her husband, David, of faithchurch.com, freely shares her story, teaching others how God moved her from merely surviving to kingdom thriving.
“The depth of your wounds does not determine the height of your future,” Crank says God showed her. “A lot of people will show us their stars. And if you get on Instagram or Facebook, there’s filters and everything else and people Photoshop and Face Tune … we don’t hesitate to show people our starts. But we’re a little bit more hesitant to show people our scars.
“And the thing about a scar though, is that a scar doesn’t hurt anymore,” Crank says. “It’s a place where a wound was. But it holds a story. And I think every story holds glory for God.”
As she continued working through her healing, God showed Crank something incredible about His promises. “What God showed me was the slingshot,” she says. “When you have a slingshot, if you put a rock in it, but you don’t pull it back at all, the rock doesn’t go very far, and it doesn’t go very fast.
“‘But every time the devil bothers to burden my children’—and He pulled the rock back a little bit—’there’s a promise in My Word’—and He pulled the rock back a little bit. He said, ‘I will make the devil pay seven times.’
“And He pulled the rock back a little bit,” Crank continues. “And He said, ‘Any sickness, any disease, any hurt any heartache, any burden’—and He pulled the rock back, back, back, back, back. He said, ‘The devil may bruise your heel’—and He pulls it back as far as it goes—’but,’ He said, ‘you will crush his head.'”
At this point, Crank says, she saw the rock hurling forward, and God told her, “I will cause you to go so much further, so much faster than you would have ever gone before—because we’re going to make the devil pay.”
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