This is My Story

Twice yearly, women in the church gather to hear two women like themselves tell how God has touched their lives in special ways.  On January 12, Kim Winters talked about confronting her issue of people-pleasing, and Patricia Weder shared her struggle with blindness.

You can listen to their presentations here, and also read Kim’s story below.



Listen to Kim Winter's Story
Listen to Patricia Weder's Story










Kim Winters: Posing as the Perfect People-Pleaser

I was born in Grand Rapids Michigan at Butterworth Hospital on April 21, 1968. I was born again just 8 miles away and 18 years later on the campus of Calvin College. It was there, in chapel, that I heard the gospel for the first time.

That was strange for me because I had grown up in church and called myself a Christian. I was very familiar with all the different parts of the gospel – I knew God was holy. I knew Jesus was God’s Son. I knew he died on a cross and I knew he rose again from the grave.

Looking saved
If you had known me back then, you would have said I was saved. But it wasn’t until that chapel service that God put all the pieces together for me. For the first time I understood that what Christ did on the cross had to do with me personally. He did it because of something I personally, desperately needed. I learned that because of my sin I needed a Savior – someone willing and able to take the blame for the bad things I had done (and would still do) and to even be punished for those things, just as if He had done them. I learned that the only One able to be that person was Jesus Christ.

I finally understood that if I wanted to be able to have a relationship with a holy God, both in this life now and after I died, I would need to come to Him on His terms, namely by faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.

But this was all radically new information for me, and I can remember looking around at everyone like: “Wow – can you believe what this guy is saying?” But they didn’t seem as enthralled as I was – some of them weren’t even listening!

I would learn later that the reason they weren’t listening was because they had heard all of this before. All my college friends had grown up in evangelical Christian places. They had gone to Christian school, Christian camp, and Christian clubs - even Christian stores!

I on the other hand didn’t know these things existed until I arrived on Calvin’s campus back in 1985. I was a senior in high school, and a girl I worked with at a children’s clothing store invited me back to her dorm to meet her “college” friends.

Here was this amazing place, right in the middle of the town I grew up in, full of cute boys who weren’t doing illegal things. And I thought to myself, this is the place for me! And the only reason I decided I wanted to go to Calvin - truly the ONLY reason - was because of one of those cute boys in particular. Of course the story my parents heard (and at this point I think still believe) was that I wanted to go to Calvin for their broadcasting department. Little would they ever know (until now) that my academic passions were all centered on a Dutch Christian reformed guy named Keith VerBeek.

Choose or walk away
Getting back to that chapel service - my friend’s boredom with the message didn’t deter me from listening. In fact I remember feeling like the speaker was speaking directly to me and only me. I felt like I was in one of those science fiction scenes when everyone else freezes, and it’s just you who isn’t frozen, and you feel like the only person in the world still alive. And that’s when the speaker said something that shocked me and made me sit straight up in my seat.

He told me that if I believed all those things about Jesus Christ, that I needed to make a choice, right there in chapel, that I needed to choose to put all of my hope and trust in what Christ did on the cross as being good enough to forgive me of my sin, to either put my faith in what Christ did completely or to walk away from Him right then and there.

As soon as chapel ended I quickly ran back to my dorm room so that I could talk to God privately. I told God that I didn’t want to walk away from Him, that I would never walk away from Him again. I told Him I believed what I had heard - that I believed I was a sinner -- and that He was the only Savior for me.

I asked Him to forgive me of my sin and to be MY Savior. I told Him that I didn’t understand everything (I had never read a Bible at that point, although I possessed a really big one that I carried around with my name embossed on the front), that I didn’t know exactly what this would mean for me or my life, but that I definitely wanted to start a relationship with Him that lasted forever.

And that was the day I began my love relationship with God – the most important day of my life.

Early signs of trouble
Now to share with you the part of my journey that I feel most compelled by Him to share, I have to back up a bit, to before I got saved. From a very young age I was a classic people pleaser. I started with simple things like wanting to make my parents proud, or wanting to be loved by the people at church, in my school, etc.

There was nothing unusual, except perhaps the occasional odd confession,
  • like the story my mom tells of how I would sometimes annoy her by confessing strange things;
  • like when I confessed that I was so sorry that I had used what I thought might be too many squares of toilet paper and would she please forgive me; or
  • like when confessing to her that I had peed in the lake while we were at the beach last week, and should we try to find the people I swam with and ask for their forgiveness?
But at some point my people pleasing tendency morphed into something much more unhealthy. I have sometimes referred to it as the time in my life when I was running on a gigantic treadmill with 10,000 carrots dangling out in front of me.
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