By Michael Ashcraft –
At age 4, Mallory Garza threw baby Jesus across the room. She didn’t want to play Mary in the Christmas play at church. She wanted to play Joseph.
LGBTQ people say they’re born that way. “That’s something I completely have compassion for,” Mallory says on a Nik Kewsani video. “Before I could remember even processing things, before I had a vocabulary for any of these things, I was super, super tomboy.”
She played tackle football with the boys at school. “I would look at guys and straight up envy them,” she says. “I wished I could dress like them. I would emulate the way my dad walked. I grew up hunting and fishing.”
A female cousin – in the name of playing house or playing doctor – began to abuse her sexually. She also introduced lesbian porn to Mallory, who was only 6.
“That fully watered the seeds of homosexuality and gender confusion,” she says. With her parents, she attended church and struggled with internal shame and guilt. She searched for acceptance: she wasn’t girl enough for the girls, wasn’t boy enough for the boys, and was the black sheep of the family.
At eight years old, she prayed: “God, I know this is wrong, but I feel like this is just how I was made. I’m sorry.” During those years she wavered between thoughts of moving out at age 18 to do what she wanted and “putting a Band-Aid on an open wound.”
Also at age eight, she got caught watching porn on her phone, and her mom put a stop to it.
“If it weren’t for my mom, I would have gone on such a darker path,” she says.
At 14, she discovered sports – basketball, crossfit and weightlifting. Being athletic kept her safe from drugs and alcohol, unlike so many of her friends. Competing meant staying healthy. She participated with the USA women’s weightlifting team in 2018-19.
She had sexual encounters with guys in high school, but was still plagued with lesbian attractions. She tried to repent at 16 and 17 but felt “dragged” back to porn over and over again.
At college in North Carolina, she became suicidal. “The consequences of sin were catching up to me,” she says. But she didn’t carry out the suicide because of a fear of Hell. She was sustaining a toxic relationship with a guy.
Back home from college, she went to church again. The first sermon she heard was about fornication and homosexuality.
After a season of continuing in the church, she deleted the sex videos with her former boyfriend and finally cut him off. At a worship service, she went to the altar, weeping and praying in tongues. God prompted her to share the abuse she suffered as a child.
“Supernaturally over that two-hour time period, I was freed from all of the shame, all of the guilt, all of the hurt from my past,” Mallory says. “I realized that God isn’t some sick god that allowed that to happen; he was hurting with me through it. I’m over here thinking I’m a victim my whole life, but the reality is the Lord was with me through the whole time. In my visions, I could see him collecting my tears.”
She got addicted to Jesus two years ago.
She married in January and lives in Fort Worth, TX. She’s now Mallory Garza Hammond.
“It’s not about behavior modification,” she says. “A lot of people perceive the goal of Christianity is heterosexuality. But that isn’t the goal. The goal is to have a relationship with Jesus.”
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.
Related content: Patti Height, from age 3, she scrawled self hate inside her closet, weight lifter and bouncer in London.
About these writer: Michael Ashcraft reported from Los Angeles where he pastors a church in the San Fernando Valley.
