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by Shawn Pearson (Author)
Being called to a position of leadership is an honor and also the task, especially if you are a woman. I recognize that I have been called to a position of leadership that requires me to share my personal experiences with developing into a woman of virtue. This is not something that has come easy because for much of my life, I neither understood the definition of virtue nor believed that I had the capacity to achieve it.
I have been called to a work of breaking the cycles and break the chains to create women of virtue. This means I am going to be a nontraditional leader in the sense that the way God is using me may contradict much of the tradition that we have learned in the modern church. I am not the kind of leader who will sit quietly in disagreement when I hear someone teaching scripture incorrectly. Incorrect teaching almost cost me my life, literally. Because I had incorrect and incomplete teaching about the Word of God, I was left vulnerable. I found myself in a position of hopelessness. I was hopeless to the point that I wrote letters of apology to my family members for the way that I had failed them and then attempted suicide.
You see, I spent my whole life trying to measure up, trying to be loved by others. I have been an overachieving child in hopes that it would change my relationships with my father and my mother. I later became an overachieving girlfriend who would do whatever my boyfriend asked me to do, just for the sake of feeling loved and accepted by him.
Later, I grew into the overachieving, yet inexperienced wife. You would think that surviving the suicide attempt would have been something that brought me joy. But instead, it made me feel like even more of a failure.
I believed that I could not even achieve this successfully. The fact that I felt hopeless enough to take such desperate actions would not seem so surprising for someone who didn't "know the Lord".
At the age of 19, I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior, believing that this singular act of surrender would transform my life and move me from the place of misery after the death of my mother. I was only 18 when she passed from cancer, at the tender age of 47.
