Brandie Cosby Testimony Section 1 of 7

My name is Brandie Cosby, and I am 36 years old. I am a licensed minister. I have an associate in case management. I have my bachelor's in Rehabilitation Services. I am in the Master’s program for Professional Counseling degree. I attend another school to become an ordinary minister through my church. I am the founder of Life Line Housing. I am co-founder of G2G, which is short for Glory to God Grub to Go; in this ministry, we feed the homeless or anyone who comes to the park hungry. I am the lead minister of Celebrate Recovery at my church. I am also involved in a jail ministry where we go to the Nacogdoches jail and preach the word. I have an amazing and supportive husband who goes along with any of my ideas. This includes starting a chicken army all the way to being a youth leader for our church. We have three beautiful daughters who all have turned their life over to God and are working towards their journey with him and their identity within Christ. We attend NorthPointe Church of God in Nacogdoches. I gave my life over to God on September 29, 2021. The journey that led me to this path intertwined with the hand of God at work in each part of the seven different sections of my life. The seven sections of my life are: first is the birth, the second is being sexually assaulted, the third is being kidnapped, the fourth is relationship abuse, the fifth one is the perfect marriage, the sixth is addiction, and the seventh is the journey with God. I want to start today with Romans 7:5: “For when we lived according to our human nature the sinful desire stirred up by the law were at work in our bodies and all we did ended in death. Now however we are free from the law because we died to that which once held us prisoners no longer do we serve in the old way of a written law but in the new way of the spirit.” Before I recognized that I had a hurt, a habit, and a hang-up the insanity of my life was the lack of my identity. I wanted to be loved and craved all the attention that I lost my identity so that I would become what everyone wanted me to become. Let me take you back to my yester years.

The first section:

This will be the shortest of all the sections, I call this my first section because it’s the first part of my life. Even before I was born, the devil was after me. I became in my mother’s womb, and my mother was told by every doctor to have an abortion because she could not handle having me and that we would both die. Thankfully, my mother was born to a preacher, and she told them that God gave me her and I won’t take what God gave me away he will protect us. I was born my mother coded, but God saved her. During the first few months of my life, I coded a few times, and my heart stopped beating.  I like to think that it’s because the Lord wanted to spend a few moments with me speaking blessings over my life; that, however, is not biblical, but it is possible. My Grandmother was holding me in church and looked down and I was completely blue, I was not breathing, and she knew I was no longer alive. She lifted me up and asked for everyone to pray for me. The whole congregation came and laid hands and prayed and my grandmother told me that I began to cry. She cried out to God with praises and thankfulness. God raised the dead and I came back to life. This is a common practice of God in Acts 13:30, “But God raised him from the dead,”.  This one of the first few moments God made a miracle happen in my life. My grandfather is a preacher, and my grandmother was an excellent preacher's wife. I've always looked up to her and her ability to be soft-spoken and elegant. The one thing I truly valued about my grandmother is that she backed my grandfather no matter what. She, to me, was a Proverbs 31 woman. Then I had my mother, who had four children. She worked about five jobs so that she could provide for her children. She gave me an example of hard work, and she instilled me with this value. My mother also instilled in me with that value but, also the value of truth and honesty. When I was five, I started to miss the attention a father would give his daughter. I started looking for it in friends, teachers, and anybody who would listen to me talk; I would talk their heads off. And when they began to get bored with the conversation, I would fill it in with some excitement in my facial expressions; I would start to cry, making it more dramatic. I would elaborate on what I was going to say. I would make it bigger and better, or I would make it sadder and worse.

One day as I was crawling under the benches at church my mother finally picked me up and put me on the bench after several people tried to catch me, she finally caught me. I was around six years old at this time as I was sitting there on the bench listening to the preacher preach, I was convicted by the Holy Spirit I started to cry. At the time my mother thought I was crying because I was upset that I was not allowed to crawl however it was the true conviction of the Holy Spirit, I told her I want to accept Jesus in my heart. I then went down to the preacher and told him I wanted to be baptized. I'm not going to tell you that I became the perfect child because I didn’t, I will tell you that I paid a little bit more attention in church and I took it seriously until I was about 8 years old.