Real Talk - Testimonies | Cierra

In this episode of the Shoes Off Podcast, we continue our Real Talk – Testimonies series with our friend Cierra, who shares a powerful and deeply personal story about identity, family, and the faithfulness of God.

Cierra was adopted and later began a journey that led her to discover more about her biological family.  But this conversation goes far beyond a story about adoption.  As we listened, it became clear that what we were really witnessing was the hand of God working through every chapter of her life.

When we sat down with Cierra, Brandy, Isaac, and I honestly didn’t talk very much. We mostly listened.  There were moments where we simply sat in awe of how clearly God’s presence and guidance could be seen throughout her story.

Often when people hear the word testimony, they think of the moment someone first comes to salvation. But sometimes a testimony is about something different — how God continues to pursue us, guide us, and reveal His purpose in our lives over and over again.

Cierra’s story is a beautiful reminder that God is always working, even in seasons where we may not fully understand what He’s doing.

Join us for a real, heartfelt conversation about identity, belonging, and the incredible ways God continues to work in our lives.

We'd love to hear from you -- email us at ListenToShoesOff@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Shoes Off, a weekly podcast where we pause, take off what weighs us down, and take a step onto holy ground.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Hey, welcome to Choose Off. Thanks for joining us this week. And before we get in the conversation, I want to set a stage a little bit for what you're about to hear. When we sat down with Sierra, it quickly became clear that this wasn't going to be one of those interviews where we asked a lot of questions or even guided the conversation very much. To be honest, Brandy, Isaac, and I didn't really talk much at all. We just mostly listened. There were moments where we sat there in awe of how clearly you could see God's hand working throughout her life. Sometimes when people hear the word testimony, they immediately think about the moment someone comes to salvation. And while those stories are powerful and important, our testimony isn't always about the moment when we first come to Christ. Sometimes the testimony is about how God keeps saving us through our lives, how he keeps pursuing us, guiding us, and revealing truth and reminding us who we are and where we belong. Sierra's story is one of these testimonies. It's a story about identity, about searching, and ultimately about seeing how God was working even in the moments when it wasn't obvious. So as you listen, we encourage you just to lean in and hear what God has done in her life. Let's jump into our conversation with Sierra. And today we have Sierra with us. Sierra, welcome.

SPEAKER_03 1:26

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Yeah, we're really grateful to have you here with us today and willing to share your story. So let's just get right into it. Sierra, can you just tell the listeners first a little bit about yourself and then we can get into the story of how God really worked and this amazing story you're going to share with us today?

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Okay, well, I'm Sierra. I am currently a somewhat stay-at-home mom of two almost teenagers. So that's been a fun journey. Um, I've been married to my husband for about 19 years. We moved here from Florida, and he owns a business, and I do a little bit of everything under the sun, and just kind of keep to ourselves pretty quiet. I was adopted when I was little, and um God has transformed my life through my whole story, and it's kind of where I'm at.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about what was that journey like for you, I guess, growing up, and then to the point where you realize that God was maybe working in your life to find your family?

SPEAKER_03 2:34

I have always been a believer to an extent. I grew up in a very fundamentalist type of church. So and my family's full of pastors. So I've been going to church ever since I can remember. But um my relationship with the Lord became personal when I was about 15 years old, went to church camp and decided that I wanted to make that decision for myself after hearing a message about how you can't get to heaven on your parents' coattails. And so that really resonated with me. And so that's when I made the decision to follow the Lord. Um, it really shaped how I processed my life, both good and bad. Um, sometimes I used my relationship with the Lord as a way to really be grateful for where I was, and sometimes it also made me question how I got there. Um, but like many people, my relationship with God wasn't exactly linear. And there were seasons of my life where I walked away from God for a little bit and decided that I thought I could maybe do it on my own. I questioned a little bit too much about why I didn't see his hand of provision on my life when I thought that I should have. And so I walked away thinking that maybe going it alone would be easier, better. Um, spoiler alert, it wasn't. And so um I just carried a lot of hurt and a lot of confusion about how I got to where I was. Um, but even when I walked away from God, he never walked away from me. And he was constantly drawing me back to him through putting people in my in my path that needed to be there. He used my husband, who was not a believer at the time, to speak life into me. Um another story for another day, but my husband got saved, set freed, and delivered of um a really rough life all in one single Sunday, and watching that happen um is kind of what brought me back to the Lord. And so him and I have been together for 19 years and serving the Lord ever since then. Um throughout the course of my life, though, I've always known that I was adopted. Um you'll have to to deal with my humor, but I was a little black girl living in an all-white family, so it wasn't hard to figure out that there was something that did not fit. Like one of these things does not belong. Um, so um I found myself um with a very traumatic start to my life. And um, I was in an adoption situation very, very young. Um, and those experiences, adoption as a whole, for anybody, I think, carries beauty and grief all at the same time. Um, on one hand, I'm incredibly grateful for the life that I was given and for the mom who raised me because she was my best friend. We were very, very close. Yeah, but adoption also means that there are pieces of your story that are missing. And for my life, I knew that I had family out there somewhere, people that looked like me, shared my DNA, but they were just a big question mark. I didn't even have names, didn't have faces. I just knew that they existed somewhere in the world and their lives were unfolding parallel to mine. Um, that created a lot of emotions, good, bad, a lot of the why me questions, wondering why God allowed that to be my path and my story. Um so my questions really never had answers. I never, my mom set really firm boundaries about sharing information about my biological family. I think a lot of that was to protect my heart, but I think it was also to protect our relationship. So I grew up without ever really knowing the details of where I came from. And that left a lot of emptiness in me. And one thing that a lot of people assume about adoption is that once you're adopted, your life is like skipping through a field full of daisies and everything is perfect. Um but unfortunately for me, after adoption, my life still had a constant thread of pain and injustice that was woven throughout my story. Um while my relationship with my mom was really strong, the relationships with others and my family and in my household were extremely difficult and um tumultuous, and there were many seasons of hurt and conflict and deep pain, um things that shaped me forever, um in ways that I didn't really fully understand at the time, and honestly, if I'm being transparent, still don't really understand fully now. Um but I became really bitter, and that just kind of started to grow in my heart, and I felt like after such a such a traumatic start to my life that I should be given the picture perfect family, like I was entitled to that in some way, and so I was really bitter that that was not my story, and a lot of that bitterness really centered around my biological mother. I carried so much anger towards her. One thing is growing up in church, I had always been taught that forgiveness meant forgiving and that you forget and that you are entitled to reconcile with the person that hurt you and almost give them a seat at your table. And I was not ready for that, and that created a really big conflict in me because I tried really hard to be a good Christian and to be a good person, but with the legalistic background that I grew up in, I was torn because that meant that I had to just forget everything that had been done and all of those injustices. And forgiving her felt like the little girl in me that had walked through so much pain was letting her off the hook. And I was giving away all of the power that I had left. So instead of forgiving, I just stayed angry, and I stayed really angry for a really long time. And I felt like I was fighting for justice for that little tiny version of myself that couldn't fight for herself. Um and I felt like if I let go of my anger, then that meant that my pain didn't matter, and that my anger is what gave me power, but in truth, my unforgiveness gave my pain all of the power. And about I would say five years or so ago, um, a really special woman walked into my life. She was really helping me with a lot of things in life, but she really helped reshape my idea of what forgiveness really looked like. Um and she told me that forgiveness doesn't equal forgetting and it doesn't equal pretending like the pain didn't happen, and that I am not entitled to reconcile with anybody. Um and I don't really owe anybody a seat at my table, but that forgiveness is really about releasing the chains that I was wearing, and it was all about me and not about the other person. Um that was very transformative for me. And once I started understanding forgiveness that way, everything changed. It doesn't for it doesn't erase your past, but it does remove the control that the past has over your thoughts and your emotions. Um I kind of have this thought that I live by that says if you don't allow your wounds to heal, you will bleed on people that didn't cut you. And unfortunately, that's what was happening in my life. And all of that pain and hurt was bleeding out to my husband and my kids and to the people that genuinely did care about me. They were paying for mistakes that they never made. And um I didn't I didn't realize it at the time, but I was angry at a ghost, essentially. I didn't actually know my biological mother, I didn't know her story, I didn't know what circumstances that led to the decisions that she made, but I had built an entire identity around being angry at someone that I had never truly known. Right. And that was weighing me down. Um, and I've also learned through this whole journey that people often expect you to hold one single emotion at a time. You either have to choose between grief or gratitude. Um but I believe that I'm capable of holding both at the same time. I can be really grateful that I was adopted and for the good parts of the life that I had, but also really grieve the way that my life started and how it all unfolded for me. And those emotions don't cancel each other out, they can exist at the same time. And that was transformative for my life because I I didn't feel like I had to be inauthentic to myself. Um but the common thread through all of this is that I believe that God wastes nothing, and it all has a reason. None of the pain that I went through, none of the waiting, none of the questions. You know, I couldn't see it for a long time, but God was writing the story behind the scenes the entire time. And sometimes it's about trusting his plan. And then one day on a random Thursday morning, um after years, 37 years in fact, of searching for answers, um, I decided to post in a Facebook group um of people that help reunite families, um, thinking that it was going to take weeks to get a lead, something I'd been searching for years. I definitely didn't expect a quick turnaround. Um two hours was all it took um for someone to send me a message and say, This is your entire life. This is everybody that you've been looking for. Um I was actually teaching at school that day and I received the message, and about approximately five minutes later, uh the bell rang, and I had a whole classroom full of students as I'm trying to process the gravity of this life-changing moment um through a series of events.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

When God works, he works fast, doesn't he?

SPEAKER_03 14:26

He does, he absolutely does. And I'd been telling my husband for years, you know, there's people out there that share my DNA, but I know that they probably look like me and I just want to know them. I just want to know who they are. And uh, when I found my adoption file, my mom unfortunately um passed away of terminal brain cancer. And so um after I lost her, um, I was going through her things and I found my adoption file, and it all started with this little grainy black and white photocopy of a photo, and that's the first time ever that I saw that I had siblings, um, three of them in the photo. I later found out that another one was born um shortly after I was adopted.

SPEAKER_04 15:16

And um it kind of like you filled at that moment, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:22

It it was suffocating, honestly. Like I felt like all of the air had been sucked out of the room. Um sometimes you think that the story's over, but really God is writing it in a way bigger than you could ever imagine. And um, of course, with that comes uncertainty, right? You don't know if I reach out to these people, do they know about me? Are they gonna want to have anything to do with me? Rejection was um a common theme throughout my life, and so to put yourself out there with people that you don't know is scary.

SPEAKER_04 15:58

Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:59

Hey Sarah, what was your conversations with God like during this time? Um, well, to answer that, let me back up for just a minute because um God's timing is perfect for everything. Had this happened five years ago, um it would have been a very different experience because there was no room in my heart to love them because I didn't love me. And I needed I needed to learn and to heal before I think I would have even been prepared to walk down this journey. Um gratitude has been my number one thought through all of this. So grateful for a second chance. Not everybody gets the second chance, and um I've really been very grateful. It has brought up some emotions of why did this happen in the first place? How did I get here? Um, you're the god of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and you created the the world in a single breath, and sometimes I struggle with you could breathe and make all of this go away. Um but God allows you to walk through things, and sometimes we don't really understand the reason for that. So that's kind of been what I've been grappling with. But most of it has been gratitude. And it's only been about five weeks since the initial message was out to them. Um, we met last Saturday for the first time. And when I met up with them, so my older brother uh Dan Wan, he waited for me in the parking lot of the restaurant that we met at because he wanted to be the first one to hug me. And when I got out of the car, he literally ran to me, and that embrace was like he hugged me with his entire life. Like he was never going to let me go.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 18:08

And it seemed like in a single instant, that little girl was healed and just found a place. Like I was home, and it was only a few minutes after that that all of the other siblings started arriving. And so um then Walter comes in, and then Tasha and Alicia, and like all of these questions that I had suddenly have faces. Not only do they have faces, but their faces look just like mine. So it was um it was quite the experience. Yeah, and um standing there, it was just like the weight of everything had finally lifted, and my heart was finally able to just take a deep breath. Um it was just emptiness for so long, and I I finally felt full, and our lives have all been shaped by the same beginning. The decisions that our biological mom made impacted every single one of us in ways that are gonna last a lifetime. But what's beautiful is that we're all choosing to move forward in healing and to grow together. And one of the most incredible parts of this journey is realizing how many of my questions actually have been answered. And sometimes you can't see it until you get to the end of the chapter. You can't really realize that God has been writing it all along, but now I understand more about how my story began. I never, I'm never really going to understand the why, unfortunately. Um, stories like this, I don't know that the why will ever make a conceivable sense in my mind, but I know the how, and I've come to realize that God's been present the entire time. And my story isn't just about finding siblings, it's about discovering that even when life feels broken, God is still writing something beautiful. And sometimes the chapters that we thought were unfinished are simply waiting for the right moment to be revealed. And I'm just really thankful that God has kept me and kept them all of these years and allowed us just this opportunity to reconnect.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

So were they searching as well, Sierra?

SPEAKER_03 20:39

They were, they um, they've always known about me. There's some complexities in our story um where the biological our biological mom did not uh want to reveal any information about me. So them finding me was almost impossible for them.

SPEAKER_04 20:57

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 20:58

But they've always held me in their heart. Um and they were ecstatic when I found them because it was just years, like culmination of searching for so many years on all of our parts, all five of us just kind of came to a head in that moment.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Yeah. I know sometimes uh and we, you know, we go through a lot of things in our life, and we we hear different people, you know, the waiting time is sometimes hard for us, and understanding God's timing is very difficult at times because we're impatient and maybe we want answers in a certain time. But I think this is a great story of in God's timing. I mean, everything just came together so quick, and it has to be just reflective of God working in the midst of all of this. Um, you talk about how this experience shaped your understanding, and you know, do you feel like it's embraced uh a better identity in in Christ because of where you're at now, or God showing himself through this?

SPEAKER_03 22:00

Absolutely. I feel like my identity before was shaped by anger and bitterness and a lot of, I don't want to say self-pity, because I don't really feel like that's authentic to my story, but it was um it was definitely a lot of questioning why I had to be the one that went through this. Um why it was my story. But I honestly truly feel like God is going to use it to bring hope to people that may feel like there is no hope in a situation like this. I'm hoping that people can see that just because I have walked through some challenges and some some tough times in my life, that Jesus can still be the center of it. You just have to let him. And you're absolutely right. The timing in all of this was perfect. As I touched on before, if I would have met them five years ago, they would have received a very different version of their sister than what they're getting right now. And I don't think that would have been good for any of us. And while I I believe that they still would have loved me just the same, I feel like the experience that I'm able to give them would have been very different. I can't love other people if I can if I don't love myself, and I was very angry.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Yeah. So if the listeners could take away, I guess, one thing from your story, and maybe they're not necessarily looking for their biological family, but maybe they are. Um, but what would you want the listeners to remember? What's that one thing that you would want to leave with them?

SPEAKER_03 23:42

I would say that the waiting doesn't mean that God isn't working. And sometimes you can pray a prayer and you may think that that they're falling on deaf ears and that he's not listening because you're not seeing movement. But sometimes the movement is happening in the background and you may not be able to see it in the forefront, but just keep trusting his plan. Um, I would think that that would be the biggest takeaway. I had questions I thought would never be answered, but God was weaving together a story that none of us could have orchestrated. We only got here through the power of God. So if you're in a season of waiting, don't assume that the story is over. It's just still unfolding.

unknown 24:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:24

Hey, Sarah, I had you had um, you said something that kind of resonated with me, and I think will resonate with a lot of the listeners that they have, is you you stated that your unforgiveness gave the pain a home. And when do you think that it during during what part of this story do you think it really sat with you that the unforgiveness of the beginning of your life is what was prohibiting you from moving forward?

SPEAKER_03 25:02

Because I was so angry, people would ask me, What do you think's holding you back from God? And I would always say, He had the power to stop it all, and he didn't. She said, You know, do you know how much God could have been saving you from, even in the midst of all of that? So even though you walked through some trials and you walked through some challenges, you're still alive. You're still here. So you don't know what God protected you from. And that's when I kind of started to think I was so used to holding on to the chains of hatred that I almost didn't even know that I was going to realize who I was if I let them go. And my identity was so rooted in that anger that I almost became scared to re-figure out who I was without all of that anger and bitterness. It had been a part of me for so long. So I think it was probably about five years ago when I finally was like, I cannot do this anymore. Like I could feel the weight of my hatred and my anger, and I didn't even have a face to put it to. It was just, she was like a figment of my imagination. Like I knew she existed, but there was nothing grounding that I could say, this is who I hate. I just hated the idea of her, and it wasn't worth it anymore. That amount of pain, but it just wasn't worth it anymore. And when I finally surrendered it to God and I decided that it was no longer about what power she was or wasn't holding over me, is when I found true freedom and I felt like I could finally walk towards God without all of the baggage.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

That's so bad. That's so bad. You I I know after moving forward from that, realizing where the pain was coming from, and then having the ability to say, you don't necessarily get a seat at my table. What would you say to someone who is struggling with that thought and their relationships with somebody who maybe feels like that someone is owed a seat at the table, regardless of the hurt and the anguish that they're feeling internally?

SPEAKER_03 27:43

Someone's title in your life does not give them entitlement to your space. Protecting your peace at all cost is paramount. It doesn't matter what title she was given on my birth certificate, it doesn't matter what title she thinks that she holds in my life. Nobody is owed a front row seat to your life. Your loyalty isn't to anyone but to Jesus. And what is meant for you will never pass over you. I truly believe that. And I believe that P some people cannot stand to see you be successful. They can't stand to see you flourish. And those are the people that are not for you. And I think about that song that we all sing in church that says, um, what is for you? Like when God is for you, what can be against you? And so that's the number one thing. God is for you, and he's not going to put people in your life that are against you. So they they don't get a seat at the table.

SPEAKER_02 28:57

Can I just tell you, as your friend, how amazingly awesome it has been to see you on this journey and watch what God has done in your life and for you. I just knowing your adopted mother and knowing that story and the closeness of your relationship and the grief that you felt when she passed, to then give you the gift of these siblings has just been an amazing God story. And I'm so proud of you, friend. You are absolutely doing walking with Jesus through this. And you can tell just it for those who know you, the blow that you have and just the way that your voice just uh it just iterates all things Christ whenever you're speaking. It's just amazing to watch, and I love that for you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

Well, Sierra, thanks so much for being willing to share your story with us. Um, you know, it it takes courage to open up about your personal parts of the life like this, and we're really grateful that you trusted us and um, you know, sharing with our listeners your journey. I mean, this this story's a powerful reminder that God's always working, even in the seasons when we really don't understand what he's doing. Um sometimes the questions we have about identity, belonging, and purpose is the very place where God reveals his faithfulness to us the most. And um, I think your story has really really shared that today. So thanks for being with us.

SPEAKER_03 30:29

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Thanks for joining us on Shoes Off. Until next time, keep walking in faith. And remember, growth begins on holy ground.