Content note: this testimony involves child sexual abuse, trafficking, domestic violence, addiction, self-harm and suicide attempts. Details are kept to a minimum here, but please read with care. If you are struggling, reach out to a crisis line in your country or someone you trust today. You are not alone.
Naniece Gonzalez has two words for her story: “I shouldn’t be alive.” By the age of 36, she had survived nearly every kind of abuse there is, along with homelessness, addiction, two near-death experiences and a brutal attack that almost killed her and her unborn child. Today she is a mother of eight, a college graduate, and a counsellor-in-training who works with people coming out of prison.
In this episode of the God’s Truth Podcast, Naniece shares her life with Abigail Smith with raw honesty. It is one of the hardest testimonies we have aired. It is also one of the most hopeful, because it proves that no one is too far gone for Jesus. What follows is her account.
A little girl behind the couch with a Bible
Naniece was born in Mexico and brought to San Diego as a baby. Her mother largely left her life when she was small, and at five she and her older brother were handed to their father. What followed, she says, was years of violence, neglect and abuse, much of it at the hands of the very people who should have protected her. She was first sexually assaulted at six, and the abuse came from more than one direction through her childhood. She also describes being exposed as a child to dark occult practices in her father’s circle.
Through it all, her older brother, only eleven months older, did everything he could to shield her. And there was something else. There was a blue Bible in the house. Whenever her father started drinking, six-year-old Naniece would take it and hide behind the couch, flipping through pages she could barely read. She says a voice told her, Read this. This is what’s going to save you. “That was my comfort,” she says. “Who would have known?”
At around the same age, as lightning set the house on fire while she and her brother hid under a bed, she says she saw an angel, beautiful, fiery and full of eyes, and heard a voice telling her to get out. They crawled out, and firefighters pulled them to safety.
Taken into care, and out onto the streets
When Naniece was nine, teachers noticed her brother’s bruises, and the children were taken into protective care. Her father was later prosecuted and sent to prison. During the painful medical examinations that followed, her mother turned and walked out of the room. Naniece remembers feeling someone hug her when no one else was there. She knows it was God.
Living with her mother brought more pain, including abuse by relatives. At twelve she was thrown out of the house, ended up in a dealer’s home, was introduced to methamphetamine and was trafficked. By fifteen she was homeless again, sleeping in parks and behind bins, and pregnant with her first daughter. Remarkably, she says that pregnancy saved her. For the first time, she was out of reach of the people who had been hurting her. She promised her unborn daughter she would be the mother she never had.
Gifts she didn’t understand
From childhood, Naniece says, she saw and sensed things others could not: premonitions of accidents that then happened, dreams that came true in detail, a sense of what was in people’s hearts. Doctors labelled some of it as illness, and church brought little clarity. She tried the Catholic church of her mother and later a group she now calls a cult, which told her at her uncle’s viewing that he and her cousins were already in hell. She walked away from God in anger.
Grief piled on grief: her uncle and cousins, her grandmother, her mother-in-law. She numbed herself with alcohol and cocaine. On her 27th birthday she collapsed and briefly died. She remembers peace, no pain and the rain stopping, and sensing God, but far away, “because it wasn’t my time.”
The darkest years
When her children were removed by social services in 2018, Naniece fell apart. A new relationship led her into injecting heroin and fentanyl, deep into the occult, and into horrific violence. She suffered a stroke, and in a moment of despair she tried to end her life. She died a second time in hospital and was resuscitated, again sensing God at a distance telling her it was not her time.
Her partner became increasingly dangerous. One day she begged God for a sign that she needed to get her life together. At a church service, a nun she had never met put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Everything’s going to be okay. And it’s going to be a girl.” Naniece did not even know she was pregnant.
Soon afterwards, that partner attacked her so savagely that she needed two blood transfusions. She fought for her life, she says, “because I knew God gave me life inside me for a reason.” He was later sentenced to eight years in prison.
Jeremiah 29:11
From her hospital bed, Naniece was interviewed for a faith-based maternity home named after Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” She moved in on Mother’s Day 2019. There she completed treatment, began daily devotionals, joined a local church and, for the first time, learned how to bond with her baby, delivering a healthy daughter. She first went to church for the coffee and doughnuts, she laughs, but soon felt that every sermon was written for her.
The road was not straight. During the pandemic she relapsed, and her children were removed again after her baby was exposed to drugs by someone else in the home, as security cameras later proved. Facing the loss of her children a second time, she made a decision: I don’t want my kids to ever feel like I did. She checked herself into rehab and trauma therapy and took her recovery seriously.
In 2021, as her beloved grandfather lay dying, she relapsed one last time, then chose to stay sober so she could say goodbye to the man who had loved her most. She has not used since.
A relationship, not a religion
The turning point in her faith came more recently, when her husband’s aunt visited and told her it was not about religion or rules. Jesus wanted a relationship with her. Read the Bible, she said, and get to know Him. After that visit, Naniece took down her Halloween decorations, grim reaper and all, and began meeting with Jesus for herself.
Her husband, once an atheist, used to wait in the car during church. Then he came in for coffee. Today he serves on the sound and lighting team, attends a men’s fellowship and reads the customised Bible she gave him. Together they attend a couples’ group that, she says, has put God at the centre of their marriage. She still has visions and dreams, but she now brings each one to God and asks what He wants her to do with it.
And she has chosen to forgive, including her mother. “Jesus told me to forgive her,” she says, “and I love her because God loves me.” She keeps healthy boundaries, but she does not carry hate (Ephesians 4:32).
The gospel was never dependent on a perfect person
Today Naniece holds an associate degree in psychology and social and behavioural science, is training as a substance abuse counsellor, and works for a non-profit helping people re-enter society after incarceration. Her own history, she says, is exactly what makes her good at it. She is quick to add that she is still healing, and that she prays before and after every time she shares her story.
Two things she heard at church have become her anchor: transformation begins where honesty begins, and the power of the gospel was never dependent on a perfect person. “I always thought I had to be perfect before I shared my story,” she says. “But I’m never going to be perfect. God will always love me, and God will love you too.”
Abigail noted the power of a Christ-centred community in Naniece’s story, an “army of saints” who helped carry her when she could not carry herself. As Paul writes, “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20).
Scriptures in this episode
- Jeremiah 29:11, thoughts of peace, and not of evil
- Psalm 27:10, when my father and my mother forsake me
- Psalm 34:18, the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart
- Psalm 91:11, He shall give His angels charge over thee
- Ephesians 4:32, forgiving one another
- Romans 5:20, grace did much more abound
- 2 Corinthians 5:17, a new creature
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