My Grace Story 

As I look back on my sixty-plus years of living, I truly understand why God’s grace is often described as amazing.

His one-of-a-kind, no-matter-what love for Kim K. Francis continues to astound me.

I was raised in the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles of the good ole U.S. of A.

My dad worked in the oilfield and my mom grew up in the restaurant business.

My Grandpa Rock was a short order cook and my Grandma Georgia (we called her “Granny Grunt”) was a waitress who wasn’t like anybody else’s grandmother I knew.

My dad was barely out of high school when he married my mom—right after her sixteenth birthday.

I came along in 1964, the middle child of five.

With two older brothers and a younger sister and brother, life around our house was pretty busy. And messy.

We moved around a lot, that is, until I was in the fourth grade.

That’s when my dad decided to put down roots in Mobeetie, Texas—population of about 300 at the time.

From then on, he just drove to where the work was, no matter how far.

And because of that, we didn’t see much of him growing up.

As you can imagine, my mom had her hands full with five kids.

We didn’t regularly attend church as a family, even though she told us we were Baptists.

One crisp fall evening in 1974, she loaded all of us up in the station wagon and took us to a revival at the First Baptist Church of Mobeetie.

I will never forget that night.

That’s when I heard the gospel for the very first time.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” the traveling evangelist said from the pulpit (John 3:16).

Not only did I hear it, but I also believed it (Heb. 4:2).

Even though his fiery descriptions of Hell provoked some anxiety within me, when he gave the invitation to accept Jesus, it wasn’t fear that drew me to that altar.

A very loving Presence was beckoning me.

I was wearing a multi-colored striped knit dress when I walked the aisle to the classic hymn “Just as I Am.”

When I look back on this momentous event, I think of walking an aisle to say “I do” to Christ.

After all, all believers are His bride (Eph. 5:22–32).

That night, I asked Jesus to save me from my sins and come live in my heart.

The following Sunday, I was baptized—along with several others who had accepted Christ during revival week.

Sadly, it wouldn’t be until over three decades later when I began to realize that the girl who walked out of that white stucco church that autumn evening was not the same girl who walked into it.

I didn’t have a clue that I became a brand-new creation in Christ when I believed.

I understood (sort of) that Jesus came to live in my heart, but I was ignorant of the truth that my spirit was actually immersed into His Spirit when I believed in Him (Rom. 6:3; Gal. 3:27).

I guess you could say that I believed myself right “into” Him!

Years later, I learned the truth of First Corinthians 6:17, which says, “The one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him.”

I sure wish I would have known then what I know now.

I like to think that it would have spared me, and those closest to me, a world of hurt.

Because of my desperate, reckless search for happiness from the ages of twenty-three to thirty-three, I left a lot of collateral damage.

The Bible tells us that we experience transformation by the renewing of our minds with truth (Rom. 12:2).

The problem with me was that my mind didn’t get the memo about my new heart (Ezek. 36:26).

I don’t recall hearing any messages about my identity in Christ when I went to church, Good News Club after school on Wednesdays, vacation Bible school during the summers, or church camp when I got older.

My dad’s mom, Grandma Hannah, loved Jesus.

In the summers when we would visit her and my grandpa at Capps Corner, Texas, she and I would take long walks at their farm.

It even had a lake (it was really a pond, but it seemed like a lake to me).

While we picked wild plums, she talked to me about Jesus.

She even wrote poems and songs about Him.

I’m very blessed and grateful to have had a grandmother who loved and prayed for me.

Life wasn’t easy growing up.

It seemed like a little black raincloud set up camp over our house.

My mom resented my dad for hardly ever being home to help raise us kids.

Many times, we felt more like five burdens than five blessings.

The phrase “If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” comes to mind.

Even though I now view my childhood through an adult perspective, her bitter negativity was impossible to process then.

Emotional issues weren’t all that she had to deal with, though.

In 1981, when I was a sophomore in high school, she was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation in her brain that caused her to have mini strokes.

She underwent a two-day surgery in order to prevent a fatal hemorrhage.

None of us kids knew then that she had been given a fifty percent chance of surviving the operation.

Thankfully, it was a success, but her recovery took a long time.

To make matters worse, within a year of her surgery, she was diagnosed with nine different types of inflammatory diseases.

It seemed that my mom couldn’t catch a break in life.

When I was a junior, I rushed her to the emergency room in a nearby town so that she could get a shot for pain relief.

She screamed almost the entire way.

At the age of sixty-two, she welcomed death with a smile.

We didn’t know it until just a few days before she passed away, but she had developed lung cancer (she was a lifetime smoker) and it had rapidly spread to her liver and brain.

I am so thankful that—about a month before she passed away—she shared her testimony with me.

She told me that she cried out to God the night before her brain surgery in 1981 and asked Him to save her.

She didn’t want me to wonder where she had gone when she was gone.

My relationship with her, especially during my junior high and high school years, wasn’t that good.

Her unhappiness bled over into mine.

Not only that, I was extremely insecure, having little to no self-esteem.

The only place I found love, value, and acceptance was through performance.

I was a good girl who made straight A’s in school.

I could have easily been the poster child for the Performance-Based Acceptance Association.

The summer before my senior year began, I married a guy I had been dating for a little over a year.

What a relief to be getting away from Mom! I thought.

Little did I know that a ring on my finger would never be able to fix my messed-up mind and emotions.

I tried college right after high school but dropped out mid-term because I knew there was no way I was going to make all A’s.

While that sounds utterly ridiculous to me now, that is how I got my love, value, and acceptance.

And it was being sorely threatened.

I got pregnant at nineteen, subconsciously believing that having a child might solve my happiness problem.

It didn’t.

After giving birth to what would end up being my only child, Wesley, I suffered from postpartum depression and couldn’t wait to go back to my job as an elementary teacher’s aide.

The teachers I worked with encouraged me to go back to college and get my teaching degree.

I tried night school, but history repeated itself.

The danger of not making A’s in both of my classes impelled me to drop out at mid-term.

“It is just too hard to work part-time, have a toddler, and go to night school” is what I told myself.

Ironically (because I’m an author now), making an A in English composition is what seemed to be my insurmountable obstacle in both attempts at college.

When I learned of the opportunity to test out of English Composition 1 and 2, I signed up and scored high enough to earn college credit for both classes.

That success inspired me to try college a third time.

Unbeknownst to me, a teaching degree wouldn’t be the only thing I would pursue.

By that point in my life, I believed that the reason I was so unhappy was because I got married way too young and to the wrong guy.

I believed my Mr. Perfect was “somewhere out there,” and now that I was going to college, I just might find him.

You can only imagine what kind of behavior that thinking led to.

I got my teaching degree, taught high school math one year, and was divorced the following fall at the age of twenty-eight.

But still no Mr. Perfect in sight.

Right before my thirtieth birthday, I had a partial hysterectomy because I was one stage away from cervical cancer.

Soon after my surgery, the guy I was dating asked me to marry him.

I said yes, believing I had finally found my Mr. Perfect.

I kid you not, the morning after I married him, I felt like I had made a huge mistake.

That was the beginning of the deepest, darkest depression I had ever known.

The postpartum blues I had previously experienced didn’t hold a candle to the ongoing hopelessness I felt.

I was teaching high school math at the time and losing weight like crazy.

I couldn’t eat or sleep, and when I finally did go to sleep, I didn’t want to wake up.

While I was drowning in this sea of desperation, a friend of mine threw me a golden life preserver.

She invited me to a Bible study called Experiencing God.

One early morning during the third week of the study, I realized that Jesus was pursuing a love relationship with me that was real and personal.

He was my Mr. Perfect!

Overwhelmed by a sense of His loving presence, I could scarcely believe that He still loved me after all the bad things I had done.

Even though the depression soon lifted, my second marriage ended within two years.

I quit my teaching job (after all, what kind of role model was I?) and got a job as a loan secretary at a local bank.

Wesley and I moved in with my parents, and I tried to figure out where to go from there.

One morning, not long after that, I got down on my knees and asked God to put the man of His choice into my life.

That’s when He put a heavenly spotlight on Steven Francis, a cowboy-farmer I knew through waiting tables at my mom’s supper club.

He was there almost every night because he liked to drink.

After we started dating, God gave both of us a knowing that He was the One who put us together.

And we were married ten months later.

I came very close to backing out of the engagement, since Steven had never been married and didn’t have any children of his own.

I could hardly believe that he still wanted to marry me.

Made me think of Jesus.

Right after we announced our engagement, Wesley, who was twelve at the time, told me that he wanted to go live with his dad.

After all, he had lived with me the last five years following our divorce.

He didn’t have a problem with Steven; he just wanted to be fair to his dad.

I was heartbroken. I was Wesley’s mom. That’s who I was. Or so I thought.

By November of that year, the darkness I had known twice before tried to draw me back into its dismal abyss.

Desperate not to revisit that horrible place, I began digging into God’s Word—for the first time in my life.

I felt like someone who had been starving her whole life, feasting on a banquet set for a queen.

Less than a year later, we moved to a nearby town where I went back to teaching high school math.

We got involved in church and started serving right away.

I burned the candle at both ends and began to experience health issues.

During that time, our church hosted a Freedom in Christ conference where Jamie Lash, a Bible teacher from Dallas Baptist University, passionately and powerfully communicated the truths of the believer’s new identity in Christ.

I had been a Christian almost thirty years, and this was the first time I heard someone tell me that I am a saint, not a sinner, and that I am literally the righteousness of God in Christ! (1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 5:17, 21).

During this conference, Jamie shared quotes from authors who had inspired him.

The books from which he quoted eventually led me to Bill and Anabel Gillham’s ministry, Lifetime Ministries, named after Bill’s first book, Lifetime Guarantee.

The teaching in Bill’s book caused me to realize that I had exchanged my Performance-Based-Acceptance membership card for a Religious-Performance-Based-Acceptance card.

Through this life-changing, illuminating book, I learned that I had been completely forgiven for the sins of my lifetime and that I have a permanently pure heart that cannot generate ungodly thoughts.

I learned what the flesh is and what it is not.

The flesh is a way of living in this world that is rooted in the deception of Satan—the deception that who we are was not changed at salvation and that we can get our needs met apart from Christ.

In other words, we can do it ourselves.

The flesh is not my old self.

My old self was crucified with Christ and is now and forever dead, buried, and gone! (Rom. 6:6; 11).

Sure, I can choose to walk just as if the Spirit of Christ does not live in me, but I would not be expressing my true identity.

And when I choose to walk by His Spirit, I will experience fulfillment—because I am just being myself when I do.

For the first time in my life, I understood that the indwelling Christ is my life—my source for living—and that He will never leave me.

I can now trust my new heart because that is where His Spirit lives, leads, and empowers me as I depend on Him.

Bill’s wife, Anabel, wrote a book called The Confident Woman that communicates the same liberating truths that Bill shared, but were fashioned to appeal more to women.

I had the privilege of leading several groups through this wonderful mind-renewing study.

Through the Gillhams’ ministry, the chains of religious legalism began to fall off of me as I learned how to rest in Christ’s finished work.

And, as a result, I felt a strong pull to help other Christians experience the same rest, joy, and freedom that I was savoring.

In 2006, Steven and I founded our nonprofit, His Heart’s Desire Ministries, in response to this longing.

For ten years, we hosted Your Bridegroom Awaits! women’s retreats where I enjoyed teaching ladies about our identity as Christ’s lovely bride and all that we can relish because of His up-close-and-personal love for us.

Leading these studies and teaching at our retreats were the natural precursors to publishing my first book in 2017.

His Banner over Me Is Pursuing Love is an intimate, interactive study of the Song of Solomon, Chapters 1 & 2.

Throughout this study highlighting our eternal spiritual union with Christ, I weave relatable examples with the truths of grace to bring deeper insights into our ultimate love story with Christ.

In 2019, through the encouragement of friends, I published a devotional spin-off of my study called Fifty Days in His Pursuing Love Devotional: Getting to Know the One Who Loved You First and Loves You Most.

I like to describe this devotional as “Jesus Calling Meets The Naked Gospel” because it is written in the style of Jesus Calling with a strong focus on the Jesus-plus-nothing gospel communicated in Andrew Farley’s book The Naked Gospel.

In July 2022, I published my second volume in my study series, His Banner over Me Is Sustaining Love, an intimate, interactive study of the Song of Solomon, Chapters 3–5.

And then in August 2023, I published its devotional spinoff Fifty Days in His Sustaining Love Devotional: Getting to Know the One Who Carries You through the Storms of Life.

In August of 2022, I went back to teaching math full time, this time at our alternative high school. (I write about the circumstances surrounding this in our most recent newsletters.)

As a result, my book ministry has been put on pause.

This coming summer, however, I plan to start writing the third and final volume in my study series, His Banner over Me Is Transforming Love, an intimate, interactive study of the Song of Solomon, Chapters 6–8.

After that, I plan to write its companion devotional to complete my devotional series, Fifty Days in His Love.

And finally—to put a bow on all six books—I plan to write a prequel called Knowing Christ as Your Spiritual Bridegroom.