I met a guy back in 2004. I was a dancer at the time, and he loved throwing money around. He was an upbeat, glass-half-full kind of guy, and for some reason, he took an interest in me. I didn't feel the same feelings for him, but I enjoyed having him around because he wanted to fix the problems in my life. That was a first for me, so I continued spending time with him.

Eventually, he met my family, and they immediately fell in love with him. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, we were engaged to be married. Everything in me told me to run, but all I could think about was how impressed my family was that somebody like him would want to marry a rebellious, uneducated woman like myself.

In some ways it felt like a Pretty Woman story. Though, deep inside, I knew I was a very broken person.

Once engaged, we immediately started our family. The marriage was short-lived, two children back-to-back, and then chaos erupted into our lives.

The nightmare began with my ex-husband taking our two children away from me to barricade them up in his family's gated community. I wasn't allowed to see them at first. I was told to get a lawyer and that the police couldn't help me. It was a civil matter, and I needed to have a custody arrangement put in place before they could get involved.

The only words I remember my husband speaking to me during that time were, "If I can't have you, the kids can't have you." That sentence haunted me for the next decade.

The court process felt like a blur. The only thing I remember was the moment my ex-husband's sister approached the stand. Her words sealed my fate with regard to any custody being awarded to me. She stated, "She will murder her children if she has any custody." A statement so strong that the judge had no choice but to take it seriously. Who in their right mind would make such allegations?

Over the years, I refused to give up on my children. It was a very expensive process. This was followed by weekly appointments with a family psychologist, accompanied by supervised visits to see my children at a facility where our interactions were closely monitored.

I never could get a lawyer to reinstate my parental rights. The closest I ever got to having a normal parenting plan was three years later, when the judge finally gave me every other weekend and Wednesdays. Though even that was short-lived.

I made the mistake of thinking I could settle down and start over with a new person. He wasn't new to me; he was my good friend. We just never were anything more than friends until two years after my divorce.

With regaining some custody of my two older children, I didn't think moving would be a big deal or that we wouldn't be able to meet halfway on my weekends with the kids. I knew I would have to give up my Wednesdays, but I wasn't thinking clearly back then.

I just wanted to move on with my life and not be forced to live in the town where my ex and his family tried to ruin my life and the bond with my children.

My moving sparked outrage within the family. I lost all custody rights again. Things got so bad that my ex-husband refused to answer the phone for a solid year straight. During that year, I was pregnant with my third child. I battled with severe depression and suicidal thoughts.

I had no money to hire an attorney, and the feelings of hopelessness consumed my life. Until one day I decided to reopen the case on my own and agree to whatever options were available to me.

My ex-husband agreed to let me see my kids as long as he supervised the visits. I documented this process for years. I showed up to every visit and smiled through the humiliation of never being able to take my kids somewhere on my own.

For close to a decade, I did everything on my ex-husband's terms. Things even got to the point where I was prostituting myself to see my children when I wanted. For some reason, if I was giving myself to him, he would let the kids spend the night with me and even go on fun outings, etc.

Then came 2018, the year I had my cerebellar stroke. That was the year God interceded in my life, and I started learning about scripture and the power of prayer.

I remember spending time with the Lord when He took me to a scripture verse about false witness. My mouth hit the floor. Immediately, I thought about my ex-husband's sister and her claims that I would murder my children if I had any custody.

Her life fell apart after she did that to me. She was doing the same thing to her husband that her brother was doing to me, keeping the kids from him. They also lost every business in their family. She and her husband lost their businesses, and the rest of the family lost their motel all around the same time. Then, within one year of her making that statement about my kids and me, her husband committed suicide next to the highway where we lived. She turned to drugs and then spent many years struggling to keep her own children.

I froze as the truth hit me in real time. God didn't let the sister or the family get away with what they did to me. That was when reality about God and Biblical scripture became real to me. God's stance on false witness became one of the driving forces for me to turn my life back to Him and agree to live by His rules.

No one came out of this story unscathed. I lost out on my children's childhood, and my ex's family lost everything they worked their entire life for. My brother-in-law took his own life, and his children would grow up without knowing their dad.

Now, when I look back on this story, I see that it all could have been prevented if I had just been honest from the start. I didn't want to get married to him. Everything in me told me to run. I felt pressured by my mom to marry him and have a better life. I was in a difficult situation and wanted my family's approval. If I had known what was to come, I definitely would have listened to my gut instinct. That inner knowing was God guiding me.

Instead, I chose to focus only on what I could gain and how my life would appear to those outside looking in. Never once did I consider the heart I would break within the man that I married. I was only thinking about me.

No, he didn't handle the divorce well, and he did everything in his power to make sure I suffered, but I hurt him first, and because of my actions, my children have been hurt the worst.

My choosing to only think about myself was sin actively at work in my body. Sin destroys everything because the actions we take to create an outcome based on selfish wants and desires lead to death. Those lies and that sin killed my relationship with my children.

What felt like a small lie spiraled into being the root cause of all this destruction. That is why lying is a sin. Lying is the direct result of us/sin trying to create an outcome. We are not God; He is the creator of every outcome in our lives.

Lying is a sin, but the worst part about lying is that it kills our relationship with God and separates us from Him for eternity.

I can only pray that the truth behind this story helps expose any areas of your own life that a lie has stolen from you. I pray that my story helps you identify the root cause of how alive sin is in all of us and how easily we are deceived about its nature.