Tasha Benz ’18, a JBU graduate counseling student, isn’t self-conscious about sharing the complex aspects of her childhood or the people God used to radically change her life.
Despite childhood abuse by a pastor, Benz says she didn’t blame God. Instead, she realized God could protect her. Church attendance was sporadic and often served as a means for Benz and her younger sister to escape the house. But once Benz turned 18 and gained custody of her sister, they stopped going.
Then one day, when Benz returned home from her nannying job, her sister said, “Tasha, I need to go to church.”
The pair drove around their hometown of Muskogee, Oklahoma, looking for a specific church, but couldn’t find it. Instead, they ventured inside a small Pentecostal church and took seats at the back. The pastor’s wife, Deborah Morris (“Miss Debbie”), approached, asked their names and where they were from, and showed genuine interest.
“The pastor and Miss Debbie would come to the projects. They didn’t care that we lived in such a place," Benz said. “They didn’t care that shootings happened there. They saw all of it. They saw me on drugs — everything — and they just took us in.
“They picked us up for church every time the doors were open. They loved us like I’ve never seen anybody love.”
While that first Sunday at church was pivotal to Benz’s spiritual journey, she didn’t give her heart to Jesus for a couple of months.
“I was having a really bad day and doing everything I could to fill the void,” Benz said. “I skipped work and went to the lake with a guy. When I came home, I felt so empty. I just felt like, ‘I can’t do this, Lord.’”
A high school teacher had given Benz a Bible, which she kept on her nightstand but had never read.
“I sat there crying, and I prayed, ‘God, if you don’t prove yourself now, I won’t believe you ever,’” Benz said. “I’ve never heard the audible voice of God except for that night. All he said was, ‘Corinthians.’”
Benz started reading until something spoke to her. When she reached chapter 13, verse four, she recognized “Love is patient, love is kind,” but the words at the end of verse five stopped her in her tracks.
“When I got to, ‘Love holds no record of wrongs,’ I lost it,” Benz said. “I thought, ‘That can’t be true.’ Then I thought of everything I’d seen in the church and Miss Debbie and I thought, ‘Maybe it is true.’”
At the time, Benz attended a state school. While she wanted to go to a university, she knew she couldn’t seek God the way she wanted to and remain where she was.
“I knew I needed to get out,” Benz said. “I was doing a lot of things I shouldn’t have done and got into some very scary situations. I know the grace of God kept me alive.”
She mentioned her dilemma to Miss Debbie and learned that Miss Debbie had been a custodian at JBU from 2001 to 2006. The two arranged to visit the campus together. Benz thought the campus was beautiful, and in 2015, she moved to JBU and started classes as a psychology major.
“When I came to JBU, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m not going to sin. I’m in a Christian college,’” Benz said. “But the evil I was in before I found the Lord was normal to me. I didn’t know anything different.”
Benz said the people she connected with easily were involved in activities she was trying to avoid.
“I didn’t know how to connect with other people,” Benz said. “Half of the things people said at JBU and the words they used were like gibberish. I thought JBU wasn’t for me.”
But Benz stuck it out and soon started developing friendships on campus. The first person was Deborah Raiees-Dana in Student Support Services.
“Deborah prayed for me and was the first person at JBU that I felt I could be broken around,” Benz said. “She was the first person to hold my hand during prayer. She spoke in the spirit over me. And I sat in her office and cried and cried and cried some more. I told her, ‘I don’t belong here.’ To this day, Deborah is still my mentor and one of my moms.”
Benz also found acceptance and encouragement in the Bible department, specifically with her New Testament professor Jason Lanker and Diane Swysgood, the department’s administrative assistant.
Benz recalled her worry when Lanker asked her to stay after class. She knew she wasn’t getting a good grade and had missed class. Instead, he told Benz he was proud of her.
Lanker challenged Benz’s assumptions that God was mad at her.
“He would show me scriptures about God’s wrath being poured out onto Jesus and would ask me questions like, ‘Have you accepted Jesus? That means there’s no condemnation for you. God is not mad at you. He wants you to come back to him,’” Benz said. “I remember one time he kneeled on the carpet and started singing, ‘Jesus Loves Me.’”
Swysgood encouraged Benz, noticing when she was having a bad day and celebrating with her when she earned a good grade. It was the start of Benz’s healing process and prompted her to change her major to Christian ministry and formation.
In 2017, Benz joined New Generation, a campus group led by two brothers from Ecuador. The group met every Wednesday in the Prayer Room of Walker Student Center for worship and Bible study. Sometimes the group would pray and worship until 3 a.m.
“There were people there I connected with who were different from me in that they had a different ethnicity or socioeconomic status, but their heart for God was the same heart,” Benz said.
She said her experience at JBU was transformative, and she is grateful for the way people came alongside her. They asked thoughtful questions about where she needed encouragement and where she needed discipline, always assuring her it would be okay.
“They genuinely wanted me to succeed,” Benz said. “They chose to see what I couldn’t see. They chose to see what no one else wanted to see. They didn’t give up on me. They’re still not giving up.”
Benz’s vision for the future is to help others by opening a day shelter for women currently experiencing domestic violence.
The shelter will provide facilities for women to cook and do laundry together, allowing them to return home with these tasks completed. Women will also receive three hours of childcare, during which they can access a room with information on programs like SNAP and immigration resources — help that Benz said many women experiencing domestic abuse can’t access.
For women ready to leave their abusers, Benz will have a team prepared to act on their behalf.
“I want to have my team sit beside a woman as she fills out legal aid paperwork,” Benz said. “Then we’ll establish a day when she leaves her abuser. We’ll have people ready to watch her kids that day and others who will go into the home with her and help get their things.”
To realize her big dream, Benz started her master’s degree in JBU’s counseling program in 2023.
“I still pinch myself,” Benz said. “I was just a kid in Muskogee trying to survive. This wasn’t supposed to be me.”