A Different Type of Fairy Tale
Written with Chelsea Charping and Melinda Elledge
From the Archives: The Journey Summer 2015
Melinda Elledge was searching for her knight in shining armor. Instead, she found the Prince of Peace.
Life hadn’t exactly turned out how Melinda Elledge pictured it would. She described herself as the type of woman “who lived in a fantasy world.” She expected to have a fairytale wedding with her knight in shining armor, a man whom her parents adored. She expected her father to walk her down the aisle to meet that man. She expected to have a big family. At 38 years old, she had yet to experience the “fairytale”.
Elledge grew up in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. She was raised in a Christian home, and most Sunday mornings, she could be found sitting on a pew at Fairplains Baptist Church. She doesn’t remember the day, the month, or even the year that she walked to the altar to accept Christ, but she remembers it being the natural thing to do.
“It’s almost like it was just the way you were supposed to do it,” she said. “I don’t remember a difference in my life, and I think I struggled with that.”
Throughout middle and high school, Elledge was close with her youth group and the pastor at Fairplains. The pastor, especially, was instrumental in showing her what a Christian should be.
“It definitely served as an important piece of who I became today based on the fact that I had that foundation,” she said.
But Elledge “was just a kid.” When she moved to Charlotte to begin attending The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, her life began to change. Her friends from youth group all went to different areas, and they no longer shared a weekly Bible study meeting. She made new friends who didn’t share her values and didn’t have her church background.
“Once I graduated high school, … I really, truly became the definition of living for this world,” she said. “You hear people say a lot of times about being unequally yoked with a partner, but I think the same thing applies to friendships ... Instead of taking the high road and being the witness to [my new friends] that I could have been, I got sucked in the other way with not seeing the impact they were having on my life.”
Soon after starting school, Elledge decided to stop attending class. She had a job, and making money to support having a fancy-free lifestyle became more important to her than her education. She said she made many poor decisions during that time that led to not only unequally yoked friendships (friendships with people who weren’t Christians) but also unequally yoked relationships.
Her lifestyle lasted for only one semester. With nothing left of her GPA, she dropped out of school and decided to move to Wilmington, North Carolina, to begin school at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She speculated that her parents thought it would be good for her because she was living with one of her old youth group friends.
After such poor decisions previously and a year of community college credits from the past, Elledge decided to attend Cape Fear Community College before transferring to UNC-W. Her roommate from her old youth group had her own new group of friends and struggles of her own. Elledge’s lifestyle mostly remained the same, although her grades did improve. She worked two jobs, one as a veterinary technician and a second as a waitress.
“I felt like I was running away from that God presence in my life [because] being a Christian wasn’t as fun as the life that I was leading,” she said.
After a year, she successfully graduated from Cape Fear Community College with an associate’s degree. She was able to transfer into UNC-W and graduate within a year and a half. During her senior year, she started working at Target. She said that she never asked off for Sundays, so no one knew that church was important to her. At that point in her life, it wasn’t.
Soon after her graduation, she was offered an interview at Ogilvy & Ogilvy in New York City. It was her dream job. But nine days before her interview, 9/11 happened, and she decided New York was not where she wanted to be. Only two days later, she interviewed for an executive position within Target and took it. She moved around the East Coast for her job for the better part of a decade, leaving in 2008.
Hitting Rock Bottom
Elledge decided to use her nest egg from her time at Target to live a carefree life in Mexico. She spent months living a dream life, until the man she had grown close to conned her out of all her money. Broken and at the lowest point of her life, she decided to move back to North Carolina. God was drawing her home.
“I didn’t start looking up until I was rock bottom,” she said.
She moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she worked for her brother growing his customer base for his printing company. Her experience at Target helped her build a market for the business. She worked with him for a year until she decided to move back to Wilkes County to pursue a relationship she was in. She moved in with her parents and began working in Boone, North Carolina.
“Even though that relationship didn’t work out and I felt like I gave 5 years of my life to it, I know that was God’s way of working His way back into my life and bringing me back to where that foundation was,” she said. “He brought me back to Fairplains for one, to the family that I grew up with, all of those people I talked about previously who were so instrumental in my life.”
The relationship ended last year when Elledge’s life changed. On April 13, 2014, she met her pastor at the front of the church she grew up in during an altar call. She told him that she didn’t feel assured she was saved, and she wanted a change in her life.
Seeking a Fulfilling Life
After Elledge decided to truly accept Christ, she made some other changes in her life. She began tithing. For the first time since she began working, money no longer ruled her life. Although she makes less money now than she did when she worked at Target, she said she no longer worries about anything related to finances. She’s gotten out of debt and now gives her money to God.
She also started teaching Sunday school. At first, she was reluctant to accept. But she did, and now she teaches a classroom of 3 and 4 year olds on Sunday mornings. Through the experience, Melinda made a realization. Although her life hadn’t turned out the way she planned, she had found a purpose.
“It’s other people’s kids,” she said. “I was created to be something for them.”
And it’s not just the children at Sunday school. Elledge also enjoys giving advice to her nieces and nephews. As she sees them struggling with potentially making bad decisions, she tries to steer them in the right direction with advice from her past.
She has also toyed with the idea of providing a counseling service to a business plan she has considered. The counseling would focus on complete life fitness, including spiritual and physical wellness. Elledge said that she hates to see others who struggle with weight because she has experienced that and knows the difficulties.
“A lot of it has to do with emotional issues and obviously having that void of God in your life and not having that relationship,” she said.
Perhaps most importantly, Elledge now realizes how important it is to share her faith with others. Before she accepted Christ, and especially during her college years, she said she knows she led others astray with the lifestyle she led. She realizes that she can’t take those actions back, but now that she’s found the Prince of Peace, she hopes to influence people’s lives in a different way.
“A lot of people in my generation feel like when you want to talk about Christianity, or, as most people would say, religion, that you’re wanting to shove it down someone’s throat and that you’re wanting to impose your beliefs on them or judge them for what they do or do not believe, but now I see that that’s not my concern,” she said. “My concern is to be able to share what I feel. And if I can share with the one person that could experience the change that I know that I experienced, the joy from that can’t be put into words.”
Elledge’s fairytale ending finally came to light when she stopped seeking the love she so desperately wanted in a relationship and relied on God to lead the way. She met a man who she was first attracted to because of his faith in God.
“Little did I know from that initial date, where he took the time to say the blessing before dinner, the happiness God had in store for me,” she said. “What I’ve learned about the ‘fantasy world’ is that it is possible to have everything you have ever dreamed of. The difference is how what you dream of changes when you are living for God and not yourself. In the end finding the Prince of Peace also gave me my Knight. The story continues…”
