Her allegations brought down megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey. Then the anonymous trolls came for her.
The night she was suspended from her job, a Christian leader came to the rescue for her.
As a student at Central Baptist University, Marissa Jarrell was preparing for her senior year of college when she was inspired by a Bible study conducted by Pastor Randy Williams.
The 20-year-old had just returned home in 2015 after working as a substitute teacher in Arkansas.
She had been trying to live a Christian life, something she had struggled with since she was a young child.
“My whole life I had wanted to know more about God,” Jarrell recalled. “To be honest, I don’t think I knew God had a name until after I came out of my first marriage. And I kind of just went through the motions and did whatever my parents told me to do.”
Jarrell married her first husband, who was abusive to her.
“And that caused me to kind of get to know who God was,” she said. “And just all of a sudden I realized that I wasn’t going to be here forever.”
She became a Christian, and then she was ready for a divorce.
But even as she began to go through the motions of living her life as a Christian, she was being attacked.
“There were a lot of people that were attacking me because of my faith,” she recalled. “In terms of marriage, in terms of my faith. And I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
Then she discovered a Bible study led by Williams, who she had begun attending and even taught her.
“What happened to me was just like a blessing,” Jarrell said. “This young man that I had learned about in my Bible study, we had been talking about these things and he just showed me that it’s okay to be who you are. And I just kind of lost myself in the Lord at that time.”
Williams knew that Jarrell was still
