Testimonies

Welcome to our first special interest feature where we will be spotlighting testimonies of what the Lord has done for some of our Roadside Chapel family. We want to share these amazing stories of God's goodness and provision so that you can be encouraged to seek the Lord and believe Him for what He has for you in your time of need.

Trisha Nash (above) and

Pearl Bellomo (below)

Pearl Bellomo

Pearl’s powerful testimony began after she accepted the Lord about a year and a half ago. Says Pearl, “The biggest area the Lord helped me with is my gender identity. I didn’t hear so much about this (with other Christians), so sometimes I felt like I was the only Christian who has gone through this, which is definitely not true.” Pearl’s struggle began about three or four years prior to becoming saved while attending college where more liberal ideas, such as questioning gender, were introduced. “I was just doubting everything. I felt like I had to transform myself, like I had to change things about myself drastically to feel okay with who I was. I compared myself to men and feeling that I had to be better than them in some senses. And that was just a really terrible feeling all the time.” She says that she felt like she couldn’t wear anything feminine and had to cut her hair very short. “There were things holding me back in my own head, a lot of perversions of gender telling me I couldn’t do these things.”

Pearl says she was raised in a Christian home but what really pushed her to make the decision to follow Christ came after a distinct few months’ period prior to her conversion in July of 2023. “It was just this very, very intense period of loneliness, depression and anxiety. I had suicidal thoughts too. I hate to say it, but I did. I knew I needed to start over. I felt like my back was up against a wall, metaphorically. I couldn’t continue with the pain I was in, so I had to choose God.” After giving her life to the Lord, Pearl says that the Lord began to heal that false and damaging feeling of who she was. “I absolutely felt like the Lord touched that confusion inside of myself. It didn’t all turn around in one day. But I’m more secure now and not comparing myself to men and feeling that I’m in the wrong space doing something.” Pearl is now on a healing path that she says is “one-hundred percent God” who is freeing her and making her feel more comfortable with who He created her to be.



Ray Phillips

Trisha’s story of the Lord’s mighty work in her life began from a place of addiction. Trisha says that she came to Christ in the depths of her addiction and in the recovery phase, which she says was the most pivotal time in her life. While attending a rehabilitation facility in recovery, she says that they began to talk about God, “I immediately felt that I was in the right place and I that I wanted to go to church.” Other women at the facility convinced personnel there to take them to a local church because Trisha wanting to go so much. “We weren’t even supposed to be there,” says Trisha, “so it was really amazing. I remember at one point at the church they were showing a video about unloading everything from your past so your life is lighter and moving forward. From that, I just broke down and I knew that the Lord was there.” Trish began to go to Roadside Chapel through a friend of hers at the time. “I just kept questioning her about God and then she brought me here. From then on, I was all in for the Lord.”

Trisha believes that even though recovery is difficult, it’s more difficult if you don’t have the Lord. She says she hopes to share her story for others who are struggling with these same issues. ”I honestly believe having the Lord is the one reason it (recovery) stuck, the one reason I’m in the position I’m in now. Everything I lost I gained back and more, but it was through the growth of the Lord. I personally don’t think there is any other way to recover. The Lord has made me a very different person than I was before. I’ve shed that past and I am a new person.” 

Kayla Bouffard

Kayla Bouffard with her son, Watson

Kayla’s amazing story is also one of addiction and deliverance. Kayla didn’t grow up Christian and as an adult, she says she was very much an atheist. “I was very against God for many reasons. There were a lot of bad things that happened in my childhood and even in my teenage years.” In 2018, after multiple attempts at suicide, extreme drinking and abusing prescription Xanax, Kayla says that she attempted to take her life for the last time but didn’t go through with it after uttering a desperate prayer. “I just cried out to God and said, if you’re real you gotta do something because I can’t do this anymore.” A couple of months later, two new people, Amy and Dave, came to the Vermont Inn, where she was working and they began to talk about God to her—a lot. “I started feeling different. I started thinking that maybe Christians weren’t so bad. They just kept loving me and I was rough to love. One day I walked into the Inn and Pastor Vinny was there having lunch with them. It’s funny because I always use to drink before going to work. I know that sounds really bad, but it’s the truth and that day I had just decided that I wasn’t going to drink.” Kayla says that day, she walked over to Pastor Vinny’s table with a confidence she doesn’t usually have. Just then, she says, “Pastor Vinny started asking me questions about my faith and he could see that there was shame in me. Then he started sharing stuff about himself and I just felt that, wow, if God can accept him, he can accept me too. And so, I gave my life to Christ that day, and ever since, it’s just been great.” Although it has been a slow process, Kayla shares that all her anxiety, all her alcoholism, and all her other addictions have been taken away. Kayla is a wife and mom to four beautiful boys, seen here with Watson, her youngest.

Ray’s testimony is one of redemption, comfort and God’s glory shining through in the midst of heartbreaking loss. Ray describes himself as a believer in Jesus Christ who, back in 2016, tragically lost his wife to cancer after a six-year battle. Ray says that his wife had accepted Jesus into her heart, but throughout the time of her sickness, she did not believe that Christ loved her. “She would always tell me that she loved me more that anything in the world,” says Ray, “and I’d say, babe, that’s great, but you got the order wrong. You need to love Jesus more than me. Then, I’ll happily take second place.” However, she continued to struggle with the belief that God didn’t love her. In the week before her passing, Ray shares how God did something powerful to heal that fear in her. “I brought her up to my mother’s place on a very wet, cloudy day in October. I said, babe, you stand in front of these flowers so I can get a picture, and she did. Just as I took the picture, she looked up and the sky opened up and shined down on her. When the picture was done, the sky closed back up again. That was when she came up to me and grabbed me on both sides of my cheeks. She said, ‘Raymond, it’s alright, I know where I’m going.’ From that moment on, no matter how sick she was, you could see the joy of the Lord in her.” Ray continues to share, however, that the most difficult day for him was three days before her actual passing, his wife closed her eyes. “It was the hardest thing because the day I met her, I fell in love with her eyes. I called her ‘blue eyes’ from then on. But the great joy I received knowing that my wife knew where she was going assured me that I know where I’m going to find her.”

A year after her death, however, Ray said he found himself in a very dark state of mind, falling into some doubt concerning God’s love and provision with the great loss of his wife. “I dropped to my knees on the bed and went into prayer, praying in tongues. At that moment, God brought me to a place that I had never been before. I knew without a doubt where she was, and it was all in the Spirit.” Ray knows first-hand the message of the Psalmist, “The Lord is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18) Today anyone who sees Ray knows that he shines with the light of his savior as one who has received comfort, reassurance and great strength in time of great need.