A Huntsville student shares how faith, friendship, and honest prayer meet depression with hope
Bryanna Waddell knows the distance between growing up around church and learning to receive love. She was raised in a Christian home in Huntsville, the daughter of a pastor, and she still points first to a name for God that comes from Hagar in Genesis.
“The God who sees me means a lot to me,” she said. That sentence carries much of her testimony. Before college ever entered the picture, Bryanna had already learned that a family can be close to ministry and still walk through seasons when church feels painful, uneven, and hard to hold.
A Huntsville childhood with an uneven church rhythm
Her family moved every year of her life until she was six. Huntsville became home around her seventh birthday, and she has lived here ever since. Her dad’s work in church brought the family into the life of a congregation, but that chapter did not unfold smoothly. When the church role ended hard, regular Sunday worship faded for a long stretch.
Wednesday nights became her steady place. Bryanna went to church midweek, sometimes with siblings and sometimes while everyone in the family was finding a different rhythm. She was homeschooled, confident in many ways, and still young enough that she had not yet faced the kind of adversity that forces a person to name what she believes when life stops cooperating.
By high school, the pressure had moved inward. She chased standards she set for herself and standards she thought other people expected, then found that meeting them never settled the ache underneath. She described reaching a point where she knew she needed help, not another attempt to be impressive. In her junior year, at that same Wednesday night church, she gave her life to Christ.
“You say that you love me and I don’t love myself and I need that,” she recalled praying. The moment did not erase every struggle. It gave her a new center. Transformation came gradually, and it still comes that way.
Learning love in community
College gave Bryanna a different kind of church life. At Sam Houston State University she found the Baptist Student Ministry and watched students build identity around Christ rather than grades, plans, or performance. That witness mattered. She was no longer only hearing that God loves people. She was learning what that love looks like when it becomes friendship, patience, and presence.
“I still struggle with mental health,” Bryanna said. “I think the Lord has redeemed that in so many different ways.” Her story does not treat faith as a switch that turns pain off. It treats redemption as something God does in the middle of real life, including the parts that remain unresolved.
Because she knows the loneliness of not loving herself, loving other people has become her passion. She has learned that community is not a cure-all slogan. It is a practice. “Trying to be a good friend changes your heart and your life,” she said. That conviction now shapes her work with the Baptist Student Ministry, where she helps welcome students, serves on ministry teams, and shares the gospel through the Three Circles while weaving her testimony into the conversation.
Her honesty has opened doors she did not script. After sharing at a ministry training night that she had once been suicidal, a student told her through tears that she had stayed because the story sounded like her own. Bryanna does not tell that part for shock. She tells it because a student who feels unseen may need to hear that God sees her before she can believe anyone else does.
Honest faith while depression remains
Bryanna is careful not to promise that obedience removes depression. She still names hard days. She still has nights when sadness sits at the center of her heart even while she laughs with friends and knows the Lord will redeem what hurts. That tension led her to the story of Lazarus and the shortest verse many Christians know by heart.
In John 11, Jesus arrives after Lazarus has died and weeps with people who are grieving, even though resurrection is near. Bryanna has held onto that detail. “The Lord is sitting there with me,” she said, describing what the story teaches her when depression returns. Honest prayer, in her telling, is not a lack of faith. It is one way faith stays truthful.
That is where her testimony lands for other students. She does not ask them to perform strength. She invites them to be seen by God, to stay in community, and to tell the truth in prayer while redemption is still unfolding. Her life began in a pastor’s home, wandered through a season when church was mostly Wednesdays, and found a new rhythm on a college campus where friends helped her live loved.
About Bryanna Waddell
Bryanna Waddell is a staff member at the Baptist Student Ministry at Sam Houston State University, where she helps welcome new students into community. To hear more conversations like hers, watch Students of the Kingdom on YouTube.