About Glenda Mays Shaw

A Neighborly Visit That Changed Everything

There are several big moments when God showed up, changed Glenda’s world, and sent her searching for something deeper.

The first came as she was watching her marriage fail, and at the same time, she was suffering from physical problems related to her birth control method. She received healing for the physical pain when a neighbor prayed. The next day, she went seeking the God who heals and found the Holy Spirit she had been missing, and never knew. He, the Holy Spirit, took her on a journey of discovery and healing for what was broken and missing in her life.

Another big moment came when she received a phone call she had waited years for. And came the day after a pivotal prayer. Her oldest son — given up at birth when she was a teenager — reached out. When she heard his voice, something in her heart began to fill. And pain and fear began to loosen.

The next big moment came quietly, the way some important things often do.

Glenda had spent most of her life angry at her mother. The rejection she experienced growing up had left a wound she wore like a permanent bruise. She talked about it, the beatings, and the name-calling. She rehearsed it. She warned people about her mother the way you warn someone about a dangerous road. But one day — through a moment she can only describe as the Holy Spirit telling her to walk in her mother’s shoes. So, she walked that mile in her mother’s shoes, and the ground shifted under her feet. She understood why she carried the rejection and saw God’s plan more clearly.

She didn’t excuse what had happened to her. But for the first time, she began to understand it. Understanding cracked the door open to something she had believed was beyond her reach: forgiveness and being able to fully forgive her mother, and that changed Glenda. She became someone who could now carry deep peace. The peace that passes all understanding.

These moments — her son’s voice on the phone and her unexpected compassion for her mother — became two of the inciting incidents that set Glenda on the road to writing, healing, and sharing what she has learned.

The Struggle: Bitterness Had Become Her Address

Long before those moments, Glenda Mays Shaw had built a life marked by hard work, loyalty, and a fierce determination to keep going no matter what.

She grew up in circumstances that left marks. Childhood trauma — the kind that doesn’t have a neat beginning and end, and that a child carries alone, in silence, because no one has told her she has the right to speak — shaped the young woman she became. She learned early to keep moving. To work hard. To be reliable. To push through.

And she did. Glenda built a career in office management that spanned years and earned real recognition. She was awarded the Outstanding Employee award. She was recognized for growing accounts receivable to above $100,000 per month — a tangible measure of diligence and precision. She rose to the highest rank available to a field computer operator at the company where she served. She was the person others counted on to train the new hire, to solve the problem, to get the job done. Whether it was teaching data entry, computer operations, office procedures, or accounts payable and receivable — including the kind of collections work that requires both firmness and grace — she showed up and delivered.

But inside, something was festering.

The wounds she hadn’t dealt with were still there, wrapped in busyness and bravado. She describes herself in those years as an angry, bitter, unpredictable woman. She told anyone who would listen about the abuse she had suffered. She planned to write a book about it — not to heal, but to expose. Not hopeful. Raw. Ugly. Just like the pain she felt inside. Friends quietly stepped away. The bitterness she carried was, as she would later write, corroding the container it lived in, her.

She was stuck. Busy, capable, accomplished — and stuck.

The Darkest Moment: The Book She Almost Wrote

There came a season when Glenda was circling the wound so closely that it had begun to define her entirely.

She doesn’t speak about all of it publicly, and that is right — some of what she carries belongs in the pages of her coming book, shared in the fullness of its context, not stripped down to a paragraph on a webpage. But she will say this: she reached a place where the pain of the past was no longer just a backdrop to her life. It had moved to center stage. The anger had voices. The bitterness had arguments. The unforgiveness had justifications that felt airtight.

She was preparing to write a book that would have released none of that poison — only spread it wider.

And she was alone with it in a way that only people who have been betrayed at the most foundational level — in childhood, by the people who should have protected them — can fully understand. The kind of alone that doesn’t go away just because you have a husband, a circle of friends, a farmhouse with a warm kitchen.

That was her darkest moment: not a single dramatic night, but a long season of carrying something heavy with no real belief that it could ever be put down.

The Discovery: God’s Way Was Not the World’s Way

What changed was not Glenda’s circumstances. It was Glenda.

Through the grace of God — through prayer, through Scripture, through years of Bible Study Fellowship, through her connection with Face-to-Face Ministries and the Immanuel Approach — Glenda began to discover what genuine inner healing actually looks like. Not the world’s version of “just get over it.” Not therapy-speak about “closure.” But the specific, supernatural work of the Holy Spirit moving in a heart that is finally willing to let Him.

The Immanuel Approach — a healing prayer model rooted in an interactive relationship with Jesus — became one of the most significant discoveries of her journey. Through it, she learned that healing doesn’t always come all at once. It comes in layers. The Holy Spirit is faithful to the next layer when you are ready.

She learned that forgiveness is not absolution of the offender. It is not pretending nothing happened. It is not reconciliation (which requires two willing people) or trust (which must be earned). It is the act of releasing another person — and your own hatred of them — into God’s hands. It is setting yourself free. As she would later write: forgiveness became the key that unlocked her future.

She forgave her mother. She forgave those who had harmed her in childhood. She forgave herself for the years she wasted feeding the bitterness.

And the peace that followed was unlike anything she had known, she says; it was the last piece to her healing.

Her Mission Now: Teaching Others to Find Joy on the Other Side of Pain

Glenda is, at her core, a teacher. It’s not a title she picked up — it’s who she has always been.

She taught Sunday School for years: nursery, toddlers, ten-year-olds, and teenage girls. She taught colleagues how to operate computers and manage data when the technology was new and intimidating. She trained office staff in accounts receivable and payable. She was patient with beginners and demanding of herself. She has always believed that what she knows is worth passing on — not to show off, but because someone else might need it.

Now that belief applies to the most important thing she has ever learned.

Glenda lives with her husband, David, in a century-old farmhouse outside Athens, Georgia. If she’s not writing, she’s in the kitchen or the garden — cooking, growing herbs, putting up jams and jellies, living the quiet life she once couldn’t have imagined having. She is part of Intercessors for America, a prayer community she has been a member of since the 1970s. She is learning and growing through Author Media as she prepares to share her newest work with the world.

Her upcoming book — The Holy Spirit: Encounter Him and Find Power, Peace, and Joy! — is the distillation of everything she has lived through, studied, prayed over, and discovered. It is her testimony and her teaching offered in one place: that the Holy Spirit is real, present, and active, and that joy is not a reward for people who have had easier lives. It is available to anyone who believes in Jesus. And she says we all need to be touched by Immanuel because we all have been hurt.

She also carries with her a collection of broken glass — fragments gathered from around the farm over thirty years, displayed in clear glass containers like frozen memories. It is, in its way, the perfect image for her whole life and message: beauty found in what has been broken, fragments arranged with care, light passing through what someone else might have thrown away.

If you are carrying something heavy — old wounds, long bitterness, relationships that went wrong, a childhood that left marks — Glenda Mays Shaw is writing for you.

She has been where you are. She found a way through. And she wants to show you the way.

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