Former Hippie Finds Everlasting Peace, Love & Freedom

“Everybody was looking forward to Woodstock! It was the biggest thing coming.”

1969. The hippie movement in full swing. Five hundred thousand people descend on the Woodstock music festival, many searching for peace, love and freedom through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Fifteen-year-old Kimberly Nyborg was one of them.

“I was excited. I was going to see these bands that I used to listen to all the time and get high. It was wild and crazy and drugs and all kinds of it. I was in my glory.” 

Kimberly’s father left when she was a baby. She was brought up by her strict and often demanding mother. 

“I was looking for friendship,” Kimberly recalls. “I was looking for acceptance. I was looking for love, because I felt unloved a lot of the time.”

By age thirteen, Kimberly had completely rebelled, having sex and using drugs as she embraced the hippie culture along with its promises of love, peace, and no rules. She also grew her hair long, not only in rebellion, but to get the attention of boys.

“I liked the way I felt. I liked what I was getting from it. And I wanted, I wanted more. I wanted more of that freedom.”

At home, she and her mom were constantly at odds. One night, after Kimberly came home late–again--her mom decided to punish her by cutting her hair.

“I had long, really long, pretty hippy hair. I felt devastated that I – losing my hair means I lost any attraction.” Later that night, Kimberly swallowed a bottle of her mother’s valium, landing her in the hospital. As soon as she recovered, she ran away with a friend, but that “freedom” came at a price.

“A lot of really ugly things happened to me,” Kimberly remembers. “We ran down to Greenwich village, I ended up staying with somebody, and they had heroin and I ended up on a heroin overdose.”

After being dropped off at a clinic, Kimberly survived. Then, a girlfriend convinced fifteen-year-old Kimberly to help at Woodstock. But after the three-day festival ended, Kimberly decided again to run, this time to a commune in New Mexico with her friend. There, she thought she found love, but when she got pregnant, her boyfriend dumped her immediately.

“He wasn't having anything to do with it; I was devastated,” Kimberly recalls.

Rejected again, Kimberly drifted to another commune in Minnesota, where, at seventeen, she gave birth to her son. She got clean and patched things up with her mom, but for the next thirteen years, Kimberly bounced from one relationship to another. By the time she was thirty she had three children, had been married and divorced to an emotionally abusive man, and was feeling the weight of her many mistakes –such as the abortion she had at nineteen.

“I felt despicable, never happy with anybody I was with, doing things like, you know, having an abortion, ended up having an affair when I was married to my first husband. The hopelessness really got heavy and hard for me, and I started rethinking about suicide.”

Around that time, Kimberly met some new friends, who turned out to be Christians.

“They shared their struggles with me, yet they had the hope that Jesus was the only way to get through their struggles.”

Then, in February of 1984, they introduced her to a show called the 700 Club.

‘“I was fascinated by the testimonies that I saw on the 700 Club. I could really identify with them and the way they lived their life. My heart went, ‘Well, God, if you're really real and you can help those people, can you help me?’ When Pat Robertson said, “You know, if you identified with that story and you would like to ask Jesus into your life." he says, "I want you to pray with me." and so I did, and I received Christ that day.  I found my father. I found my perfect father, and I found someone to dance for, as silly as that sounds, and that was healing for me.’”

The following year Kimberly married her boyfriend of three and a half years. She says as she asked forgiveness for the abortion and many other things, piece by piece, God restored her heart. A big part of that was forgiving her father.

“I forgave him for abandonment. It was huge. It was a weight that was lifted off of my shoulders.”

Kimberly has worked in Christian radio for the past thirty years and currently hosts a morning show. These days Kimberly’s focus is on her relationship with Jesus, who loves and accepts her unconditionally.

“He responds; he listens. He pulled me out of the miry clay I was in. I know that Jesus is always with me. I've given him permission to shepherd me and to lead me. So, it's just allowing him to wrap his arms around me and be loved, which was all I ever really wanted.”