Honestly? Because I had decided it was time to stop running. I have spent so many years of my life never truly facing myself, never allowing my deeply seeded wounds to heal. Instead, I did everything I could to bury my pain, my past, and my guilt. Vulnerability has always been a struggle of mine, something that doesn’t come easy to me, so I did everything I could to appear strong on the surface, act like I didn’t care… which resulted in putting up walls and pushing the people that I did care about away from me.
You see I grew up in the church, I studied scripture, went to private school, attended church every week, wore a promise ring, did all the things that I thought a good Christian was supposed to do. As I child I did genuinely love God, but when my world fell apart just as I was entering my teenage years, I started using Christianity as a mask to hide what was really going on inside of me. I thought that if I did everything a good Christian was supposed to do, that I would somehow be spared from going through that kind of pain again.
I was struggling to be in control of my life, and when life kept flying out of my control, when bad things kept happening, I eventually just said I am done with it all. At that time, I didn’t want anything to do with a God that I thought had allowed such bad things to happen to good people. I felt abandoned, and I thought I had grown up believing in a God who actually really didn’t care… and that’s when I turned to everything imaginable to numb the pain I had been burying for so long… smoking, drugs, sex, alcohol… you name it. Even now this is hard for me to write, because for as long as I can remember, Christianity didn’t leave any room for failure, it didn’t openly allow for people to talk about their struggles and their mistakes, it wasn’t about love and forgiveness, it was about following the rules, about having this perfect image.
This program reflects God’s love so much because just like God, this mission program understands that we have all sinned, but it see’s our true worth, our true potential, the good that we have to offer, and how God can use anything bad that we have been through for his glory. Even when I was running as fast as I could away from him, God was still there, still pursuing me through it all. I had given into the lies that Satan fed me, that I was unworthy, that I didn’t have what it took, that I was unlovable, that I was a failure, that my mistakes were all beyond forgiveness. I was so trapped in his lies that I literally got a tattoo that said “set me free” because I felt so caged inside, it was like my plea with God to set me free from this pain, from this life. Change doesn’t happen overnight, I still have many struggles, but through having to face myself, through having to confront parts of my past, through choosing to no longer believe the lies, he has set me free.
I want to go on this trip because I am ready to be the person that I know God created me to be. God has taught me that I am worthy, that I still have so much in me to offer, that his plans for me are greater than the plans that I had for myself. Every single day he is teaching me to trust him more and more, to let him have control over my life. I want to go on this trip because I want to experience God in a real way, I want to see him in action. He pursued me, he has never given up on me, and instead of all that energy I wasted running from him, I want to use that energy for him, and in service of others. We cannot control the things that happen to us, we can only control how we react to those things, what we do with them. I don’t want an ordinary life, I want to go where God wants me to go, and to do whatever it is he needs me to do. We are called to be courageous, to step outside our comfort zones, to make a difference in the lives around us, to give people hope, and to love the people who have been put in our paths. No one is beyond God’s love, no one is beyond God’s forgiveness.
