When I was little, I wanted all the cute, cliché things that you see little girls and teenage girls and young women experiencing in movies…and I got them.
At age 3, I began taking ballet lessons.
At age 5, I began gymnastics.
At age 8, I started horseback riding lessons.
At 15, I had the best boyfriend any teenage girl could’ve asked for; but then I kissed my math tutor and perfect boyfriend broke up with me…
so I got the cliché horrific teenage heartbreak, too!
At sweet sixteen, I had some sort of strangely indefinable romantic relationship (who really knows at 16?) with a nineteen-year-old in the Army who sent me letters from Iraq while he was deployed for the first part of my 11th grade year.
I switched schools so much that I went to 9 public schools before I graduated high school, meaning I got to be the “new girl” SEVERAL times.
For you Glee lovers, I WAS Rachel Berry. I had leading roles in every single school play, I held leadership positions in bands and choirs, was featured in solos, and given my high school’s “Performing Arts Student of the Year” award…twice.
At 18 I got a seasonal job dancing with an opera company in D.C.; and, of course, would join my company after work at the bar down the street from the theater, where I received countless complementary drinks somehow despite my age.
The world told me I could have a lot of things, and I wanted all of them, and I got most of them.
I’ve already shared in previous blogs where that got me; but I’ll sum it up here:
By age 19:
I had done a decent amount of experimenting with drugs,
I had done a decent amount of experimenting with drugs,
was drinking heavily 3-5 nights a week,
had been abused by more than one boyfriend,
had been betrayed by almost all of my closest friends and was carrying scars of distrust of both men and women from those experiences that I’m STILL discovering, forgiving, and releasing,
and I had almost no real relationship with anyone in my family.
Based on the contrast between who I was at work, who I was in my home, who I was at school, and who I was in my head and in my unseen activities; I was at least two different girls living at least two different lives, likely more, and none of them were really me.
I do remember picking up my Bible every now and then, though, and I remember that the verses begging me to regard my body as a temple holy and pleasing to the Lord always hit me with conviction, but there was one that always especially confused me:
"Daughters of Jerusalem, I beg you, do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires."
…
What if I didn’t have a choice?
What if, at age 8, when I was learning to ride horses, taking ballet lessons and gymnastics; I was abused and parts of my body were awakened without my permission?
What if that allowed a spirit of perversion to enter my life, and two years later I not only had my first kiss – but was making out – at age 10?
What if I honestly believed from the time that I was in the 3rd grade that what happened to my body and what I did with my body didn’t matter? – and along with that, what if I quickly learned that using my body to gain affection was the only value I had?
Those questions are a large part of what deterred me from being able to really see God’s love for so long…because I didn’t choose that initially; and by the time I understood what I was doing with my body, I didn’t understand my own worth enough to care.
I believed I was so spoiled, so dirty, so damaged, and so lost that God’s redemption couldn’t possibly be powerful enough to place me at the same table as His disciples, and why would He want to?
I would often have the thought that the Gospel is Truth: Jesus’ blood does atone for everyone’s sin and offer everyone eternal life and access to God…except for me.
Satan seemingly won the battle over my identity – the way I see myself and where I see my own value – when I was 8, kept winning it until I was 19, and still had one flicker of hope left until I heard these words a year ago:
“God loves you too much to leave any part of you broken.”
That means that He’s going to bring back every situation that I thought I’d been alone in, and He’s going to show me where He was in it.
He’s going to completely redeem me: soul, mind, AND body.
While on the race, I’ve had to re-heal from wounds of my heart that I thought had been healed long ago.
The problem is, I had healed them myself.
Imagine a shattered crystal chandelier that has been repaired by a small child with popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue…
That’s what I’d done to my heart, I had pieced it together so that it functioned – sort of.
It reflected light and projected partial rainbows on walls through various prisms when light hit it just right,
but parts of it were blocked –
there was glue in the cracks that held it together, sure, but that glue made the crystal impure.
It diminished its potential.
It didn’t allow light shining on it to be reflected in all of the glory that it was designed to reflect light with.
It doesn’t make sense
that a shattered crystal chandelier
can be repaired to a purity
greater than its former glory without time being reversed –
but what if…
it’s placed in the hands of a God who exists outside of time?
In the past six months, God has taken my heart and shown me where I left impurities in it when I repaired it myself – and He’s had to separate pieces that were “glued” together in order to reform them the way they were designed to be.
In part of that, God has asked me for something very, very specific.
He doesn’t exist in time, but I do.
