I jolt awake, my heart pounding and a familiar ache in my chest.
I had dreamt a familiar nightmare – one that followed almost to a T the mistakes that are laced intricately into my past.
With my heart still threatening to leap right out of my body, I lay in the deafeningly silent room, willing myself to fall back asleep and praying with all my might that the nightmare stays far, far away from my unconscious state of mind.
But to no avail…
So I attempt to distract myself by diving into someone else’s story.
I flip open my laptop and pull up on my screen the next episode of a show that I had watched several times before.
Now the episode is over and I’m sitting in the still-dark room wondering if I can go back in time and decide not to watch it.
There’s still that well-known pain in my heart that seems to materialize every time the mistakes of my past make an appearance to haunt me.
I wonder to myself how I’m ever going to truly escape those things.
And a second later, I think to myself, haven’t I already dealt with these things?
Why do they still cut me so deeply?
I ponder, sigh, then brace myself for what I have decided must come next: I need to re-watch what I just saw in the tv show – the struggles, heartbreak, and painful growth that this girl experiences in her adolescent life.
And while I’m doing that, as well as after, I need to curl up in the arms of my Father and listen long and hard to what He has to tell me through this.
My story may sound like a cliché teenage angst sob story to many people.
But my story is what makes me the way that I am today.
My favourite part of it though is the part where my knight in shining armour rides in on his white stallion, scoops me up, and carries me off to his castle.
The plot twist is that my “knight” is Jesus.
I have yet to decide on a way that even begins to explain how extraordinary that part of my story is.
I was rescued from my past mistakes – taken from my lowest point by the Creator of the universe.
Even when I continue to make those same mistakes, my Rescuer returns over and over again to take me under His wing and forgive me.
This piece of my tale is what completely cancels out all of the bad in the rest of it.
Which is why it tears my heart open every time I hear a story – even a fictional one – of someone in such a painful place in his or her life.
That agonizing, well-known ache returns every time I hear a story that I can relate to, that sounds like my own.
My first reaction is to want to scream at them and show them my life and tell them what a mistake they’re making – that they need to get their act together so that they don’t end up regretting their past.
Then a voice in the back of my head reminds me that that didn’t work on me… and it won’t work on them either.
I’m discovering right now as I write this, that I have such a strong desire to be a relatable example to people.
Those years in high school were the years that broke my young, innocent spirit.
And in the years that have followed, the Lord has drawn me back to Himself and I’ve rediscovered what it means to “be myself”.
God has begun to show me what my identity is in Him.
I’ve heard it said that high school can be some of the hardest years of a person’s life.
I have quite a few years of life left, so I really have nothing to compare them to.
But I know that I struggled during those years – and I want to be used by the Lord as an example of rescue.
I desire for my life to be looked at by people and I desire for them to see so clearly the Lord’s hand throughout the whole thing.
Most of all, I desire for them to want that for themselves.
Maybe that’s an outrageously farfetched aspiration – to have people look at my life and see something so life-changing that they want to have Him for themselves.
Isn’t that God’s specialty though?
When is the last time you’ve experienced a “familiar ache in your heart”?
What was that ache for?
What are the ways that you’ve grown and healed from it?
