Christianity. This is a word that so many of us throw around, but really don’t follow the truth of what it means. Or at least not in its original intended state. We identify ourselves with a label that tells us that we are “good people” because we go to church on Sunday, put smiles on our faces, and then yet feel miserable and treat others really crappy the whole rest of the week. I am saying this, because I have been that way myself.
I want to tell you a little prodigal story right now. Growing up, I lived in a household full of turmoil and a lot of inconsistency, and hurt that left me confused, and wanting to seek something more. I wanted to belong to something good, something that would make me feel like I was doing something right. I thought that church was the answer.
My mom, little sister and I had finally relaxed into realizing that my step father was finally out of the house after several years of emotional abuse that left us all completely battered and lost. We were all broken, and so, all immediately clung to the church that we began going to. My mother and I joined the choir, and I got involved with the youth. While at the same time, I continued partying in my last year of high school and became a huge hypocrite. I became the people that I looked at in the church with distaste, the people who I saw in the church on Sunday and at parties on Friday and Saturday. Within the choir, I began hearing people talk badly about others behind their back, and began noticing that people would say one thing in the church, smile in your face, but then would have no joy and no sense of what my heart wanted to feel. LOVE. I just didn’t feel it. It was as if the people were living in a matrix, and didn’t realize that they were being judgemental and fake. So, I put that face to God. I began doubting HIS love, and began to think that it was all a bunch of crap.
Around that same time, I met my boyfriend. He was wonderful, and I fell head over heels, while still not knowing how to love or function in a relationship. I had no sense of what healthy boundaries, respect, trust, or love looked like at that time in my life. Partially due to being 17, partially because of the lack of example, and a lot to do with that I was just lost. The church slowly fell to the back burner, my desire to know God fell even further, and he became my god. I quickly fell even deeper into this relationship that soon became a spiral of hurt that became an unhealthy and very familiar cycle. God was not at the center of my life and I quickly began to hate the person that I was becoming because I became reliant on my boyfriend to make me feel loved, yet had no clue how to give him the love that I wanted from him, and in life.
As I ran farther and farther from God, I fell deeper and deeper into depression and anxiety, yet it was covered up in a codependent happiness that I thought was what love looked like. Though he was not a bad person, the relationship went sour. It kind of became like the blind leading the blind. We ended up wounding and hurting each other along the way because of my skewed idea of love, and his inability to fill the place in my heart that God needed to fill first and bad choices we made.
Love was selfish, love was circumstancial, and it was something that you had to cling on to because you could lose it at anytime because you never REALLY knew where you stood. The voices from my childhood, the mistakes that I made, and the condemnation that I felt from my church and myself kept controlling me and throwing me further and further away from God. I was miserable, yet disguised it with my relationship, drugs, alcohol, and momentary happiness that left me feeling more empty than I started. Because God was not at the center of my life or his, I lost myself, I lost this relationship, and I got so low that many days I would drive aimlessly hoping to be hit by a car, or sitting in the pouring rain belly crying because I saw no point in going on, and no way to escape. I saw only hypocrisy, in my own life, and in the lives of the church. I felt guilt for the damage I caused in my relationship and in my family because of the cycle of hurt I was in and couldn’t get
out of.
I wanted to die, and I killed myself slowly every day through my actions, the situations I put myself in, and the lies I allowed Satan, my past, and myself to whisper in my ear every day.
I STILL hurt looking back at these things because, like they always say, hindsight is 20/20, I see my life and my heart more clearly now though.. I see moments where God was begging me to listen to HIM. Where he was crying out for me saying to me “my beloved, breathe of my breathe..just let me love you. Come, let me show you who I really am. Let go. Let go. Let go. You are safe, and you don’t need to stay captive.” But I just wasn’t ready. It took me hitting rock bottom, for me to finally be ready to let go of my past conceptions of love, to stop walking down that path, and to finally let go and run towards God. So, I decided to pursue this calling that made no sense to me, to come on the World Race, to leave that life behind and start fresh.
This is a call to everyone who may feel that you are alone, who may feel suicidal whether that be directly, or through a more insidious and slow spiritual death. For those of you who may have ever been in this place of hopelessness, or at the end of rope, or just completely lost and in denial that God wants your heart, this is for you friend. This is for those of you who have looked to the church instead of God himself to heal you, and to love you first. This is for those who have looked to a relationship to be the answer to everything, and to fill all your desire for love, especially love not given, or a love fallocy developed in childhood.
This isn’t to say that the church is not important, or to get it off the hook saying God doesn’t give responsibility to the church. He does. He expects the body of Christ to stand together and fight for one another in prayer, through time, love, and patience. I am simply calling you higher, to not give up, to listen to God speaking to you. Much of the time, he comes to us in our lowest points because sometimes those are the moments when we are still enough to actually LISTEN to his voice. I am both asking for the body of believers to come together in humility and realize that we ALL have burdens, we all have our cross to carry, every single day, and for those of you who don’t believe, to keep going and give him a real shot. It isn’t just a one time give it over to God, easy bake fix it solution that you’ll never have to look at again. Wounds take time to heal. God takes time to understand, and even then, we will always have misunderstandings and questions about and for him. God understands that, but let’s all keep our hearts real, and support each other in LOVE.
If you are reading this, and you have struggled with numbness, anxiety, self destructive behavior, codependency, shame and guilt for your actions and hurting people you love, first, I want you to know that you are not alone. You are not going to be in this forever, but you have to choose it, and fight for it. God is glorified in all of who I am today because even when I didn’t realize it, his hand was protecting me and preserving the joy in my heart that he gave me when he created me. He has preserved my love and strengthened me because of the lessons I’ve learned and the burdens I’ve carried. He is restoring me more and more everyday, and allowing me to simply be used as an example that God doesn’t pick the perfect people to use. He sees his son when he sees us. He sees human beings that he created and loves, who hurt for him because of the world we live in. The captives are set free, and he doesn’t leave things unfinished. Most importantly, his GRACE is everlasting and his love is timeless and incomparable to anything that we could ever imagine. Because of this, we as the body of christ HAVE to love the world because he first loved us.We have to choose to see our humanness and our similarities first, and to put our actions where our mouths are.
If you are a Christian and are reading this, let this be a reminder to you of God’s grace and a call higher to actively love the people in your life. Let this be a call to ACT, and not just have nice things to say, and a knife to shove in someone’s back when they’re not looking.
If you are not a believer and you are reading this, I want to say to you, that you are SEEN. You are not any less, and no Christian is any better than you. We are human beings, and we ALL need unconditional love and grace. These are simply things that we inherently kind of suck at as people, but that is not something that we have to lack forever. Because I promise you, God will slowly, if you let him, bring you closer and closer to a place of wholeness if you let him in. It doesn’t have to be in grand steps, give him an inch and he will expand that more than you even know. Try it. Try him. Look to him, and know that he will never ever fail you.
Love you all!
-Mariah
