Saturday night, I had an amazing conversation with a new friend about my faith in God. I often forget that people who meet me now have no idea how different my life used to look, and in the case of a lot of college students–that my life looked identical to theirs before my senior year. God has given me a testimony that is extremely powerful to my generation, yet I often sell it short and leave out so many of the painful details. So over the course of this blog, I want the full work of God in my life to unravel in words. Because God changed my heart, changed my life really fast. But the “before” picture is an even bigger testament to the “after”–to the person I am becoming still.
So I often reference June 6, 2009 in Cambodia as the moment everything changed–the single moment that I gave my life to Christ. But what about everything before that? Life was a mess. The rest of this post is about a time I still can’t really put into words because of how much it broke me. It’s a story that gets left out of any spoken part of my testimony. But God used this time in my life to humble me to loneliness and to helplessness, to strip me of any remaining ideas I had about being able to go through life without a Savior.
After a series of surgeries, it became clear that my aunt was going to make it, although no one knew what “recovered” would look like. After five days in the hospital, my mama went back home. I went back to school. My uncle spent his days at the hospital but had to go home to their son 40 miles away at night. But he was so distraught about my aunt being alone that I volunteered to spend my evenings at her side. For over thirty straight days, I would leave USC around six, wait in the waiting rooms until night check-ups were done, and then I’d be allowed into ICU. For the first few weeks, my aunt couldn’t speak. When she became coherent, she would call me my mother’s name. I would stay until she fell asleep, then call my uncle, tell him she was taken care of for the night, and then I would drive the half hour back to school. I would go home to my eleven housemates, to my homework, to everything exactly as I had left.
Some nights I cried. Other nights I screamed. Mostly I just stopped speaking about it at all. My friends stopped asking. They would hug me if I would let them, but even that I stopped responding to. And so. Now over a year and a half later, I still don’t talk about that month plus of my life. I still can’t process the extent of the loneliness and hopelessness I felt for all of those miles in my car, for all of those nights staring out over Westwood.
I got tired of people telling me I was a great daughter, a caring niece, a dedicated and loving person. I hated it. Because I didn’t feel like that. i felt alone. I felt exhausted for being unable to change circumstances. I felt heavy for not being upbeat. I never felt willing. I felt guilty for the nights I was impatient in traffic. I felt overwhelmed by my endless to-do lists. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t find meaning in my schoolwork, in my friendships, in anything.
It was during these weeks that I began realizing that I couldn’t do everything or anything on my own. I couldn’t be responsible for making anything better for anyone else. I couldn’t keep anyone else’s world spinning because I couldn’t even keep my own life together. I didn’t walk out of the hospital each night feeling like my time there had been meaningful. I left feeling like life was too fragile. I was angry. I was hurt.
And it was from this mindset that I left for Cambodia to study genocide. I had tried to put my own life back together, but I was just a house of cards waiting for one light breeze to come blow my life to smithereens. Luckily, God was that swift wind. He stepped in. He took over. And so the girl you meet now is a girl whose faith is defining, a girl who people think was raised as the pious church-goer. God’s grace is unfathomable and incredible.
