As I sat in my air conditioned hotel room every night during the month of December, mind too super-charged to fall asleep, I couldn’t figure out why my world felt like it was unraveling and spinning aggressively out of control.
My anxiety spiked for the first time since October, the beginning of the Race, and I found myself needing to take my medication more often than I was comfortable with. Why am I so anxious? I kept asking myself repeatedly, before I would start to fall back into old habits without realizing it.
This always happens, Hannah. Just when things start to go really great and you start to show improvement, you ruin it with your anxiety. You really need to work that out with God. I mean, seriously. I’m sure He’s very disappointed in your inability to trust Him. What kind of hypocrite are you? You’re on a missions trip and you can’t even trust the God you’re trying to tell people about? You’re such a fake. You’re the biggest phony I’ve ever met. You need to get it under control, this is starting to get embarrassing. How are you ever going to be able to live a normal life if you’re constantly crippling yourself?
Tears streaming down my face in frustration with my inability to be healthy and anxiety-free, it suddenly hit me: the voice was back. The voice had been back for weeks and I was so wrapped up in myself that I didn’t even notice its black presence. My tears of frustration turned into tears of grief. After all the work that I’d done over the past two years to block out that sinister voice, suddenly I was hearing it all over again.
I locked myself in my bathroom, in a hysterical wave of tears, called my best friend and told her everything. “It’s like I know what I need to do to get better,” I told her, in-between sobs, “For the longest time, for years, I never even knew I was sick. And then, you know, I finally figured it out. The next battle was admitting I was sick, and identifying the voice and the thoughts when they were happening. This took awhile.”
She nodded her head, sympathetically, already knowing the truth behind the words that I spilled out as I tried to externally process in a puddle of tears on the bathroom floor, “And that took a really long time. Like, two years. And then I left for the Race, and it was good, because I didn’t hear the voice as often anymore, and when it tried to come back, I blocked it. But now, I feel like God is telling me that it’s time to learn how to heal from this whole process once and for all. In all his love and mercy, He has allowed me to run away from this for so many years, but now I’m hitting a wall. He’s telling me it’s time to stop running, Becca.”
She continued to nod, a sad sort of smile breaking on her face.
“But what’s so endlessly frustrating is that I don’t know how to do it.” I burst into a fresh batch of sobs again, “I know I need to. For the first time I can truly admit the
depths of despair I carry in my heart and that the way I’ve viewed myself for my whole life is deeply sick, it’s disturbing, it’s wrong, it’s sin. I know I need to heal and move on and love myself, and I keep trying, but I don’t know how to get there.
I can see it! It’s like I can see where I want to be right over this stupid wall, and I know that I have to climb the wall in order to get to the other side, but I don’t have any climbing tools. I know what I need to do, but I don’t know HOW to do it. And.. And- And I’m tired, Bek. I’m so tired of this battle. I’m so tired of looking in the mirror and having to constantly fight my own mind to love what I see.
I’m tired of knowing that the problem isn’t my body, it’s my eyes- it’s the way I see my body. That’s what’s so exhausting. If my body was actually the problem, I could do something about it. But no matter what I do to my body, or my mind, or my character, they never going to be accepted by my eyes because my mind is so broken from all these years of self-abuse.”
The words shocked and gripped me as they came pouring out. It doesn’t get easier to hear yourself speaking these truths out loud.
Somewhere, deep within me, something twinged. Something new. A deep pain, an overwhelming grief, and a different voice began to speak. “You are my daughter, you were made for me to love you.”
That new voice continued to whisper to me for the rest of the month, and I was constantly awash in the conflicting battle that was raging within me between my twisted mind, my sinful heart, and the living, powerful Holy Spirit inside of me.
A few days later, I let my team in on the battle. They knew it was something I struggled with before, we have talked about it briefly here and there, but this time I just flat out told them that I needed prayer because I can no longer do this on my own. I prayed for the eyes to see myself the way God sees me, and they prayed that over me too, daily. One night, during a team time, we did an exercise of open-eyed prayer over each other. Praying to God in thankfulness for our individual sisters and the gifts we see in them, as we stared them directly in the face, maintaining eye contact the entire time.
Every one of them prayed for me, looking directly at me, for me to see myself the way they see me, the way God sees me. I sat there, flooded in humility and cried so very many tears at the depth of love I felt in the room for me.
I wish I could sit before you, as I type this in a quiet café somewhere in Cambodia, and tell you that it only took the remainder of the month for all of this trauma to sort itself out.
I wish I could tell you that God showed up in a crazy miraculous way and reached down to touch my mind with His mighty hand and POOF healed my heart and my mind on the spot.
I wish I could tell you that this isn’t going to be a long healing process and that sometimes, the thought of it doesn’t still fill me with a misleading feeling of hopelessness.
What I can tell you with confidence is that the hopelessness isn’t real.
The hopelessness is a tool that the enemy is trying to use now, grasping at straws to be able to maintain his slipping control on my mind.
What I can tell you is that God is moving in me in awe-inspiring ways.
He has been, ever since that painful night on the bathroom floor in Vietnam.
What I can tell you is that even though my journey is far from over, I have begun to pray for His eyesight every single day, and little by little, I have already started to not recognize the person staring back at me, because she is so lovely and strong and full of faith that God will never reject, abandon, nor discard her.
My teammates are astoundingly annoying and overwhelmingly wonderful (said with the deepest love in my heart for them) during this entire process, as Betsy pushes me to declare 3 positive words about myself almost every morning, and Blair Grace has committed to forcing me to write 23 Things I Love About Myself this year (she told me this on my 23rd birthday.) And all of them have a habit of saying “I rebuke that.” Every time something negative comes out of my mouth about myself. The skeptic in me rolls my eyes and pushes against these seemingly trivial practices with all that I am, but deep down I know they are right and that God is using them to teach me so very much about the depth, height, width and breadth of His overwhelming, never-ceasing, all-consuming love for me.
And so, as I close this blog out, I want to leave you with three things that God is teaching me about myself and my identity right now that are slowly, quietly, starting a revolution in my soul from the inside out.
1.) I am redeemed.
2.) I am desired by the eternal creator of our universe.
3.) I am full of hope.
And a 4th and final thing: I am no longer under the control of the voice of Evil, because I am God’s daughter, and I was created for Him to love me.
Thank you for hearing my heart.
