Welcome back to part 2 of who knows how many blogs to help catch you up on my life! If you missed the first blog, head over to The Importance of Community: When Your Hands Are Tied Behind Your Back to catch up before jumping in to this blog.
————————————
Have you ever heard the analogy: you can always tell a good sculptor because when their art pieces are in the light there is no blemish? Maybe it doesn’t make sense to you, so I’ll try and explain it a little bit. If a sculptor makes a mistake, accidentally takes off a piece he needs or gets distracted and messes up, he has 2 options: start over, or glue the piece back on. But, all good sculptors know that if they glue it back on people will be able to tell because in the light there will be a line where the glue went.
When God created humans, he didn’t make a mistake because He made us in His likeness and said it was “very good”, Genesis 1:26-27, 31. So, if God made us in His image, He had no intentions of wanting to crush us because the very reason He made us was so that He could have communion with us, similarly to the Trinity.
But sometimes, I get caught up in thinking that we are dealt a little more than what we can actually handle. And that is the honest truth, because Christ wants us to depend on Him, to lean on Him when it gets too hard. And that is something that has been hard for me these past couple of months. I like to think that I can do it on my own, and that is very prideful of me. When it gets too hard for me to bear, I cry out to the Lord and ask Him to take the pain, the hurt away, and He does! But that’s not the point of believing in Christ. He wants to be with me 24/7/365 and I have stiff-armed Him so often that I feel alone in the very times He is sitting right next to me. This is what the Lord and I have been working on.
When I was in the Philippines in July, I got hit with some pretty big storms. I found out that a really good family friend had passed away from stage 4 pancreatic cancer that had spread to her lungs and brain.
Angela was someone I met 5 years ago on vacation in Cabo San Lucas. My parents and I were on our way to see timeshares so we could get a couple vouchers for free activities when we met her. She was from New Jersey and us Texans had no idea what we had just gotten ourselves in to with her! Every year after that we would meet her in the same place at the same time and just enjoy our time together. At one point she even met us in New York City to visit and a couple months later I was able to go to her daughters wedding.
I reached out to her daughter the night I found out, and to my disbelief her first response was, “How do I get through this? I feel so broken. I’m at the point I want to go too, I just want to be with her.” I began to bawl as I sat at the dinner table playing cards with 2 friends I had just met that month. I bawled because I was first-handedly watching as the enemy tried to tear this family apart. I fought so hard, trying to reassure her that life was better than anything she could do with her own hands, but was that enough? Were my words going to deter my friend from taking her life that night? I attempted one last time to reach out to her with no response, and I was broken. I cried out to the Lord on behalf of my friend as I showered that night, because I didn’t want to wake anyone up in the room full of 17 other women. I went to bed that night questioning if I was a “good-enough” Christian because this family I had known for 5 years didn’t once have the opportunity to hear the gospel from me.
It felt like someone had picked up a picture of my life, and as they were turning around with it, they threw it up against a wall and all the little pieces of my life were broken, shattered really, with no way to put them back together. Everything after this day was hard. I couldn’t breathe. I could barely sleep at night. Every ounce of me wanted to make sure my friend was okay, but the 13 hour time difference made it almost impossible! I had to rely on the Lord, that He would protect her from the enemy minute by minute, and He did.
But then came the stream of my emotions, the ones I had kept locked away so that my friend could be broken. I retreated from my community, my team, and did ministry that was easy. I would go into the library every day and arrange books because it was something I could control. I put new labels on books because it was the only thing I could actually understand. God forbid I had to put a label on myself, it would have been, “BROKEN, GIVE AWAY”. I would lash out at the people around me because I had no idea how to even begin to grieve what I had just been through.
I was rigid, mean, and out of control. I remember waking up one morning to go to the bathroom where a teammate approached me and asked what they could do to help. I yelled at her and I ended up storming off to my room and bawling on the ground because I was broken, shattered beyond what I could have ever imagined.
And yet the pain was not over. I found out that morning that my dad’s uncle had passed away. Exactly a week after my friend had passed away, another death came around the corner. I can’t even begin to express the way I felt. No amount of words can ever take the pain away from what happened in my life that week. And yet I sit here, in Chile, on the up and up. I don’t know what changed in me, because it was nothing in my power. But I can say that I began reading my bible more. I finished reading Ann Voskamp’s book, The Broken Way, and I began to share a little about how I felt. And over time, the pain lessened. It’s been a month, and even just writing out this blog still hurts. I cry because I feel like a part of me was lost. But I know that my identity does not come from whether or not I share the Gospel with people. That family knows I love the Lord and they could tell by my actions, because when we don’t have the words, our actions speak for us.
So, when my life felt like it was in a million, sharp, little pieces, and I couldn’t do anything, the Lord stepped in. With His gentleness and kindness He picked up all my pieces and He molded me into what He intended me to look like. He took my ashes, the parts of me that were dead, the dirt of my life if you will. And He breathed His life back into me, just as he originally did in creation, Genesis 2:7. I can’t say when exactly it happened, I’m not sure I even want to know the exact point, but what I do know is that I wake up every morning by the grace of God and get to share about His redemptive love. I get to share about how it is never about us, but how He uses us as living vessels to bring others into His love, and I’m so thankful for that.
