Hope

So much is swirling in my brain and in my heart it’s difficult to know where or how to start. But it needs to come out of my head. So it may be difficult to follow, it may be messy and not properly edited, but I don’t care.

To be sitting here so broken, so afraid of what’s next, so raw and unprotected feels asinine, it feels like the opposite of what I should be doing, the opposite of what I have always known to do best. Hiding. I’m an expert hider. It’s all I have known and the only way I have survived my life. But I sit here today naked, my cover is gone, and it’s because slowly but persistently the God who loves me do desperately has pursued and relentlessly surrounded me until I could let go. Until I had no choice but to let go. He has shown me the uselessness of my ways, the futility of my striving, and allowed me to break down, and give into His grace. Each layer of protection He takes away feels like being killed, it feels like dying, it feels like the pain I’ve been hiding from all my life will swallow me whole. It feels cruel, and mean one moment and the next moment it feels like the only hope I will ever know this side of heaven. How? How can feeling so much pain and feeling so hopeless lead to something good?

The paradoxes of God never cease to amaze me and leave me with very inadequate and empty words to attempt to describe it, but I still try because…because I never want to forget this. If I have ANYTHING of value to offer anyone it is my open bleeding and broken heart, that beats for Jesus still. That hangs on to His hope, and His sacrifice for ME.

Maybe none of this makes any sense if you don’t know me, if you don’t know my life, my past, my journey, and my story.

There are details too horrifying to ever put on paper (or on screen) so I will spare you those. I will share that as a little girl my hope was taken away. My body was violated, my soul was murdered by the very people who were supposed to love me, care for me and protect me from a difficult and painful world. I had no hope. I had no dreams, I learned at a very tender age to never hope and dream, to never believe in good things, to fight for survival and protect myself from ever DESIRING love again. But I also learned something more vile, vicious and toxic. I learned to believe that the shame of the sin done against me belonged to me. I not only believed that, but I became that. I BECAME THE SHAME of my abuse.

And then I became whatever I needed to become in order to escape that shame. In order to hide from it and to hide it from others. I became whatever I needed to become in order to be loved. But here’s another paradox. I had learned that needing love invited abuse, so I couldn’t really allow love in, but I was still desperate for it, so I allowed abuse instead, because it was at least human contact and attention. Abuse begets more abuse, and the only way you learn to relate is to prostitute yourself: “I’ll give you this if you give me attention” is not love.

I manipulated others in order to feel any kind of human acceptance, I lied to myself and others and manipulated my ways into situations that would offer a taste of what I thought I wanted.

I have never known what it means to respect myself, to love myself. The love of Jesus!? It has taken over 15 years of His relentless pursuit to start to peel away the layers of my stubborn protection. But it wasn’t protection at all. Sure, it kept me from literally dying inside when I was young, but after age 18 it was no longer protection. It was quite literally the opposite. It is the way I have kept people out of my heart, and kept myself at a distance from the possibility of ever being known. My shame still defined me. If you see my shame, I will die. Not so different from Adam and Eve huh? I was ashamed so I hid. And then right after that starts the blaming game “the woman you gave me”. In my case it became “the life you gave me”. I blamed God (albeit completely subconsciously) for everything I got, and everything I didn’t get. So all I had was shame, cynicism, and a fierce determination to make it. 

You have never met anyone so determined TO NOT be defined by abuse and brokenness. Or anyone so utterly defined by her abuse and brokenness.

And yet somewhere deep down I did desire to love Jesus. And little by little, He took this tiny desire and grew it, through trials, through His relentless pursuit, His amazing forgiveness, through his providence and provision, and in the face of ALL MY OUTRAGE, all my rebellion, all my sin and all my stubborn decisions to do life on my own, He never, ever gave up on me.

So today I sit with the broken pieces of my heart in my hand, all my desperate attempts to hide have failed me. The fear of who I might be if I let it all down is no longer bigger than the desire to let go and be free. I saw a t-shirt yesterday at the mall that had a picture of the cross, and a soldier and it read “Freedom isn’t free”. My freedom certainly isn’t. It isn’t free of pain for me, and it wasn’t free of deep pain and sacrifice for Jesus. I have spent my life running and hiding from pain, and desperate to be loved. But the paradox here is that once I could allow myself to sit with the pain of what was taken from me, I could actually and finally let love in. The pain I have held inside from the murder of my soul is heavy. It is big, it is vast it is deep, it is crushing. It takes my breath away and it threatens to swallow me up. But it is NOTHING compared to the immense and endless love of Jesus, who doesn’t just love me, but fights for me. And He fights harder than I ever could. And His weapons against my shame are love and grace.

I have deceived myself into thinking that loving Jesus and working hard to “make myself ok” are the formula for freedom. 15 years worth of sermons, books, talks, and prayers about grace and I was still striving to work hard enough to cleanse my own shame and brokenness. The fact is, the shame inflicted on me is so egregious, so vile, so dark, there could never be enough I could EVER do to make it ok. It was not, and is not OK. The only antidote against that kind of evil is surrender. Surrender to the ONLY one who truly has the power, and has already defeated the evil done against me. He has already cleansed me, He has already made me whole, holy, and pure.

Today I  feel as though all has been stripped away. My resourcefulness is gone. All my relentless persistence has vanished.
You don't think trusting is really all that hard until you realize it means giving up everything else, every other safety net, and you're left feeling empty. All I have left is a stubborn and desperate desire to hang onto my Daddy’s hand and to learn to TRUST Him. The Only One that has ever loved me perfectly, the Only one I can truly trust with my life. The Only One who gives me hope.