February 7, 2018.

This is what started it all. A wonderful woman who just glowed God’s light and joy. It seemed to me and everybody that she just did that. She just was. She just was light. She just was what all women were designed to be. But the story she shared was of how a man stole her of her light. I cried.

February 8, 2018

I went to bible study. We talked about Psalm 139 and how God is always with us, even in the darkest places, even when we make our bed in the depths. We talked about guilt and shame. Even in our guilt and shame, God is with us. Not only is He with us, but He thinks of us just as wonderfully as when He created us. What a reassuring thought. Because when you are laying in your bed that you made in the depths, it doesn’t really feel like God is there.

And why is that? Why in the depths, in the guilt, in the shame, why don’t we feel God? The lie of the sin is what drowns out the truth. But the thing about sins is that they are so easily burnt down by the light of the truth. One of the woman reminded us of Ecclesiastes 1:9. It says that there is nothing new under the sun. This means there are no new sins under the sun. The temptations and evils of sin are just something of this earth. There is nothing said about guilt in the Bible. It is just something we feel here. It is just something we are tempted into here. But it feels so real, it hurts so deeply.

What hurt the most for me was the other women sitting at that table. I could tell by the way some of them spoke, the way their eyes spoke, the way their faces grimaced, the way their fists tightened, the way their heads nodded in agreement. See, this is what got me: there was solidarity in that dark, heavy feeling. The empathy within me made me feel the weight of hurt of a tables-length of women. It hurts me so bad that other people know what that feels like. But there’s beauty to be found in that too. That if the same sins are used against us, at least we can build each other up and build ourselves up from it together.

February 11, 2018.

I cried myself to sleep, and I couldn’t figure out why.

February 12, 2018.

I cried in the middle of class, and I couldn’t figure out why. I had to leave the classroom. I went into a bathroom stall. I stood there and sobbed. I felt so alone. The lies filled my head. They usually come in questions. The questions usually sound like: Why am I so broken? Can I ever even feel whole? Why does everybody just use me and leave? Why am I so easy to leave? About a year ago, I was able to realize that those questions are lies. They are the lies of the enemy. They can be so believable in those low times in the depths though. That’s what makes it so dangerous, that they are so believable. But even as I cried in that bathroom stall, I was able to tell myself that they are lies, no matter how believable at times. And that’s so powerful to recognize and name the lies.

It was scary, because I only had sad, dark thoughts that day. My mind was full of them, only them. My heart was like a ten pound brick sitting in my chest, crushing everything within me. I did not want to be alone, but I did not want to be around others, because I did not want to hurt anybody around me with my hurt.

On my calendar, I’ve marked this day with the word “GRIEF.”

February 14, 2018

What a beautiful day this was. Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day. I’d like to think that it was extra special, because everybody in Heaven and earth were dancing with love.

I came to the chapel. Leading up to that point in the night, so much had lined up just right for me to be where I was at that exact time. You could say “that the stars aligned for me.” You could say “it’s a God thing.” I said “we are always exactly where we are meant to be.”

A woman stood outside by an unlit fire. We asked what’s wrong. She said she had trouble lighting the fire. We said we’d help. She ran inside the chapel to grab a candle. We used the small flame to build the fire. We asked what the fire was for. She said that the people inside the chapel could write their sins down on a piece of paper and throw them into the flames. My jaw dropped and my heart felt joy that I could have some part in this. The fire started blazing just fine just a few minutes before all the people from inside the chapel started coming out. If I could only describe to you the heaviness of the feeling as the people solemnly, silently walked out; as they threw their sins into the flames with contempt; as they stood, staring into the fire, their minds wandering into stories that I probably could not even imagine. I sat down with my journal, and started to write my own sins. What I wrote was fairly simpleminded, forgive me, but it went something like this:

God, I am sorry for being so bad, to myself and to others. I know that’s not what you want. I know that makes You sad. Thank You for being good to me regardless. Thank You for loving me regardless. You have been so good to me. I want to try to be good too, even if that may not be who I am or who I have been. I feel like I’ve done too much bad to be good. But I feel like You are telling me now that I could leave the bad behind. And I really thank You for that opportunity. Thank You and I love You.

They’re simple thoughts. But honest.

This night was beautiful for many more reasons than that moment by the fire. But what makes it even more beautiful is that just two days before, I was in such an incredibly un-beautiful place. Yet, God is there with me through it all.

Psalm 139 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

February 15, 2018

When I tell this story to my friends, they tell me they get chills.

It’s a normal day. I’m a college student. I have class. It’s bible class. Before class, I walk into the bathroom. I notice that the sink water is running. That’s weird, because it’s an automatic sink, and it should not be doing that. It makes me feel a little weird, but not in a bad way. I care about the environment, so I turn the water off. I wash my hands. I walk out of the bathroom. As soon as I leave the bathroom, there is a water bottle filling station. People can put their water bottles in front of the censor and it fills it up. This water is running too. That’s weird, because there is nothing in front of the censor, and it should not be doing that. Again, I feel weird, not in a bad way. I wave my hand in front of the censor to make that water stop. I go to class. I’m still thinking about the water. I’m thinking of the significance, the meaning, the symbolism of water. I write in my notes that I have got to ask one of my friends about it later, somebody who knows more than me.

What we talk about in bible class that day is the flood.

In Genesis, God creates the universe, and on the second day, He creates the waters above and the waters below. The waters above are Heaven. When the flood comes, the Heavens open up, the waters from above join the water below. This is just a slight thing in the wordage that may not seem significant, but it is, because it represents how God destroyed something He created in order to recreate it into something better than before. It represents Heaven coming down. It represents the waters becoming one. Well, now that made sense why I felt like I was drowning.

When my professor started talking about the flood, explaining the waters above and the waters below, explaining God’s recreation… I mean, oh my goodness! This is so big! My soul is imploding in itself into a million feelings of light! It is me. I was created, destroyed, and recreated by God. New life was coming, new joys. My heavy sorrow was for a cause, thank goodness, and that cause was me being washed clean for the new promises of joy.

I told this story to one of my best friends a few days later, about the two unceasing waters that I took as a sign for God’s recreation in me. She told me that two is the number of angels.

February 16, 2018

On this day, my therapist told me that the feeling I felt as I cried in the bathroom was grief. That was not a feeling that I would have come to name on my own. Because it did not seem that obvious. I did not lose anything in the recent past. Why grief? Well, I realized that sometimes grief can take a while. Sometimes, like in my case, the grief doesn’t hit you until years and years of loss. It was all that was happening in my life recently, all these hits in my soft spots, all these signs. That’s how God works. That’s how He was telling me that after all these years, it was time to face what I had swept under the rug and considered “okay” no matter how much it damaged my soul. Because that’s what I did, that’s what women do. We are resilient. We take a lot of things that are not really okay. And a lot of the times, we can handle it, because God made us to be strong, to be protectors of others, to be perfect servers of this world. But some of the times, there are sins made outside of God’s design, and those things are much much much harder to handle.

In Genesis, before God brings the flood, God feels grief. Let’s break down the feeling of grief: it is something you feel after you lose something you love. In this case, God feels grief, because He lost us. We sinned and we got away from Him. Just imagine how heavy the feeling of grief is on the human heart. Now imagine that on the scale of God, imagine that on the scale of how much He loves us. In a way, it is so incredibly sad that humans made God feel that way. In another way, it is reassuring to know the magnitude of His love.

For me, I realized that the loss of something I love was me. I am the something I love, and I was lost by years of giving myself away to people who just took parts of me and left without apology. Of course that leaves scars, and I carry them with me, but I choose to fill those gaps with light, God’s light. That is really the only thing that will be able to heal the loss.

April 13, 2019

It’s over a year later, and I revisit these words, these feelings, these moments. It’s a wonderful read. I don’t know if you feel that way – at all interested in trying to find beauty in mundane human life. I like it though. I like reading the words I wrote a year ago. They remind me of a different girl. That girl was much more haunted than I am now. Funnily, I feel like she also had more light. At least, the light had more fire then than now – probably because there was more fuel. Today, I would like to think I stand in more dignified fire. I praise God that my heart does feel more whole actually. The fractures heal with every fragment of grace I allow myself to receive.

Five days ago, I experienced one of those grace fragments. Those things I realized a year ago, I’ve been realizing and re-realizing them all year. For over a year now, I have let the wounds sting, but the healing has been done quietly. That’s because I haven’t been ready to tell anybody how I got the wounds in the first place. But strong and silent growth is stunning. I am proud to be a bearer of God’s gifts. Thank you, grace that I cannot see with my eyes, but I can see with my life.

Five days ago, for the first time in my life, I replaced shame with transparency by speaking out loud the origin of my wounds. The fractures heal with every fragment of grace I allow myself to receive.