Walking With Christ

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. This is, in some ways, a continuation of the message from yesterday. I’ll be off until Monday and the Verse of the Day will pick up then and turn towards what this season truly means. I think what follows is the beginning of what this season means to me. The meaning hasn’t changed much over the years other than to get deeper. The meaning of this season creates a bond with life itself.

Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.(ESV)

So many people rightly use this verse as a shield. Every life has purpose. Trigger warning for the following story. It’s ok to stop here or skip to the end. I won’t be offended. Those who need to read this will when the time is right.

Bare with me for a bit of a story. I don’t know why I feel compelled to tell it, but I do. It’s a part of my life that lets people much deeper under the mask than I’m normally comfortable with. The simple truth is that I know my life has to have a purpose with all of the things that I’ve witnessed and experienced. I’m not worried that I won’t understand that purpose. I don’t need to. The purpose of my life is for the glory of His kingdom and that’s good enough for me.

My birth was the cataclysm that destroyed several families. I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say that to say that I blame myself for anything that happened in those first few years of my life. I only say that because this was the first domino in a long line.

When I was born, a weak arterial valve in my mother’s brain ruptured. It was a slow leak. She started having headaches that wouldn’t go away. She progressed to having vision problems that would blind her for hours then days on end. Test after test showed nothing wrong. Doctors told her that it was all in her head. Nearly six months later, a new technology came on the scene and my mother was one of the very first people to have an MRI used to identify the blood pooling in her brain. The entire rear half of the left side of her brain was drowned in blood.

An emergency surgery removed that entire quarter of her brain. It was groundbreaking medicine. Doctors at the time had no idea how the nerves were even supposed to be put back together. There were a few crossed wires. That kind of trauma obviously scrambles the memory. She had no idea I existed, that I had a sister and a brother, or that she was married to my dad.

This tore my dad apart. Not as much as what her family did to take advantage of the situation though. They began to get money away from her for food or clothes for the kids only to spend it all on drugs and alcohol. When dad tried to put a stop to it, they took advantage of his absence because of his job (over the road truck driver) and started introducing mom to a lot of different men when he was gone. She eventually found one she liked. Dad found out and filed for divorce. He began a spiral that he never really recovered from. Mom remarried to a monster. That was two years of hell. I won’t go into details here because I like my job. Just know, those two years shaped the adult lives of three children.

My mom didn’t know I existed. My dad was so crushed that he couldn’t take care of me. He never directly said he blamed me but he did tell me that it was my birth that caused the rupture. My mom’s family used the money from my dad to entrench themselves deeper into the drugs and alcohol. When that dried up, they turned to a spiraling decay of crime to support the habits. Grandma, my mom’s mom, kept the worst of it in check until she died in the spring of 86. That was the last thing propping most of them up.

My dad’s parents took me in out of a sense of duty. Grandma later told me that she could never let herself get close to me because she was afraid that my mom would come to take me away. My grandparents hated my mom and her family for what they had done to my dad. My aunt hated me because I was my mom’s kid. All of that transferred to me.

I grew up isolated. I had no one to take care of me beyond food, clothes and a bed. I had no one to teach me, show me love or what life should be like. I wasn’t allowed to have friends because that was inconvenient for my grandparents and it distracted from school. No after school activities or field trips unless it was for a grade and the school provided a way home. I was a people pleaser. I wanted so badly to be liked and accepted because I felt broken and unwanted. I would do anything to make friends but I had too much energy (ADHD?) and had no social graces at all. I was awkward and had this growing ball of rage inside because I knew that I was different and being treated differently. I just couldn’t see why. I wanted to know what I had done that was so bad that nobody wanted me. My dad left me with my mom. I would see him twice a year for the next decade. My mom left me with her mom so she could try to drink herself to death along with the string of random guys in the house. Her mom, because she was dying of cancer, sent me to my dad’s parents who didn’t really want to take me. I was five and had already seen more violence and other adult content than some people see before college.

I’ll stop there. This isn’t a ‘pity me’ story. This is also just the highlights and doesn’t begin to touch the real darkness of those years and the horrible parts of humanity that I encountered. No, this is the preparation of the soil that seeds were planted into. The deep scars made room for even deeper roots. It took a while for that seed to see the light but when it did it was starving for living water and holy light. The well of anger I had built up over the years tried to stop the seed from growing. I can tell you that those little seeds are pretty resilient. I’ve personally witnessed the worst humanity has to offer. I’ve repeated many of the mistakes I saw growing up. I’ve survived these things, not to say that these are the norm, but rather, to say that there is always hope even in the darkest parts of our path. There is room for salvation no matter how far over the edge or how far down the hole we go. We serve a God who will meet us where we are. There is beauty in our scars. There is something holy in the healing. The pain is unpleasant and confusing. The purpose is always peace.

I’m not responsible for where I came from or how I was raised. I was given that path for the glory of the kingdom and I choose to use my past to break away from the generational curses that have plagued both sides of my family for so long. I’ve been healed of alcoholism. I’ve been able to avoid a life of drugs, for the most part, in a family that is simply swallowed whole by them. The fires of rage the once threatened to consume me completely have been doused in the healing living water. My scars are not gone. They are healed and remain as a reminder for me and others about the regenerative and transformative nature of having a relationship with our savior, Jesus Christ. I hope that my openness about my scars is a living apology to my wife and kids because I truly am perfectly broken and trying to get better.

Revelation 2:17 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.(ESV)

I am not a survivor. I’m an overcomer. I am redeemed. I am not unique. Every single one of us has had the exact same nail scarred hand extended to us in grace and love. It was there throughout this entire story. It guided me even when I felt so alone.