turbulence
written on December 9, 2021
this year was rough.
God, you are good. Thank you for your faithfulness in my life and the ways that you’ve consistently shown me your love, even when I was running away.
the year started off in a different country with a friend i had met in person for the first time just 2 weeks before. his mistake was another trauma that simply exacerbated my already messed-up mind. i was… so lost.
God, I thought you wanted what was best for me? I thought your plan was goo ? How could a good plan include this happening?
the only logical conclusion that i could come to: what had happened was good
to any other person, this would have been an obviously incorrect conclusion, but to me it was the only one that made sense. i couldn’t handle the truth that something so messed up could have happened again.
in the following months, i had a very flawed sense of morality, worth, and
the general world.
• I mistook my emotional dependence on my abuser as affection
• I placed my entire sense of worth into the sexual pleasure I can provide to
a man
• I prioritized this one person above anything else, social or spiritual
i was a fool. i spent the first 10 months of this year believing in these facts and convincing myself that this altered reality was morally correct. i spent that time hiding from God and ignoring all that might ruin this altered world that i had set up in my mind.
in the summer, i lived a “perfect” life. woke up early to work out, ate a healthy diet, worked a well-balanced 9-5 job, and spent quality time with my boyfriend.
however, throughout all this i felt an emptiness. i had experienced the fullness of God’s joy, so this superficially perfect life could not satisfy me – there was no purpose to this life that i was living. near the end of summer, i started to desire God again. i was aching to go back to the days where God was at the center of my life.
coming back to berkeley and starting life as a student again, i decided to hold on to whatever tiny piece of God i could, like the bleeding woman reaching out to touch the fringe of Jesus’s garment in Luke 8. fully internalizing the message of “come as you are,” i surrounded myself with Christians and had a couple intentional conversations. though it was difficult to be fully transparent given my clouded mindset, i joined a Christian a cappella group that kept me accountable to being present.
Thank you Lord for placing me in FCS and showing me overflowing love and grace through my brothers and sisters there.
i was fellowship-hopping, so there was no set group i had committed to except FCS, and they became my community where i was loved on, cared for, and directed back towards God. slowly but surely, my heart was being pieced together by the grace of God and my moral compass was being recalibrated to match that of God’s.
then, one night in mid-october, i decided to surrender my life to God again.
the next half of my reflections will be continued in the next post.
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