Chapter Three
I lay awake in bed the next morning, arms behind my head, replaying the sights and sounds of the previous day in my mind. The flash of lightning, the concussive boom of the thunder, rain bouncing off the metal roof of the car, all the power of heaven meeting earth all around us. I had a strange feeling about that day, like I should be committing to memory the things that Jarrius had told me, like perhaps I would need to remind myself about God’s power sometime very soon.
I was thinking about Abbie, too, and wondering what I had gotten myself into. I liked Abbie a lot; she knew it and I knew it, and she was an incredible woman, the only one in my life I’d ever really wanted to get close to. But what could I give her? I still couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what it was about me that drew her to me. Cold fear rushed into my heart; I felt very much like an imposter, like if Abbie got too close to me, she would find out that I wasn’t all she hoped I would be, and that she would shrug her shoulders and walk away.
The thought terrified me, and for several minutes I just laid in bed, imagining that conversation, where Abbie walked casually out of my life as if I’d never meant anything to her at all. The more I thought about myself, the more doubtful I was that there was anything desirable in me. Where were these insecurities coming from? I thought I was finished with them. I hadn’t felt inferior or worthless since before I had embraced God. The desire not to feel that way any more was one of the major reasons I’d listened to what my friends were saying about God at all. What was going wrong?
Someone knocked softly on my door, and I shouted, “Come in!”
Danny stuck his head in the door. “Oh, sorry, Eli. I was hoping I wasn’t going to wake you.”
“Don’t worry about it. I was up.” I pushed myself into a sitting position. “Sorry I don’t have any furniture to offer you.” There was that feeling again, like perhaps I was to blame for not having a job, for not being able to offer nice things to offer the people who came to see me.
“It’s no problem. I won’t be here long. I just came by to bring you your notebook.” He tossed it onto the countertop to his right. “I saw the longer article you wrote, too.”
“What? Which one?”
“The one that was torn out and stuck in the back cover. About how you became a Christian. Man, Eli, that was some great writing. You should think about sending that to the magazine, too. It seems like the kind of thing they’d be all over.”
Abruptly I did remember what he was talking about, did remember cramming the article into the notebook as an afterthought and forgetting completely about it. Part of me was embarrassed, because I had never meant for that to be read.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said quickly.
“Are you okay, Eli? You look really unsettled.”
“Just had a rough morning, is all.” There I went again – running from the truth, trying to shut Danny out even though I knew full well, even though he’d proven time and time again, that he cared about me and all he wanted was to help. “That’s…not exactly true,” I amended. “There’s more to it.”
“Tell me,” Danny offered, easing into the room and pushing the door shut behind him.
I related what I’d been thinking before he walked into the room, how confused I was that all the insecurities had come back with such force. It surprised me that I was talking so candidly about those things. The old instinct was still there, telling me that I should keep quiet and handle things myself, but the more I talked, the more the old instinct faded into silence.
Danny nodded slowly. “Man, Eli. That’s powerful stuff.”
“So what do I do?”
He leaned against the wall, glancing around the room, gathering his thoughts. “Eli, where is God in your thought process?”
“I don’t follow.”
“It seems to me that you’re basically thinking as if God doesn’t exist. You’re focusing on yourself, your own fears and insecurities. Where is God when you’re having those thoughts?”
I frowned, thinking. “I don’t know.”
“Where does your value as a person come from?”
“I guess from God, but I don’t really understand that.”
“Alright,” Danny said with a smile, “let me give you a better way to picture it. What makes a diamond more valuable than any other rock?”
“They’re rare, I guess, hard to get to.”
“Simply being rare doesn’t make something valuable. Diamonds would still be rare even if there were no people on earth, but they wouldn’t be valuable.”
“Okay, I give up,” I told him.
“They’re valuable because people assign them value. They’re valuable because people are willing to part with a lot in order to have them. That’s the only reason. If something happened and people didn’t want to buy diamonds anymore, their value would plummet, even though they’d still be just as rare. Still with me?”
“Yeah. Keep going.”
“The thing that makes you as a person valuable is that God loves you and is willing to pay an incredible price in order to have you for himself. Your relationship with him cost him the death of Jesus, Eli.”
That thought upset me, for a reason that I couldn’t exactly pin down. Danny must have seen my face change, because he quickly continued.
“Whatever you’re feeling, it’s probably not grounded in truth. God said it was worth the price. Hebrews says that Jesus went to the cross for the joy set before him. Making you right with God was completely worth it to both of them. So don’t feel bad. Don’t feel unworthy. You will, of course; I still do most of the time. But you should feel honored instead, honored that God would see you and love you in spite of all those insecurities you’re talking about. That’s what gives you your value in life. That’s what you need to take with you whenever you start to doubt yourself. You may fail; you may let people down, but your accomplishments don’t determine your value. Your value comes from somewhere else entirely.”
I sighed. “That’s going to be hard to really internalize.”
“Sure it is. Every time you doubt yourself, you’re going to have to call it to mind and meditate on it all over again. You’re really talking about reforming the entire way you think about yourself. Of course that’s going to be hard and take a long time.”
“I think so. Look, I think I need to take a walk and think all this through. Thanks.”
“Anytime, Eli. That’s what I’m here for. Let’s get together sometime later this week, maybe Thursday, and talk some more. I might have some more to say, or some Bible passages you could read to explain what I’m talking about.”
“Sure thing. Thanks, Danny. I’m really grateful for everything you and the others have done for me.”
“Like I say, that’s our purpose in life. Don’t feel like you owe us anything or need to pay us back. The change we see in your life is thanks enough. Take care of yourself.” He ducked out the door, leaving me by myself again.
I climbed out of bed, staring out the huge window at the clouds that lingered in the sky, relics from yesterday’s weather. Fifteen minutes and a shower later, I was outside the front door, looking at the clouds again without a pane of glass in the way. It was frigid out, the rain bringing a cold front along with it, and I gritted my teeth inside my winter jacket, wondering if perhaps a walk had not been the right decision.
I set off toward the west, not paying too much attention to where I was going. The things Danny had told me were way different from the way I’d always thought of my identity. Growing up in my parents’ house, if I hadn’t performed – in school, in baseball, in basketball, doing my chores – I was made to feel worthless. That much was obvious just from the talks I’d had with my dad on the phone since moving down here. He’d done almost nothing except club me with the fact that I hadn’t gotten a job yet, and I’d accepted his reasoning. It seemed true to me that if I c
ouldn’t get a job, there must be something wrong with me. I’d tied my identity to what I was capable of accomplishing. But Danny was telling me that my value was inherent, that I had it simply by being a creation of God. It almost seemed too good to even be true.
I sighed. My parents. Christmas was less than a week away, and my trip back to Indiana was due to kick off in just four days. The date had snuck up on me so quickly – which only showed how little I was looking forward to it, how much more excited I was about life in Fort Worth and all the things that were happening to me here.
Did I even want to go back and visit them at all? I had a hunch that it was going to be an awful experience, that I was going to come back feeling like a disappointment to my parents. Maybe the smart thing to do would be to call them back and tell them…
Tell them what, exactly? Tell them that something had come up? That would be a lie, and running from the truth was something I knew I didn’t want to keep doing. I had to own myself, own my decisions. But what else could I tell them, other than the truth, which was that I didn’t want to see them because I felt like they didn’t love me?
And of course, my dad would be all over that statement, accusing me of being overly emotional, a nancy-boy. What he really meant was that I wasn’t unemotional like him, and the thing is, I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want my dad’s life, stuck in a dead-end job and a loveless marriage. I wanted to, had to, be different from him. But again, could I tell him any of that?
My eyes were flitting all over, taking in houses and sidewalks and cars and people, and finally they settled on the gray clouds that huddled low to the earth, left behind by yesterday’s weather. Abruptly, memories of the storm crashed into my mind. I could see them in front of my eyes just as clearly as if they were happening. I had been thinking just this morning about the power of that storm, the power of God, and that maybe I would have to remind myself about his power sometime soon.
This was the time. I didn’t know what that power meant, how he was going to handle everything that was going on, but I knew one thing: he had to, because I couldn’t. I told him so, as I wandered down the streets of Fort Worth.
It was nearly dusk when I pushed open the door of the apartment complex again, although I couldn’t tell for sure because the sun was blocked by the persistent cloud cover. My feet and knees were killing me; I must have walked fifteen miles at least, and that hadn’t counted the time I’d spent at lunch, eating the tacos I’d treated myself to at a Mexican lunch stand, and sitting underneath the shade of a huge pine tree along the Trinity River. I still didn’t know what I felt, honestly. My heart was a tornado of conflicting thoughts and feelings, thoughts about me and my worth and Abbie and Stanley’s past and my parents and a million other things. I felt overwhelmed by it all, like the sheer volume of it all was going to rush up and bury me.
But underneath all that I felt a kind of peace, something I could reach out and grab, and I reached for it, pushing all the other things to the side – not to pretend they weren’t there, but to tell them they weren’t the most important thing to me. I was willing to be still, to let God speak to me in spite of my chaos, and I did. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was saying, other than that he was there and that he was powerful, but that was good enough.
New Heart Church Page 29