The Earth Is Full (Child of Deliverance Series Book 1)

by B. D. Riehl

  Lydia had jolted upright in her seat. “Oh, Mom, what did you do?”

  “I just told my friend Diane—you know her daughter is in your class—about your modeling. I thought it would set you apart.”

  Lydia banged her head dramatically against the dashboard. “MOM! You didn’t!”

  “What?” Stacey, brows knitted in confusion, turned the car into the parking lot. Students milled around catching up after summer break. A pile of bags sat between the buses. Two adult males, presumably teachers, stood together with clipboards and compared notes.

  The “modeling” Lydia had done was a school project, but her mom liked to present it as a serious modeling gig when trying to impress others. She didn’t understand that girls her age didn’t admire models; they felt threatened by them. And she wasn’t one! It had been a school project to raise money for a girl in their class who had cancer.

  Her mother had parked the car and helped her register. Lydia was sure she noticed a group of girls turn silent as she walked by; a few stared openly at her with mocking eyebrows raised. Her mother kissed her good-bye, oblivious to the long week her daughter was about to endure.

  Lydia had sat on the bus by herself in a middle row while the rest of her classmates huddled in groups until it was time to leave. Her heart had pounded and cracked beneath insecurity and anxious hope that by that evening, all would be well. As girls boarded the bus, she noticed some glared at her while the rest ignored her.

  Thanks, Mom.

  A tall, dark-haired boy climbed aboard the bus and smiled at Lydia as he passed her row. She meekly smiled back, her stomach in knots. She was surprised when he turned back and plopped down next to her.

  “Jay.” He stuck a hand out and she shook it reluctantly. “Welcome to Central Valley.” He grinned and spread his arms to encompass their surroundings.

  They talked easily for the next hour before both pulled out headphones and withdrew into their own thoughts. Lydia had stared out the window. Open farms whizzed by, then dirt roads, then thick green trees as they climbed higher into the mountains. The steady hum of the engine and curves of the road soon lulled Lydia to sleep.

  When she awoke sometime later, her pillow was on her lap, Jay’s hand moving in on her underneath it. Her eyes widened as she realized what he was doing. He slipped his other arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. We couldn’t help it. We didn’t realize what we were doing. We just need to pray and God will forgive us. No need to confess to anyone else. Right?” He gripped her shoulder hard and she nodded numbly. A group of guys in the back called out to him, and he rose to join them. Lydia, sick and stunned, looked across the aisle. Two girls looked back at her with absolute disgust.

  The guys in the back had grown quiet, except for Jay’s low voice. Suddenly they all shouted a chorus of: “You dog!” and “No way!” and “Hands off, fellas, I’m next!”

  She had hugged her pillow tight against her chest, still in disbelief and confusion.

  Over the next few days, Lydia kept to herself. She was one of five new students in her class at the small private school. The others fit in effortlessly.

  Girls ignored her; guys eyed her hungrily. She spent hours on the dock by the lake, her legs drawn up, her arms holding them close. Whenever girls came near, she could hear them whisper, “What a slut! The first guy she meets here? On the bus? Seriously?”

  At the final bonfire of the week, Jay led worship and gave a devotional.

  Anger had formed a tight seal around Lydia’s heart; bitterness held on tight. Over the next few years at Central Valley, she noticed Jay and others like him rise up through the “ranks” of Christian school. They were often given accolades for their “faithfulness” to God and their involvement in the Christian community. Jay was the chapel worship leader and had been voted homecoming king that year.

  Lydia learned that people were going to assume things anyway and made a sort of game out of it. She dressed in a way to accentuate her curves. She knew the guys liked it, and it riled the girls up. After a while it became habit, and she liked the feel of how the clothes fit. When Ethan came to school she intrigued him. He talked with her when no one else did, which made others open up to her a little as well. Lydia’s loneliness made her vulnerable to his attention, and she fell for him fast. It helped that the self-righteous snobs in her class were green with jealousy over their relationship.

  If they knew how he really was, how controlling and cruel he could be, would they all still want him? Did she? She and Ethan had only dated a few weeks before their kisses turned deeper and more involved. She knew everyone believed that they had slept together; Ethan certainly let his friends assume they had. While she had long ago stopped wondering if Christianity was something she wanted a part of, she still held back from giving all of herself to Ethan. Maybe it was the cold humility she had felt when Jay took advantage of her that day; maybe it was something more basic. She wasn’t sure.

  Now on a campus for rescued slave girls in Thailand, listening to the group prepare for a time of worship, she felt that sick shame wash over her again. She looked at the faces of everyone around her and wondered if they, too, were like Jay: polished on the outside, rotten and evil on the inside.

  She looked into the fire and wondered if she would ever get over the feeling of seeing an outfit she loved to wear at home on the body of a sex slave in Pattaya, Thailand.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Suchin’s eyes were swollen shut from tears or Lok Lee’s beating, she was not sure. She curled into the corner of the stuffy room, terrified to move and arouse his anger.

  When he had been satisfied that she was too frightened to ever run again, he sent her to the little room in back. She lay now broken, watching girls come and go. The hot room pressed upon her, darkness closed around her.

  She dreamt again of the white elephant. This time she knew it was a dream and fought desperately to hang on, to get to the magnificent beast. Somehow, if she could climb on its back, she would be free. She knew it. She just knew.

  She ran and ran, unable to reach the beast. It charged away from her through the lush forests, out of sight. She screamed and cried and begged, “Come back! Oh please, oh please, come back!” In the mist, she caught up with the animal; it was no longer an elephant…but a man. She recoiled as he held his bleeding hands out to her.

  Lok Lee shook her awake. Her head ached.

  “You’ve had enough time to rest. Back to work.”

  He propelled her through the small hallway, her left arm locked in the vice of his hands. She was surprised that he would allow her to be sold in such a state. Surely someone would notice a girl with swollen eyes and a fat lip?

  But no one did. Not here.

  In fact, the man that had requested a young girl barely looked at her. He nodded once and thrust a sweaty wad of bills into Lee’s greedy hands. Suchin resisted the urge to vomit and hoped this customer wasn’t expecting much.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Luke strummed his guitar gently as more from the group came close to the fire. Everyone wore the same somber expression. After several moments, Paul stood and cleared his throat.

  “That’s tough, isn’t it?” He pointed a thumb behind him, toward the outer gates, in the direction of the busy city. “It’s hard for us to comprehend that evil like that exists until we are face to face with it.” He shook his head, chewed his lip. The fire cracked.

  “We started Deliverance fifteen years ago. I’ve taken hundreds of tours down Walking Street and never get used to that darkness.”

  Paul stared into the fire for a full moment before he spoke the words that had taunted Lydia since that awful bus ride years ago. “Why does God let bad stuff happen? How can we preach a God that is loving and good when we see and know of exploited children—men and women held against their will in slavery? How can He not only let it happen, but let people make money off of it? How can we see such poverty and believe in a God tha
t gives water that quenches all thirst? How can we believe in His glorious light when all around us we see such terrible darkness?” He looked into each of their faces. No one spoke. The fire popped and sizzled, abrasive in the painful silence.

  “Can you all do something for me?” he asked. “Turn away from the fire.” It was a pitch black, moonless night. “That is dark. If that were all we ever saw, we would have a hard time believing in light, wouldn’t we? Now turn back to the fire.”

  Shoes shifted on the gravel, but Lydia kept her face turned away and stared into the inky night. This she knew: darkness. To her, the inky black represented a pit too deep and dark for her to climb out of. For the first time in years, the crusty bitterness caked on her heart crackled and broke a little. She saw that, while Jay had certainly been wrong, her response and lifestyle since had been anything but right. And that was on her.

  The insight stung.

  “This fire is bright and alive, full of warmth and light…”

  Desperate for the contrast, frightened by her realization, Lydia turned back, her eyes hungry for the light, heart burning for hope. Please, she thought, please. What she was pleading for and from whom, she wasn’t sure.

  “Nature is such an amazing thing. So much in our world is a picture of God and of our relationship with Him. Seasons: the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Repeated over and over so that we can’t miss it. Weeds that so easily choke out the good seed in our gardens, show how damaging sin can be in our lives.” Paul dipped his chin toward the flames. “This fire is much like Him.

  “Isaiah says, talking about the day of Christ, ‘The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.’ Folks, our perspective can make a world of difference. Where our eyes are pointed determines what we see. And where we go.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the city again.

  “Back there? That’s garbage. That is stinky, foul darkness. A pit. But I love what Betsie Ten Boom said to her sister Corrie while in a concentration camp in Germany: ‘There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.’ I have seen the never-ending depth of God in this place. Just when I think the hole of depravity is so cold and dark that not even God can penetrate it, He does. He shows up in big ways, warming the hardest of hearts, delivering light to those in the darkest places. Over the next few days you too will see this bright light I am talking about.”

  Lydia was stunned. A pit? Wasn’t that what she had just felt? That she was in a pit too deep for anyone to reach in and help her out?

  The rest of the evening melted around Lydia as she watched flames dart around white-hot coals at the base of the fire. The group sang worship songs and took communion together; Michelle passed the communion past Lydia to Patsy. Neither seemed offended that she didn’t partake, neither looked at her, both held their communion close as they stared at their feet, lost in thought.

  The songs Luke chose were nothing like the ones Jay used to lead chapel, not something easy to memorize then sing over and over. Not a lot of words about what “I” wanted or was going to do. Instead, they all focused on God. His power. His Sovereignty. His goodness and justice.

  As they sang a song she’d never heard before, her insides hummed with something she’d never before experienced: hope. The sounds and movements of the group danced around her, taunting her with their light. For years she had lived in a world of assumption: assumption that everyone expected the worst of her, assumption that this Bible business was just that: business and hypocrisy of the deepest level; assumption that the clothes she wore meant nothing, just cloth sewn together, that her body didn’t matter more than to attract attention, both good and bad.

  But here, now, she wondered. She could not get that girl out of her head; a girl that must be close to her age. Her eyes wizened, mouth flat, hair long and stringy…and in Lydia’s favorite outfit. Only she wasn’t wearing it because the boots were stylish or the shorts made her feel superior to girls that couldn’t pull off such a look. She wore it as advertisement of a product she was selling: herself. And not by choice.

  As if waking from a dream, Lydia noticed that the music had stopped, and everyone had cleared out. Well, almost everyone. Luke and Michelle flanked her on either side. She looked between them, but both stared straight ahead, the flames casting a warm orange across their features.

  The trio remained in silence for a few minutes more before Luke began to talk, never taking his eyes from the fire. “When I was about thirteen, a new kid moved onto my street, about my age. We both enjoyed baseball and things, so we hit it off. At first we hung out at my house; his parents weren’t home much. But eventually we began to meet at his house after school to play video games. One day his older brother had some friends over, and they all called us down to the basement. We felt so tough hanging out with those guys. They passed us a dirty magazine.”

  Lydia, confused by the story, looked at Michelle, who gazed at Luke, resting her cheek in one hand. Her eyes softened as if she’d heard the story before.

  Lydia turned back to Luke and watched as he picked apart a long, thin stick, throwing small pieces at the flames, one by one.

  “I was hooked. They thought it was so funny that I’d never seen anything like that before, and the next time we were over, they showed us some videos on the Internet. From then on, I couldn’t look at girls the same. I wondered what girls at my school would look like if they posed in those magazines; I wondered a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I felt sick about it but couldn’t stop thinking that way. I found more excuses to go to that house.

  “One week in the summer his family went on vacation. I thought they were going to be back a certain day, and I knew their garage code because I had watched my friend punch it in before.”

  Luke took a deep breath. “I snuck in, went to the basement and tried to watch an adult movie on their TV. I couldn’t get it to work and was frustrated. I was making such a racket in my frustration that I didn’t hear his mom come home. Apparently, she had to come back a few days early for work and found me when she came downstairs for something. Of course, just then, the show I wanted kicked on. I was so humiliated.” He rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment.

  “She grabbed my ear and dragged me home to my mother and made me tell her everything. That was even worse; the look on my mom’s face was awful. She was crushed.” He threw the rest of the stick in the fire and rested his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together.

  “What did she do?” Lydia asked, both intrigued and disappointed. Luke was the one guy that never looked her over in the hall. He was the one guy at school and church that seemed to genuinely believe in this stuff and live just the way he claimed the Bible said to. Although she had always told herself he was a self-righteous jerk, deep down she was embarrassed that he wanted nothing to do with her.

  Luke shook his head. “Nothing. She thanked my friend’s mom for telling her and went to her room. I hid out in my room all that night, even after my dad came home. I remember listening to them whisper in the hall. As the family ate dinner, they told my sister I wasn’t feeling well.” He shook his head, mouth curved to one side. “The smell of spaghetti still makes my stomach churn just thinking about that night.”

  He leaned back on his hands, resting on the ground behind the low log, feet stretched toward the fire. “The next morning before the sunrise, my dad woke me up and told me to get in the truck. He had some bags in the back and stopped to get McDonald’s on our way out of town. I honestly thought he was taking me to military school or something.”

  Michelle laughed softly.

  “He drove for hours into the mountains then pulled into a campsite. It was the middle of the week and still the beginning of summer, so the site was mostly empty. We spent the next week together, discussing manhood and Jesus. Among the pines and the rushing river next to our site, I learned a better way.

  “He made it clear to me how wrong pornography is. He share
d his own struggles in the past with me and told me how he overcame them. He gave me a book to read about temptations and how to overcome them. He made me read it every day and talk to him about it before we would go fishing or hiking during the day.

  “I learned that week about sex God’s way. Women are not mine to look at or think about in that way until it is my wife. And even then, I must think about her in a respectful, loving way. I learned so much about what it means to be a man—a real man that treats females appropriately, not as the world does, but as God does. Most importantly, for the first time, I met Jesus. Or rather, He met me, right where I was, and changed me. He washed me clean, freed me from the stink of my sin, and transformed me from the inside out.

  “When I got back, my friend and his brother dogged on me for getting caught. Our friendship fizzled after that; I became too “religious” for them. They didn’t want to hear my new realization about women and waiting for marriage to explore sex; that the junk they’d shown me was just a distortion of the real thing, and not worth giving into.

  “I had to keep away from them after that because I still struggled with my thoughts and temptations. I had this new Spirit in me, but my flesh didn’t want to give up without a fight. The door had flung open to that garbage, and I could not close it against the torrent of images that had been burned on my mind. That’s the awful thing about that stuff.… I have to study for a test for weeks before I remember the information, but ten seconds of flesh on a computer screen are seared onto my brain forever.”

  Luke looked past Lydia to Michelle and back to Lydia. “I’ve had to work very hard, Lydia, to control my thoughts. I don’t talk to girls much at school because most of them dress in a way that makes it hard for me to keep pure thoughts.”

  Lydia felt heat, which had nothing to do with the fire, creep up her neck and tingle to the roots of her hair. Was all of this just a setup to call her a slut, to condemn her?