by Sturm, Lacey
“There is a suicidal spirit in the room,” he said through his sobs. The congregation sat, silent.
This is freaking me out, I thought to myself. Goosebumps popped up all over my skin. I have to get out of this place!
But I couldn’t move until it was all over because Granny was waiting right outside the doors, and if I bolted now everyone would think it was me who had the suicidal spirit! Then other people started crying with the pastor. I heard sniffling all over.
“Please, child,” he said, pleading. “Come up here and let us pray for you. God has a plan for your life, and he doesn’t want you to die tonight. Please come up here and let us pray for you, whoever it is. Please come.”
There was no way I was going to go up to the front of the church, in front of all these Christians, and admit I had a problem they thought they could fix. My pride held me down. So I didn’t move. And no one went up. And it looked like Brother Edgar may have gotten it wrong. So he asked for people who had been dealing with depression to come up for prayer, and some did.
With the pressure off, the music leader dismissed the church. Finally, I was able to get out of there. I bolted for the door—and right in the doorway a man reached out and gently grabbed my arm. His gentleness was shocking, but when I saw his face I was even more shocked.
God Speaks
My mother always taught me to be suspicious of strange men. She warned me that most of them were perverts and I couldn’t trust any of them. It was a sad prejudice my mother taught me, one I continued to learn through my own life. I had my own experiences and things I had witnessed that made me hate men, and I didn’t really need my mom’s warning. I had seen men sexually and physically abuse people I loved, steal from their struggling families to feed drug and alcohol addictions, break promises to me and my siblings and my mother, and I’d seen seemingly nice, intelligent men turn into drunk, greedy, perverted monsters. A man had assaulted every woman I knew.
So when I looked into this man’s face I saw something I’d never seen from a strange older man like him. I saw pure love. It was just like how I would picture Jesus looking at someone. He looked at me like he knew me. Like he saw my heart and all its pain. The compassion in his eyes was arresting.
This strange man held me in place with a look that conveyed his genuine, humble, selfless love for me. And I couldn’t go anywhere because I didn’t know this man and was completely perplexed by why and how he could love me. I waited for him to speak. He’d been crying, so he paused and steadied his voice.
“The Lord wants me to speak to you,” he said. “He wants you to know that even though you have never known an earthly father, he will be a better father to you than any earthly father could ever be.”
How could he know? How could he know my feeling of being orphaned? I fought to rationalize his mystical ability of knowing I’d never had a father.
Well, look at yourself, Lacey, I thought to myself. You have a Metallica shirt on and raggedy, chopped-off purple hair. You don’t look like you fit in here and most misfits have daddy issues. He just guessed right is all.
“God has a great plan for your life,” he continued. “You have been questioning your sexuality as well, and the further you go down that road the further you will go from the plan God has for you. This road brings so much pain with it.”
Wait, what? Is he talking about my girlfriend? There is no way he could know about that. He kept going.
“God has seen you cry yourself to sleep at night. He has seen you rehearsing the pain you have gone through since you were a little child. You saw too much too soon and it has caused so much pain in your heart. Jesus died to take that pain away. There is pain in your heart from your own sin, and from other people’s sins that have affected you. Jesus died on a cross to suffer the consequences of sin forever. That way we don’t have to carry that pain around with us. Do you want me to pray for you and ask Jesus to take that pain away?”
Every time he said the word pain it was like my heart broke into a million pieces. I was melting, desperate for anything to make the pain go away.
I nodded, shocking myself by my consent.
He laid his hand on my shoulder and began to pray.
“Heavenly Father, wrap your arms around this girl who you created, like the loving Father you are.” As he prayed, a great warmth wrapped around me. I felt a sense of holiness I had never felt before in my life, like God was embracing me. It felt familiar.
It felt like I was finally home.
11
The Reason
I’m Beautiful
To see beauty we must close our eyes, for it is far beyond what our eyes perceive. I know this now because I received a new vision of myself in the flash of a prayer, in the spark of a thought, in the gasp of a breath. That prayer changed me in so many ways, but stark in my mind is the new perspective it gave me about myself. When you encounter God for real so much about your life and thoughts changes.
No one had to say anything about God to me in that moment, because I was encountering him for myself. It was as if I was standing in front of God. The God. It was so clear to me this was the only God, the King of everything. The first thing I noticed was his perfect holiness.
There was an order to my thought process, although somehow it all happened in the same moment. First, I saw myself. According to my own moral code, I had considered myself a pretty good person. Compared to the people I hated, I thought I was at least much better than they were. But when you’re standing in front of God, saying “I’m good,” it’s like saying “I’m tall” when you’re standing in front of a mountain, “I’m big” when you’re standing in front of the ocean, or “I’m old” while looking at the stars. The thought is absurd. I realized that I had no idea what good was, because up to that point I had not stood in the presence of the God who made the universe.
Then it was like my life flashed before my eyes and I saw everything I had ever done wrong in an instant. I saw all my sins, and no one had to tell me what a sin was and what it wasn’t because it was very clear in that moment. I almost wanted to shrink away because I knew I had no right to be in the presence of this infinitely good, perfect, holy God. This God was perfect love.
The worst realization was that my idea of love was not really love at all, and because I didn’t know true love I had never loved anyone, and even if someone truly loved me I was never able to receive love from them because I could not recognize it. I knew all my ideas of love were only shadows compared to this painfully bright, shining, true love that fell all around me.
All the love I thought I had in me was nothing like true love. It was conditional, confused, and even hateful compared to the love I felt God lavishing on me. I felt a great sense of regret and remorse. I felt so sorry for the way I had treated others—how I had hated them. To know I’d been so full of hate and now stood before a God who was love nearly made me collapse from the shame. His holy and loving presence overwhelmed me and sorrow welled up inside me, for his goodness exposed me to myself. My regret was thick, but not thick enough to keep his love from piercing me.
My reaction was a feeling of expectation mixed with a strange longing. I expected God to say to me, “Go away from me forever.” And in the strangest way I longed for him to say that to me. It was as if I understood I should be dead, or explode, or just disappear while experiencing the holiness of God. I felt like I was shrinking away, wincing with agony, as I waited for this good God to speak words of justice to me. I knew that if he would cast me away forever, it would be right. And in the presence of God, I was somehow painfully aware of what was right and was overwhelmingly compelled to want what was right.
But at the same time the horror of my true self was revealed to me, I sensed God reacting to me and was surprised when I realized he wasn’t casting me away but rather drawing me in closer. It was like he was saying, “Yes, I know you. I know all the things you have done. I am not shocked by any of it. Come close to me, my love, just like you are. I have a
lready forgiven your past and future. And, if you let me, I will make you new. I will make you into all that I have planned for you. You are beautiful, my love.”
Where Beauty Hides
I felt that, on that day, I really understood beauty from God’s perspective. Our culture focuses so much on what we look like and the things we accumulate. I grew to hate culture for those exact reasons. But in what I felt was my justified indignation with culture, I adopted my own set of rules. I defined acceptance, success, goodness, and beauty. I was just as guilty as the prude, or the redneck, or the Christian—all those whom I felt had put their definitions on everyone else.
Beauty, I realized, lay first in our createdness. God created you and me in his image. We reflect his glory. To all of a sudden realize I was not an accident, a burden, or a mistake but rather intentionally created by a God of holiness, love, and purity changed everything. As I recognized the majesty of God, I began to understand, as he wrapped his arms around me, that I was his creation. I was his idea. From my hair color to my shoe size, from my sense of humor to my taste buds, I was his beloved creation. He knew me better than I knew myself.
And, being a girl he created, I was his daughter. I was in my createdness the daughter of the King of the kings. In this sense I was a princess.
What’s more, we are all a mysterious kind of spiritual royalty, for you and I are created by the King of everything. C. S. Lewis talks about this in The Weight of Glory when he says: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”1 I came to meditate on the idea of being a spiritual princess much later in my relationship with God, but when I first came into a relationship with Christ, it was as simple as this: there exists an infinitely good God who created the universe, and he also created me. I am a wonder made by God. A quote I love by St. Augustine says:
People travel to wonder
at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the seas,
at the long course of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars,
and yet they pass by themselves
without wondering.2
Too often we don’t recognize our beauty because we won’t acknowledge that a loving God made us. It is in this, our createdness, that we find our beauty, our wonder.
The next thing that makes us beautiful is God’s unwavering gaze at us. We can blaspheme that image of perfect love and holiness by being our hateful, perverted, sinful selves—like I did—but God keeps his eyes fixed on us. I tremble at this thought: he does not turn away from us. He sees us inside and our every sin in all its horror, and he forgives us. He took our sins upon himself when he became a man called Jesus, and he was crucified once and for all, for the sins of the whole world. We are forever forgiven. Because I stand forever forgiven I am always beautiful to God. I could finally see myself through his love.
A musician and speaker I love named Christa Black wrote a book called God Loves Ugly and Love Makes Beautiful. That phrase by itself was something I understood so profoundly in these first moments of encountering God. So, although forgiveness and true love were outstretched before me all my life, it wasn’t until I chose to believe it that I could actually receive it.
God sees us all as beautiful and lovely enough to forgive, even though it meant he had to be crucified. The only way to blot out sins in eternity was for God to do that himself, and the only way he could be merciful and just at the same time was to suffer the just consequence of our sin himself. God looks at you and me and finds us worth dying for. Forgiveness was a gift bought for me by the blood of Jesus. He offers the same gift to the world.
Beauty, I realized, lay in forgiveness. I found that when I saw myself through God’s lens of forgiveness, all my dirt and grime and muck washed away. I saw myself true and translucent, naked and unafraid. I found myself beautiful because God found me forgiven.
How can I explain to you your deep worth and beauty? And no, you don’t need to be a girl to be beautiful. And that’s just it, isn’t it? The beauty of the individual has nothing to do with gender; it doesn’t have to do with culture or nationality; it doesn’t have anything to do with our sexual impulses. God made us all, and his love leads us toward truth—the truth of ourselves, the truth of others, and the truth about him. When we grasp that truth, we do not grasp a vision of prettiness, but a vision of worth. Although I don’t deserve it, I am somehow worth God sending his Son to die for me, and so are you. You’re beautiful because God sees you as beautiful, and if I had the honor of meeting you, you would know that I see your beauty too.
__________________
1. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 19.
2. Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 187.
12
The Reason
People Matter
I was not supposed to have woken up. Waking up on the day after I planned to commit suicide was not part of my plan. I remember the moment my eyes opened to the new morning. I could see.
There was a clarity that hadn’t been there for as long as I could remember. Not a clarity like when you understand something, but the clarity of a blank canvas. The clarity of a flyleaf page in a new book.
If you don’t look at the cover, you can’t know if the flyleaf is the one in the front or the back of the book. You can’t know if it is the end of the story or the beginning. I think each flyleaf is always both. That’s what my blank ceiling reminded me of when I opened my eyes that morning. It was a strange thing to feel like I had died yesterday, just like I wanted to. But I hadn’t planned on waking up. I hadn’t planned on feeling resurrected from the dead world I had “lived” in for so many years.
So what now? I knew God was in my room that morning. Nothing physically about my room was different from yesterday. The little Christmas tree I kept up all year was still blinking its multicolored lights in the corner. My dresser was still cluttered with overflowing memory boxes. Dimebag Darrell’s picture was still tacked on the wall beside my bed.
The only thing different was me.
I stared at the ceiling, thinking about how phenomenal it was that the very God I had hated so much had intervened in my life at the exact moment I was about to throw away the life he gave me. My heart grew warm as I thought about it, until tears streamed from my eyes. It made me cry to think that God was not only real, but that he wasn’t far away. He didn’t just make life and then watch the pieces randomly and chaotically fall where they may. He was involved. I never would have believed that if I hadn’t experienced the presence of God so tangibly the night before. The man who prayed for me spoke so specifically to me and about me. “He has seen you cry yourself to sleep at night,” he’d said. That amazed me, humbled me, and comforted me.
“Well, I wasn’t supposed to wake up today,” I spoke out loud to the God who had saved my life. “So . . . why am I still here? Why did you save me? What do you want from me today?”
Leaves Falling from Trees
I lay awake for hours, just thinking. When it came time to eat breakfast I wasn’t hungry, and asked permission to walk to school instead. October had brought its normal relief from the Mississippi heat and I kicked down the road, on my way.
As I turned the corner at the end of our block, I dug through my bag to find the lone cigarette I had stashed in the pocket of my notebook. I hid it there since Granny didn’t allow me to bring cigarettes to school. A row of trees to my left, an empty church to my right, all looked on as the tobacco flared into a glow. The air felt different. It seemed so perfect on my bare arms. It seemed thoughtfully measured as it played with my hair. But my cigarette clashed with the perfection of the breeze around me. The same birds that always mocked my dreaded mornings now sang songs of celebration, like they knew it was my birthday—their coronation of my new physical and spiritual life rose into the autumn beauty.
&
nbsp; Here’s a new daughter! What glory! Oh, the wonder of the great things that are in store for her! they sang.
I felt the wonder of their song. It was everywhere.
It began to overwhelm me, and I dropped my head to turn away from the undeserved kindness of the gentle wind kissing my face. When I looked down I noticed the golden leaves I’d been walking on. Then I looked up at the evergreens and wondered where all the leaves I’d been trampling on had come from. They could have traveled very far, I thought. The idea of their origin plagued me. I imagined they had followed the wind all the way from somewhere I could never picture myself going, like New York. Then I thought, But God knows where each leaf came from. The thought surprised me and made me giggle with the idea there was a real person like God who knew not only what state each leaf had come from, but what tree and seed, and when and where that seed fell, and how long it took to grow, and on and on and on back to the moment he created trees.
God knew.
And he knew the exact moment the leaf I was standing on fell, and why. I stopped walking and stared at the leaves. I began to laugh at the romance of it all. The mystery and beauty and wonder of an ancient, intricate, creative, thoughtful, mathematical, brilliant, artistic, playful God.
How immense and overwhelming! My mind struggled to grasp the fact there was a living God who still made trees grow, lose leaves, and spread seeds. I laughed at the beauty of God and fell a little more in love with him.
Understanding Love and God’s Art
The first thing I understood about this new place or state in which I now existed was that God wanted me to know he loved me. It was as if he kept reminding me he loved me with breezes of joy randomly tickling my heart all day long. I believe this was the first time I encountered joy. Joy is not mere happiness. It’s as if happiness comes from our souls, but joy comes from the spirit within our souls. Joy was a beautiful and astonishing melody singing in my heart all about how much God loved me.