by Sturm, Lacey
Next, I realized how much God cared about other people. He wanted me to know this about him so I would learn from him and do the same—he wanted me to love others the way he did. At school that day, I would see someone I had hated yesterday and have to walk away from her because I would start to cry with an understanding of how much God loved her.
I remember sitting in the lunchroom, alone in the corner, and just looking at everyone. I was one day into my new love affair with God. I fell in love with him because he’d been so supernatural, powerful, and present, and mostly because he gave me grace by loving me enough to embrace me as I was. And because I was so enchanted by the love of God, I wanted to know more about him. As I looked at the lunchroom full of people, I had a revelation of God saying something very simple about all of them: This is my artwork. These are my masterpieces.
I began to cry when I understood that the God of holiness, love, and mercy I’d met yesterday had made every person in that room. This was especially sweet for me to understand, because my favorite thing to do when I made a friend or started to have a crush on someone was to explore their artwork. I knew that people’s art, whatever kind of art it was, said something about the deepest part of who they were. I always knew that seeing people’s art would make me fall even more in love with them. You could always see the artist’s fingerprints in the art, like their signature.
To suddenly see people as God’s art overwhelmed me with humility. I had hated people so much. I had oversimplified them; I had judged, condemned, ridiculed, perverted, abused, and used them. It was like I’d spent so much time spitting on God’s art and calling it worthless. It broke my heart to understand this.
“Oh, my God. Forgive me,” I said under my breath.
Not long after that, my girlfriend, Amanda, came over and sat by me at the lunch table.
“Oh, you cut your hair. I’m not gonna lie, it kinda looks like crap. You’re probably gonna need to wear a hat for a while.” She laughed. “Too bad they don’t let us wear hats in school.”
Then she started cussing our assistant principal because the rules seemed stupid and made no sense to her.
As she talked I was in awe of how Amanda’s life said something about who God was. She was God’s creation. I became so fascinated by this revelation that I just stared at her.
I noticed the way her freckles—which she despised—looked as random and enchanting as the stars in the universe. God had put them there.
I noticed the way her eyes were moving so quickly around the room and perceiving so much. Eyes are amazing. God made them.
I noticed the way she bit into her apple and realized how crazy it was that we had taste buds. I thought about how I gave my dog the same dry dog food every day, but God gave us taste buds and all kinds of different flavors of food to eat. It seemed so loving of him. He made taste buds.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
I had no idea where to start.
How do I explain? I thought.
I remembered what the guy at church had said to me about my relationship with Amanda. In that moment, I understood that God wanted me to love her and let her go. If it wasn’t God’s best for me to have this kind of relationship, then it wasn’t God’s best for her either. God had something better for both of us. It was a subtle feeling, but I knew God wanted me to really love her like he did in that moment.
I told her, “I’m just thinking about a lot, is all.”
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“I don’t know how to explain it right now. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about it later.”
I excused myself and went to the bathroom to cry alone. I sat in the bathroom and, for a few minutes, just processed the fact that God made everyone and loved them all. All day as I thought about it and felt the truth of it deep in my heart, it would overwhelm me and drive me to tears.
God loves everyone.
He made everyone.
Each person has his fingerprints on them. Each person’s life says something about who God is. He is so vast that if all the grains of sand and stars in the sky were alive to say something amazing about God, it would not be close to saying all the good there is to say about who he is. I find myself, even now, living in the glow of thankfulness for such a magnificent and all-powerful God.
When I arrived home from school that day, Granny returned my cigarettes.
“Your Gramps is doing better today. Thank you for going to church yesterday. You look a lot better. I love you, Lacey.”
I just thanked her and took the cigarettes. I sat outside smoking, thinking about everything that had changed inside of me. I didn’t tell Granny. Not yet. That night I lay in bed and listened as Billy Corgan sang about how life was changing. “What is love?” he asked. He didn’t like change; he was afraid of it. I thought about my desperation. I had wanted something—anything—to change so badly I was ready to die over it. But I couldn’t imagine anything different than what I had known. Life outside of my grungy cave of bitterness and hate was completely foreign to me. It was mysterious, like a blank canvas in my mind. Kind of like looking at the ocean for the first time and being unable to imagine what kind of world exists inside it.
Our Decisions Define Us
I think so many people get Christianity wrong, and it makes me sad. It’s viewed as a religion of dos and don’ts. God cares about our hearts and the state of our souls. He wants us in relationship with him. God wants us to have life, and only he, the Creator of life itself, can tell us the truth about the difference between life and death. The One who formed our spirit within us is the One who knows what is poison to our spirit and what is healthy for it.
Whenever God would point out something in my life that I was holding back from him, he was always so gentle with me about it. He was always so loving when he would ask me to let him into something in my heart that I’d rather keep him out of. And it was as if he always left it up to me. He was and continues to be so very kind and patient.
I remember how God started to squeeze my heart whenever I thought about my relationship with Amanda. It was one of the first major decisions I had to make after my encounter with God to really choose him. I knew that I’d be dead if he hadn’t saved my life. I knew that if I ended my relationship with Amanda, I would have to be very distant friends with her, if we could even stay friends at all. Deeply emotional romantic relationships are the most difficult things to walk away from, and “staying friends” can create unhealthy cycles. I wasn’t sure how she would take what I had to tell her.
I knew that if I were going to die tomorrow, the short time on earth I had left before I got to eternity had to be spent saying yes to whatever God was calling me to. I also knew how much deeper and more perfectly God loved Amanda than I ever could. God had saved my life, so the least I could do in return was give it to him for whatever he wanted. So I decided to talk to Amanda about what had happened in my life and let her know that I couldn’t date her anymore. It would be much better for Amanda to hear about my encounter with God than for her to hear about my death by suicide.
She came over and we sat on the floor in my room. I cried as I explained what had happened. She cried as she heard it. She cried at my suicidal wish and my salvation. She cried about the experience I had with God. She understood about my wanting to live my life differently, my desire to live for eternity instead of just for this life that was passing and so short. She understood that we had to end our relationship. She cried with me and we were both sad, but we were both happy too. God had so much grace on my life to know what I could handle at that time. It was his miracle that she was so understanding.
I’m thankful that Amanda and I were able to end that way. Years later there were other relationships that had to end as well, but those stories I’ll save for another book, another conversation with you, dear reader. Just know this: I had to trust God with someone threatening suicide in order to obey him by leaving the situation. But God was so sweet to me
to let this one come easy.
My New Vision
There’s a well-known Bible verse in 1 John 4:19 that says you and I should love because God first loved us. How beautiful and tender of the awe-inspiring God I encountered in that Baptist church to love me first—to love me enough to come after me. And it’s reciprocal. Though he doesn’t need it, he desires my affection as well.
But God’s love goes so much further. When you and I realize the depth of his love, he then desires us to love others the way we ourselves are loved by him. The great philosopher Søren Kierkegäard says that love begins in a vertical line, what I would call a vertical dimension. This love affair begins with God first loving us, and that love then empowers us, inspires us, and guides us into loving others. The vertical finds its way into the horizontal, and suddenly we’re able to see past the shadows and into the real core of one another; we’re able to see people the way God sees them—as fearfully and wonderfully made.
God’s love spoke to me about a relationship I needed to confront in my own life: my relationship with Amanda. He had something better for each of us. If you would have told me when Amanda and I started dating that I would be the mother of two thriving little boys and the wife of a loving husband, I would have laughed in your face and probably cussed you out for good measure. I didn’t ever want to have kids, and I had such a sad hatred toward men. But the history of our lives reveals God’s enduring plan. We look back and see all along he had something better for us, something more wonderful, something in line with his greater plan for the entire human race. Something that is not based on fear but rather destroys fear with trust. Something that isn’t based on old wounds but rather heals them through forgiveness and faith.
Was it hard to talk to Amanda? Yes. But many times goodness in life is appreciated only after trudging through the muddy bogs of our own shortsighted choices. And there, on the other side of the stench, we find the shining gem of the life we were intended to live. It shines because it’s on fire with God’s holiness. But it doesn’t burn us. Rather, it galvanizes our hearts and minds and souls, enabling us to love—to bring the vertical into the horizontal and discover how we were meant to live.
13
The Reason
I Sing
As far as I know, my mother was born with her old nylon string classical guitar in hand. She’s played it ever since I can remember. And whether in our house or in our car, my mother always had music playing. I could sketch out on paper the soundtrack to my early life. I suppose it was inevitable for my siblings and me to all love and make music of some kind growing up.
I believe somewhere there is a picture of me, fourteen years old, sitting on the couch in a T-shirt and baggy pajama pants in front of a Christmas tree, and my mouth is hanging open in shock. Wrapping paper was scattered all over the living room floor and I expected the gift part of the morning to be over. And as my expression explains, I was amazed to see my mom coming around the corner with a bass guitar—held out to me. I had wanted to play the drums for a while, but I reasoned that if I was going to cart an instrument around to friends’ houses, it would probably be a pain to try to carry a drum set.
So I had mentioned to my mom once that I wanted to play the bass, since my brother Eric played guitar already. Eric had a subscription to Guitar World, which was the coolest magazine because it had guitar and bass tabs to popular rock songs in the back. I thought my brother was so cool because he knew how to play Weezer, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson, and White Zombie songs—all because he had a subscription to Guitar World. I wanted to play those songs with him, so I really needed a bass guitar to do that.
When I saw the black Fender jazz bass I sat in shock because I didn’t think we could afford something like that. But there it was, along with a sparkling, fuzzy, purple strap. I didn’t have an amp yet, so I spent the rest of Christmas Day in the bathroom with the headstock resting against the bathtub, with Guitar World magazines all over the floor, figuring out bass lines to the songs my brother already knew. That Christmas present really rocked my world.
Beyond My Mind’s Limits
I was such a cynic that I could never take anyone’s word for anything. I wanted to find out for myself what the Bible said, so I read it all the time. I continued to fall in love with what I read about Jesus and true Christianity in the Bible. And everything I read seemed to say what I was already sensing through my encounters with the Spirit of God in church. It was easy to sense God’s Spirit when I was standing in the front row, unable to see anyone behind me, during the praise and worship songs at church. I became extremely addicted to the feeling of God moving in worship.
I’ve heard people bash that feeling because they label it “emotionalism.” I think there is a difference between emotionalism and what I experienced at Pass Road Baptist Church in those early days of being a Christian. This was completely different from some self-help situation. It was beyond my mind’s limits. It touched my spirit and, for a while, simply and profoundly opened up the meaning of Christ’s death to my heart. I couldn’t even say the words “Jesus died for my sins” without weeping, because I was continuously understanding the meaning of that event in a deeper and deeper way.
There is something about music that opens up your soul to understand, to meditate on something, to taste the spiritual significance of the world around you.
The music in the church, sung from the heart and led by the Spirit, seemed to transport me into a timeless zone where angelic worship of the Most High God of the Universe was already happening in eternity. I understood the full power of music in church during worship. This is what music seems meant for, and we are invited to join in through creating and playing and singing to God. Wow.
When God gives you a gift, you can use and abuse your gift however you want. But I believe music was ultimately meant to express God’s heart, and to express the heart of others toward God. I believe this because when I experience music in this context, honest, consistent, crazy beautiful, supernatural encounters with God seem to be the normal result.
I understood the great difference between emotionalism and true spiritual encounters when I saw extreme examples in the secular arena. There are emotional blues singers who make you wallow in your sadness, hypersexualized jazz and pop musicians, and romantic country and folk singers, all of whom pull at your heartstrings in order to move you. You can find yourself crying and not even understand the words. There are still other musicians who have a spirit of influence. They can make you chant, dance, and give you the chills, like Rage Against the Machine. And what about punk rock? That’s a music genre built around outright rebellion; it makes you want to go fight in the war before you even know what you’re supposed to be raging against. And then, beyond emotionalism, there is the demonic spiritual experience in music as well. We love satisfying our emotions because, in my opinion, we are simply dying to feel anything.
After my encounter with God, I went to the Pantera concert that I’d already bought tickets for. The intensity of the genuine hate and anger was absolute emotionalism. It made the audience want to start fights with each other for no apparent reason. Sometime later I stumbled into a crowd on the street that was waiting to hear a band play on the outdoor stage. From the moment this band played the first notes in their set, I felt a great sense of the demonic. It was overwhelming and made me want to vomit. The power of music, with its effect on the soul, is one of the most tangible ways to touch someone’s heart or spirit.
I began to be very selective about the music I let into my soul and spirit because of how powerful I knew music could be. Emotions aren’t wrong, but letting them control your life and sway all your decisions can be deceptive and very destructive. I felt myself slip easily back into depression and condescension whenever I listened to certain music.
There are seasons when we’re more vulnerable to falling back into our old lives than others. For a while, I simply could not continue to listen to the music I had in the past because
it haunted me in ways that stole my joy, peace, and the victorious feeling I had over suicide and hatred. But when I would listen to music that was meant to be used to worship God and praise him, I would experience the opposite. It built up my spirit and opened up my heart to learn and grow. I meditated on God through the music, and as long as I did I could sense his presence. The music acted like a doorway into God’s throne room.
The Bible says in Psalm 100:4 that we can enter into God’s gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. The more I entered in this way, the more intimate my relationship with God became. The more you hang out with someone you love, the more you learn about them, the deeper you know them.
In many ways this is what worship music was doing in my heart. As I joined in the congregational singing I experienced just how strong the words, when truly sung from the heart to God, could be. I understood Psalm 22:3, which talks about how the praises of his people enthrone God. I was able to actually experience this verse coming to life.
Unusual Lightness
It really is as if the praise and worship music in church pulls back the veil between God and man and lets us actually encounter a foreshadow of heaven, of being in the presence of God. Just like I experienced a physical feeling of nausea in the presence of the demonic, at times there are physical feelings in the presence of God. Everyone describes these feelings differently because everyone’s relationship with God is as unique as the individuals God created. For me, there is an unusual lightness in my heart and in my body. I feel a warm burning in my chest and stomach. Sometimes when I’m singing or speaking and I feel like God is helping me, I can hear nothing but a ringing in my ears, like someone hit a bell and I can only hear its sustain.