by Lea Sims
Delaney looked startled then threw her head back in laughter. “Lexie is a force of nature.”
He nodded his head vigorously. “Yes, she is. But Delaney, she didn’t need to tell me any of those things. And you don’t owe me an explanation for what you have or haven’t done. You didn’t need to change for me. I told Lexie that. If you were opening your mind and heart to God, it needed to be for you, because it would finally bring you healing and answers to your questions. From the first day that I met you, I could see the pain you were carrying around inside you. That’s why I sent the Bible. Not to preach at you or condemn you for anything you said to me, and not to make you feel like you had to change who you are for me.”
“I know,” she reassured him. “But I still felt unworthy. And you know what? I was unworthy. I was just like Jonah after the whale spit him out. When I was in that garden with you, I still had the stench of my old life on me, Drew, and I hadn’t decided if I was going to come ashore and clean up or swim back out to sea. But when you sent me that Bible, it was like you’d handed me a bucket of suds and a scrub brush. I know you didn’t mean it that way, but that’s exactly what it was.
“And it was the most loving, Christ-like thing you could have done for me. I wasn’t even yours to love, and you still chose to treat me as Paul commanded. You set yourself aside to sanctify me, to wash me with the water of the Word so that I could be presented without stain or wrinkle or blemish. You’re the reason I was able to approach the altar today without shame.” Her voice quavered with emotion. She wondered if she was making any sense to him at all.
Her sudden quote from Ephesians rocked him to the core. Drew could not utter a word in response. She had no idea how powerful her statement was. Did she realize she had just compared him to a husband loving a wife and to Christ loving the Church?
“Tell me again, beautiful,” he whispered softly, arms still crossed and back against the wall.
She looked confused. “Which part?”
“The very first part,” he said smiling.
She mentally scanned everything she had just said to him, trying to figure out what he meant. Then she remembered the first thing she’d whispered. She raised her eyes to meet his and said, “I love you, Drew Hemming.”
“Now can I kiss you?” he asked huskily. When she nodded, he pulled her to him, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, softly at first and then with more passion, deepening the kiss until they both pulled away breathless a few moments later, forehead to forehead as they had been in the garden.
“Please tell me you feel that,” she whispered with teasing sweetness. He responded with something that was half chuckle and half groan. He picked her up, arms wrapped tightly around her, and spun her around in the stairwell, his heart overflowing with joy.
When he put her back down, he grabbed her hand and brought it to his lips, kissing her knuckles, his honey eyes looking up at her in a way that made her legs feel weak beneath her. “What now? What happens next?” he asked, his face serious again.
She sighed and looked up at him, shaking her head. “I haven’t figured all of that out. But after what I just experienced upstairs? I want that every day of my life, Drew. I want to be part of this church family.” She smiled into his eyes. “And I want to be with you. Those are the two things I’m sure of. And I can’t have either of those things if I stay in New York.”
His heart ricocheted off his chest wall. “What does that mean? You’d consider moving here? What about your job?”
She shrugged. “For the right relationship, distance can be overcome. Residences are temporary. Jobs can be transferred.”
Drew’s laugh echoed throughout the stairwell. Oh, how he loved this girl. He reached for her again, but she stepped back slightly.
“But, there’s something else, Drew. I want to ask you to wait for this…for us.”
Not taking her meaning, his brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t misunderstand me. Everything in me wants to dive in with all my heart. I’ve never felt this way about anyone in my life.” He smiled warmly at her statement. “But, I’m at the very beginning of a new walk with God. I still have wounds that need healing and sins that need confessing. I need some time and space to do that alone, one on one with God.” She put her hand over his heart and smiled up at him. “I want to come to you healed and whole, precious man.”
She couldn’t have said anything that filled him with greater reassurance, and his heart swelled with pride as he looked at her. Claire was right. They would never be unequally yoked. “How long are we talking?” he asked with a grin.
“Well, I want to go through Breaking Free. Claire has spoken so highly of it and how it can help me that at the very least, I want to dedicate those ten weeks to God without distraction, which means we’d need to limit our communication during that time. As soon as I can figure out how to get in that class, I want to start there.”
He pulled her back into his arms and said tenderly, “I’ve waited thirty-seven years for you, Delaney. I can wait a little longer.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “That’s why I want to do this right. I want to be worthy of that wait, Drew Hemming.”
“You already are, beautiful. You already are.”
Epilogue
“How does one become a butterfly?’ Pooh asked pensively.
‘You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up
being a caterpillar,’ Piglet replied.
‘You mean to die?’ asked Pooh.
‘Yes and no,’ he answered. ‘What looks like you will die,
but what’s really you will live on.’”
– A.A. Milne
Delaney walked up the steps of her new house on East Taylor Street in downtown Savannah, just around the corner from Whitefield Park and within walking distance of the church. It was a beautifully restored Victorian built in 1889. It had cost her a pretty penny, but her monthly payments were still lower than the rent she’d been paying for her Manhattan loft. She’d only been in it for three weeks and there were still unpacked boxes in nearly every room, but she had never loved a home more than this one.
It had been nearly three months since she’d given her life to God at the altar of Refresh Station, and since that time, life had moved quickly. She had spent a few days with Claire and Drew talking through the revelations of the previous few months, sharing her heart about her future, and discussing her options. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that she wanted to leave New York and come home. After a lot of discussion with the two of them, she’d opted to leave both Rogue and her Jeep with Claire, and she flew back to New York to talk to her vice president about what role she could retain with Blue Muse from a remote home office. Claire and Drew were going to help her find a house downtown, and she was going back to New York to terminate her lease, pack up her stuff, and hire a moving company to bring it all to Savannah.
She’d spent a lot of time on her flight home praying for God’s hand over the decisions she was making. She knew she was embracing a radical life change, and even though she had tremendous peace that this was the right path for her, she had still been very uncertain about the logistics of leaving her job and what her career would now look like. She just prayed that God would open and close all the right doors.
Having put the issue in God’s hands, she met with Eric Mayer, her vice president, when she got back to New York. When she had told him she was moving home to Savannah and wanted to discuss her options with him, he had been surprised and dismayed to think Blue Muse would be losing her, so he asked her to stay on with the company as a senior design consultant and continue to report directly to him. She would work remotely in Savannah and consult on design projects. She would also work with Badger on the Timber Ridge portfolio. At Delaney’s recommendation, Divya Batwa would step in as senior director over the creative team.
When she walked out of Eric’s office, she’d felt like the weight of the world had fallen off her shoulders. Six months ago, if anyone had told her she would be giving up her senior director’s job, her path to vice president, her team, and her huge corner office to go back to being a design consultant in Savannah, she would have told them they were crazy. And while she would miss Callie and Lexie and her team, she wasn’t upset to let it all go. Her heart was so full of peace and anticipation about her new life, it really wasn’t that hard to leave her old one behind.
Within two weeks, she’d terminated her lease, packed up her apartment and transitioned Divya into her role. She flew back to Savannah to stay with Claire until she’d closed on her house downtown. Her belongings had been held in storage and brought down by the moving company after her closing.
She was now in week eight of Breaking Free, and the study was wrecking her in the most beautiful way. The process of digging in deep on her abusive past, acknowledging the root issues of her resentments and pain, letting the Holy Spirit unlock the chains of rejection that had been around her wrists for years—every bit of it felt like someone was scrubbing her soul with a wire brush. It was agonizing and exposing, but it had generated the most powerful moments of revelation and release. She felt like she’d done nothing but cry for the last three months. It was as though the dam had broken and all the tears that had been locked up inside her were now constantly leaking from her eyes. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. The stone was gone; in its place, she now had a tender heart of flesh.
She smiled as she unlocked her front door, spying a white envelope sticking out of her mailbox next to the door. She reached up to pull it out along with the bag of Skittles it was taped to. She smiled with delight. It was from Drew.
“She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh without fear of the future.”
(Prov 31:25)
Can’t wait for that future, beautiful. ~Drew
He had taken to dropping notes, flowers, and other items in her box as a way of encouraging her while she went through this process. It was harder than she thought it would be to ask him to keep his distance. Their declarations in the stairwell had been powerful and permanent. They were deeply in love and unquestionably committed to each other. Neither of them had a doubt about God’s will for their relationship or whether they were bound for the altar. They had not discussed marriage or even hinted at it, but they both knew. It didn’t need to be said.
For the ten weeks she would be in Breaking Free, she and Drew were limiting their contact to Saturday dates and worshipping together at church on Sunday mornings. But from Sunday night to Saturday, they did not see, text, or call each other so that Delaney could focus on this journey. She spent Sunday evenings with Claire, talking, praying, and unpacking revelations from the study, and at least one day a week, she had dinner or lunch with Bethany. Those two women had become sisters to her in every way. They laughed, they cried, and they prayed. Delaney was learning what it meant to be “girded”—to have Gethsemane girls in her world.
She stepped into the front hallway and set her keys in the basket on the credenza. Rogue appeared sleepy-eyed from around the corner, stretched adorably, then greeted Delaney with enthusiasm. Delaney grabbed the leash from a hook by the door, clipped it to Rogue’s collar, and then took her to the park for a quick walk.
When they got back, Delaney sat down at the dining room table with her Skittles, her Bible and her Breaking Free workbook to prayerfully ponder the video session she had just watched with her small group this morning. They had reached the point in the study where they were exploring the character and nature of God. Earlier chapters had focused on identifying and unpacking family history and understanding generational patterns of abuse, neglect, and sin. It had been difficult and painful for her to dive that deep into her early childhood memories. She had expected to struggle with the exploration of her abuse, but she was unprepared for how deep her wound of abandonment was, how much unresolved grief she was still carrying inside her about the death of her parents. Her Saturday date that week was spent sharing those revelations with Drew while they drove out to Timber Ridge, and she’d been so overwhelmed by the emotion of it, that when she couldn’t stop crying, Drew had quietly pulled over on the side of the road and simply held her in the front seat of his truck while she cried it out.
But as soon as she’d gotten to the sections in the workbook about the unfailing love of God, she had hit a bit of a wall. Several of the women in her small group had experienced some of their greatest revelations and breakthroughs when they had gotten to this part of the study, but she was struggling to wrap her heart around it. After everything she’d experienced in the last six months, she accepted and believed everything she was reading about the character of God. But she was having a hard time emotionally connecting to it in the same way the other women were. She knew it was because she was utterly stuck on the word unfailing. As powerful and transformative as she was finding the love of God to be in her current season of life, she could not make that same claim about her childhood. She just couldn’t shake that stubborn little stronghold—that God’s love had failed her when she needed it most. But she had stopped cold in her tracks when she had reached this paragraph in her homework:
“No one has ever done more to show you that you were unloved than God has done to show you that you are loved.”
Just today, they’d discussed this statement in her small group. Becky, a woman in her early forties, shared with the group how she’d been looking back through the events of her early twenties when she’d gone through a long season of addiction and destitution. She could now see where God had been protecting her from certain outcomes and positioning specific people in her life during that time. She teared up as she talked about the time she’d found her way into a diner, only able to order a cup of coffee with her loose change, and the waitress who served her had brought her a grilled cheese sandwich.
“She told me the sandwich was on the house,” Becky said, “and I later found out she’d paid for it herself. It was such a small gesture, but that particular day, I was sitting at that table so hungry and strung out that I was seriously thinking about prostitution. I knew a girl who could get me in with an escort service if I wanted to try it. So I sat there staring at that cup of coffee, trying to justify to myself why it would be okay to become a prostitute, and all I kept thinking was…I’m just so hungry. And the next thing I know, the waitress walks up with that grilled cheese. There wasn’t anything magical about that sandwich, but having it show up right then changed my train of thought. I stopped thinking about the escort service job, ate that sandwich, and spent that night in a shelter. It was in that shelter that I found out about Teen Challenge and got into their program. I know God orchestrated a rescue for me that night.”
Becky’s story amazed Delaney. There was a time when she would have scoffed at the suggestion that God was the reason Becky had been given that sandwich. She would have rolled her eyes and pointed to the waitress as the source of her meal, not some invisible divine hand. But she’d had too many divine appointments in her own life over the last six months to chalk them all up to coincidence. The evidence that the events of this year had been orchestrated by God was inarguable to her.
As she sat at her table now, it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps her problem was that she had not tried to see the same supernatural intervention in the events of her past. If God’s hand was so evident in the rear-view mirror of her last six months, shouldn’t it also be evident in her youth? Perhaps, like Becky, she simply needed to sift through those memories to see the “grilled cheese” moments of her own story.
If you have the courage to revisit your story, I believe God will show you exactly where he was. You will discover all the ways he was truly protecting and defending you.
Drew’s stat
ement outside of Sasha’s enclosure all those months ago leapt back to the forefront of her brain. She felt like she’d been revisiting her story throughout the study so far, but she had still not been able to see God’s hand in it. Frustrated, she leaned back in her chair and exhaled a long sigh. Her eyes scanned the room looking for Rogue, whom she spied on the rug in front of the fireplace. As her eyes drifted past her sleeping dog, they stopped on a stack of boxes in the far corner. They stood out from all the other unpacked boxes still scattered throughout the house because they were old and weathered, the words “Delaney’s stuff” written in magic marker now faded on the sides, the packing tape around them long yellowed with age.
Revisit your story.
The tug of God’s Spirit was so strong that she got up and walked over to that corner and contemplated the stacked boxes. There were two of them, both containing whatever childhood artifacts her Aunt Beth had saved for her. Claire had brought the boxes over the day Delaney moved in, having kept them aside after the sale of Elizabeth’s house. They’d been sitting in that corner for three weeks, and Delaney had initially debated whether to open them or just stick them in the attic. But now, suddenly pondering the unlikely coincidence of these boxes being here as she was going through Breaking Free, she grabbed the top box, set it on the ottoman, and tore the tape off the bottom box. She knelt down and folded back the faded cardboard lids.
The box was full of her junior high and high school yearbooks, several sketchbooks, her zippered pouch of colored pencils, and compact disk wallet full of CDs. She had no interest in looking through her high school yearbooks, so she grabbed one of the sketchbooks and opened it, expecting to see some childish scribble and a few juvenile drawings. She gasped when she saw page after page of exquisitely detailed drawings of animals—mostly of dogs. She’d sketched quite a bit in her teens, and her love of art and design had propelled her to SCAD for her degree. Her now highly trained eye could see just how talented her younger self had been. But as she looked through the pages, she had to smile at how completely fixated she had been then, and still was, on dogs.