Running from Monday

by Lea Sims

  She set the sketchbook aside and turned to the box on the ottoman. She unfolded the lids and peered inside. She inhaled in painful surprise to see the very first item at the top of the pile. It was Duchess, the stuffed dog her daddy had given her on her fifth birthday. Her mother had said no to a real dog, so her daddy bought her this fluffy white stuffed animal version instead. She had a real pink collar and a tag that could be taken back to the pet store and engraved with whatever name you gave your pet. Her momma had suggested the name Duchess, and Delaney had agreed it was the perfect name.

  Lifting Duchess out of the box, she held her close and hugged her. Tears sprang immediately to her eyes, the visceral connection to the toy immediate and intense. How many times had she clung to Duchess in the middle of the night, praying her uncle would not come through the door? How many more nights had she wept silent and bitter tears into Duchess’s fur when he had? The now faded and matted little dog had been by her side through it all, but seeing her now brought those nights and their horrific violations to Delaney’s memory all over again.

  She frowned and put the stuffed dog down next to her, turning her attention back to the box. Her eyes widened to see the object at the bottom. It was a vintage wooden cigar box that she’d found at a flea market when she was in junior high. The box had lived in the drawer of her nightstand and over time had become a keepsake box of sorts, the place where she kept souvenirs and small objects that were meaningful to her. She pulled it out now and held it to her nose as she’d done often in her youth. It had the faint hint of tobacco still resident in its pressed wood panels. She sat it on the ottoman in front of her, running her fingers along the edges of the box, then gently unlocked the brass latch on the front.

  There were myriad small objects in the box—a small pink Bible, two woven bracelets she’d made at youth retreat the summer of her freshman year, a key chain from Stone Mountain she’d gotten on another youth trip, the name tag she wore as a volunteer at the animal shelter, and a folded piece of wax paper that she had used to rub the etchings from her parents’ headstone with a carbon pencil.

  But sitting on top of all those things was an item more precious to her than all the rest combined. It was a worn and weathered brown leather dog collar, frayed along the edges in several places. An equally battered metal tag in the shape of a dog bone hung from the buckle. Engraved into the tag but nearly rubbed away by wear and time was the name Monday. Delaney reached into the box and lifted the collar out gently, tears filling her eyes at the sight of it. She cradled it in her palm, recalling the day she had taken it off her beloved dog. She was a sophomore at SCAD when she had to give permission to the vet to euthanize Monday because they’d discovered he was riddled with cancer. It had been an extremely painful day in a long history of painful days.

  That dog had been her constant companion from the night she found him in the scrap pile of the old lumber mill until the day she’d stood beside him in the vet’s office watching him drift off into his final sleep. From the very beginning, Monday seemed to sense that Delaney needed him. He left her side only at her command and never willingly. No matter what room they were in, he would lie between her and the door, and he stepped in front of her whenever anyone approached her, at home or on the street.

  She recalled the day she’d brought him home, the day the police had taken her back to her aunt and uncle’s house. Monday had taken to her Aunt Beth immediately, falling in love with her the instant her aunt had given him a strip of bacon from the paper plate on the counter. But when her uncle came in from the garage, Monday had bristled and growled at him. Her Uncle Jimmy wanted the police to take the dog with them when they left, but her Aunt Beth intervened, telling him that the dog might be just the thing Delaney needed to help her get over whatever had prompted her to run away in the first place. So, he’d relented.

  Two nights later, when her uncle had slipped into her bedroom as he had so many times before, he was greeted by Monday, who had been curled up asleep at the foot of Delaney’s bed. As soon as her uncle took a step toward the bed, Monday stood up, walked to the head of the bed and positioned himself over Delaney, teeth bared and growling low. Her Uncle Jimmy had tried telling the dog to hush and get down, but Monday had held his position and growled even louder, clearly on the verge of issuing a warning bark. Fearful of waking his wife, her uncle had backed quietly out of the room and closed the door. No amount of complaining about the dog to Aunt Beth the next day would persuade her to get rid of him. In a rare show of defiance, her aunt had stood her ground and told him the dog was staying.

  “He never touched me again after that night, did he, boy?” Delaney whispered out loud as she looked down lovingly at the collar in her hand.

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, her eyes widened and her heart began to pound. He never touched me again after that night. Suddenly the memory reel in her mind rewound to the night she had spent in the abandoned portable building at the lumber yard. Hadn’t she just been crying it out on the floor, begging God to help her? Just a short while later she’d heard the banging coming from the scrap pile outside. And the dirty ball of fluff that had emerged from that pile had been the very thing that had finally put an end to her uncle’s long reign of terror.

  Was that you, God?

  Yes, baby girl.

  Something cracked open in Delaney’s heart at this immediate and tender response from the Holy Spirit. Deep, wracking sobs welled up from within her and she cried in overwhelmed release in the middle of her living room floor, clutching Monday’s collar to her chest. God hadn’t abandoned her. He hadn’t been looking down from his throne unmoved by her abuse and heartache. He had done just what Drew had told her God did—watched over her until the right time and opportunity to intervene.

  Delaney’s eyes darted back over to Duchess and then to the sketch book on the floor. He’d used the best vehicle available to him to love and protect her. You sent me a dog, God. She giggled and sniffed through her tears. The deep and stubborn pain, the one that had been locked up inside her for years, began to slowly seep out of her. The stronghold of rejection broke, and she felt the chains of doubt dropping from the wrists of her deepest beliefs.

  As she looked down at the collar in her hand, she shook her head at the irony. She had been running from that Monday her entire life—the day her world had gone dark. And yet it was Monday, her dog, who had come to her rescue.

  As she sat up now, thinking through all the jumbled puzzle pieces that were finally falling into place, the dots that were now blessedly connecting, she marveled at how she could have missed it all. She glanced over at Rogue asleep on the floor. Even Rogue’s arrival in her life, she had no doubt now, had been by God’s hand. How many times had she looked at that picture on the credenza of her office and cried out to God without even knowing it? How often had she sat there staring at the girl in that picture, loved unconditionally yet again by a dog, and yearned for a different life?

  God had loved her as much as he could through the dogs in her life, but they were not his end game. He still needed to restore her faith in himself and in humanity. When she’d finally found herself in the belly of the whale, at a rock-bottom place of value and identity, God had brought her back to Savannah, to Claire and the people of Refresh Station, and then navigated her to the kindest, most gentle man she had ever known, the only one who would ever have been capable of restoring her faith in men and ultimately in God himself.

  A man who rescued…abused dogs.

  Little shockwaves of revelation coursed through her again as she realized how deeply intentional God’s plan for her had been. Only God could have written this story on the book of her life! Only he could have seen the avenue by which she needed to find her way home, and only he could have orchestrated the moments that would get her from there to here. She put her face to the floor, repenting her doubt and weeping in prayerful gratitude to him for all that he had done to rescue
her.

  A little while later, as tears washed away her last remnants of opposition, she lay on her back staring in wonder at the ceiling, Rogue tucked snugly beside her. She thought of all the years she’d kept the pain and doubt locked away inside her—all the years she’d spent going through the motions of life, making costly decisions, and living in the wilderness outside of a relationship with God.

  She sat up suddenly. There are so many women out there just like me. She thought of Lexie and Callie and others she knew in New York, girls she’d gone to school with, others she’d worked with. She thought about the women in her small group. So many stories. So many in need of hope and a rescue.

  “Use me, God,” she whispered fervently. “Lead me to other women who need the same revelation you’ve just given me.”

  A match had now been struck in her heart, and a fiery new zeal was being birthed inside her for the God who had gone to such great lengths to redeem her. Her desire to live a God-first life shifted to a whole new level, replaced by an even greater desire to live a God-full life—full of passion and purpose.

  She smiled in teary-eyed joy back down into the box of memories sitting in front of her. She reached in to grab the tiny pink leather Bible that sat at the bottom. It had been a gift from her mother for Easter when she was six years old. It had been the same Bible she’d been clutching as she cried on the floor of her old bedroom the day she’d moved to her aunt and uncle’s house. Opening it now, she saw that her mother had written an inscription on the inside page.

  Keep this book close, little love. God has a beautiful purpose for your life. Trust him, Delaney. He’s always there, even when you can’t see him.

  Author’s Note

  I am so screwed up.

  These were the anguished words I whispered hoarsely into my living room carpet, fists clenched tightly and forehead pressed to the floor, as I poured my heart out to God one lonely night in the spring of 2003. I was alone in my newly leased apartment. My son and daughter were sleeping in their beds a few miles away in their father’s also newly leased apartment. Just a few months earlier, I had affixed my signature to the sale of what had once been my dream home, packed up my belongings, and left my husband. The walls of my beautifully constructed world had come crashing down around me, my eight-year marriage ending in a blaze of selfish neglect. A deep and numbing depression, a calloused conscience, and a long history as a relationship escape artist had led me to reject the suggestion of marriage counseling, to thrust my two young children in front of the oncoming train of a divorce, and to harden my heart to the devastating pain I was both feeling and causing.

  This was the defining moment of my life.

  I remember telling God, with whom my relationship had been as fickle and feckless as so many others in my life, that I was well and truly screwed up. “I am broken in ways I don’t even understand,” I admitted painfully to him that night, shame and frustration consuming me. I knew deep down that something had gone terribly awry—that I wasn’t just brokenhearted. I was broken. But I was ill-equipped to understand the root causes of my brokenness and, more importantly, how to fix them.

  Years before in my late teens, I had given my heart (or so I thought) to Christ. I was emotionally drawn to the comfort and security of God’s forgiveness, grace, and unconditional love. I drank eagerly from the worship well and embraced the beautiful idea of God. But I stepped into that relationship with a tremendous amount of baggage. Without the guidance of early discipleship and freedom resources, I continued to carry that baggage around for years—the defense mechanisms, the repeating patterns of sin and denial, the untamed tongue, the wayward emotions, and the toxic thinking that had taken shape through formative events in my young life.

  Because of that baggage, I experienced almost zero growth as a believer. I was a Christian in name only. I was, as Jesus so starkly accused the hypocritical Pharisees of his day, like a “whitewashed tomb,” deceptively lovely on the outside but full of “dead men’s bones” (Matt 23:27 NIV). Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to be the very picture of a godly woman. There were moments and seasons where I could convince even myself that I was pulling it off. In truth, the garments of a believer hung on me as on a mannequin. Inside, I was unchanged.

  If you had asked me back then how I felt about God, I would have responded unhesitatingly, I love him. It would have been purely an emotional response. I had no idea what it meant to really love God because I was operating under the juvenile assumption that loving God was a feeling. And like all feelings, sometimes I felt that love more strongly than at other times. It’s easy to get distracted from a feeling. It’s also easy to set that feeling aside in favor of other more immediately gratifying feelings.

  I have come to understand that loving God is a decision. In fact, loving God is a lifelong series of transformative decisions, both large and small, that reshape and redefine us. That night in my apartment, reeling in the aftermath of a marriage I had unraveled with my own hands, I was longing for something or someone to surgically remove the knot of confusion and pain that seemed perpetually lodged in my chest. I reached out to God in raw transparency. For the first time in my life, I didn’t sugarcoat it and I didn’t lie to myself or to Him. I didn’t hide behind a carefully worded prayer or the right infusion of scripture.

  You can’t hide your dead bones from God.

  So, I told Him I was broken. I told him I was a lying, hypocritical, messed-up woman. I wept bitter tears into the void of my room. But you know what happened when I did that? I met God for the first time in my room that night. And He let me cry it out. Awhile later as I lay there staring up at my ceiling, I felt a huge burden lift from my mind and spirit. A beautiful stillness fell over me. I can tell you that some things were broken off me completely and permanently in that moment. Other things took a whole lot longer and a lot of surrendering to God’s process to lay down. As I closed my eyes and listened, perhaps for the very first time, to the insistent voice of the Holy Spirit, I could see myself standing at a fork in the road, two divergent paths before me. I’ve long been a fan of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, and I knew immediately that the Holy Spirit was prompting me to choose my future.

  “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”

  Deuteronomy 30:19 NIV

  I made the first of many transformative decisions that night. I looked down the two paths that lay before me, and I chose the narrow one. I wanted to live! And I wanted my children to live! I made the decision to truly follow God and to commit to the work he wanted to do in and through my life. But one thing was abundantly clear. I needed to change. Choosing the other path would mean staying on the same road I’d been on for years. It would mean staying the same person I’d been for years and inviting the same outcomes I’d been walking out for years. I had to be the change I wanted to see in my life, and to do that meant I had to take my hands off the process of becoming who God had designed me to be. I surrendered complete control of that process to God.

  While Delaney’s story is her own, I have been in her shoes. I believe there are struggles she walks out in this story that are common to all women—abandonment, rejection, abuse, neglect, fear, emotional guardedness, and emptiness of soul. We can all relate to her in some way, and it’s why I’ve come to love her greatly. Through her story, Delaney shows us what it looks like to come out of hiding, to stop lurking in fear and shame in the shadows, and to walk uprightly in the radiant, cleansing light of truth. When we have the courage to open ourselves up to God, he does not make a mockery of our transparency. He does not put us on public display and point out our flaws for all to see. He does not invite others to throw stones nor does he throw any of his own. He asks us to step into the light so we can see him clearly while he puts us back together.

  God made my life com
plete

  when I placed all the pieces before him.

  When I got my act together,

  he gave me a fresh start.

  Now I’m alert to God’s ways;

  I don’t take God for granted.

  Every day I review the ways he works;

  I try not to miss a trick.

  I feel put back together,

  and I’m watching my step.

  God rewrote the text of my life

  when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

  Psalm 18:20-24 MSG

  My life changed the instant I opened the book of my heart to God’s eyes. I let him walk me back through the pages of my story, including the most painful chapters, the ones I never wanted to read again. But when God narrates those chapters of pain, he brings revelation and healing to what was written there. He doesn’t erase those words. They are permanently etched in sin and pain on those pages. But—he does take charge of the story.

  God showed me that at all times and in all things, he was working for my good. He was watching over me in every moment, and because he was also sitting in my future, he could already see how my story would turn out. Chapters that had been inscribed with abuse and sin are now part of a much larger testimony he was writing for my life. I now view all the chapters in the book of my life as God-breathed, redeemed and beautiful.

  If Delaney’s story has unlocked some painful pages in your story, open that book to God. Take the next step. Find a life-giving church and a group of faith-filled women who can walk beside you as God heals those wounds, rebuilds your identity, and breathes value and purpose into your life.

  Trust him. He’s always there.

  Even when you can’t see him.