CHAPTER 17
FROM HERE TO THERE
LOOKING BACK, IT all seems very clear how I ended up trapped in the rapids with no one who could save me but my King. I can see the slips, the tiny decisions that seemed insignificant, but in the moment I thought I was just living. I thought I was being a teenager, just discovering “who I was.” The reality was that I was being lied to, daily, by myself. I was buying into the “me” mentality. My life was for me, was about me, and had one actress: me. I was center stage and lived with the notion that the world revolved around me. But I didn’t have anyone to blame for my lifestyle but myself. I was the one downing the shots, making out with the boys, and doing the drugs. No one held me down and forced me to do any of it, but for some reason I felt compelled to continue doing things that were harmful to me. The following passage helped me understand this slip into sin. God provided these verses to help us understand the process and learn what to avoid.
They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.
EPHESIANS 4:18-19
“Darkened in Their Understanding . . .”
I feel like this is a nice way of saying you have lost your way. Suddenly, the things you thought you’d never do seem like no big deal. The laws of God seem insignificant and trivial. You feel as if you can’t find your way in this world, so if you create your own rules, it will help you navigate. I love that it says “darkened in their understanding,” because, make no mistake, believing the lies of your enemy, Satan, puts you in a very dark place. You feel clouded, as if someone has turned off the light in your head. Your feet start to feel unsteady, you feel misplaced in your own skin, and everything you thought you knew about your world suddenly feels wrong.
When my understanding was first darkened, I thought God was my problem. If I could just do all the things He told me not to do, then I’d be happy. I was a modern Eve, letting Satan speak the same lies to me that he said to Eve in the Garden. Satan told me, “God wants you to be lonely. He doesn’t want you to have fun. Look at all the popular kids. They have so much fun, and you don’t have a lot of friends. Don’t you want to fall in love? Doesn’t God want you to be happy?” With each lie I became more indignant, breathing them in like they were truth. I put on my stubborn face and started to echo Satan’s lies with, “Yeah! Good point!” I was so deceived, my understanding was darkened.
“Separated from the Life of God . . .”
Once your understanding has been darkened, it’s easy to separate yourself from the life of God. God is the God of light and truth, and when you believe the lies of the enemy, then you can easily slip away from God’s plan. When I started to buy the lies, I stopped going to Bible study, stopped talking to my Christian friends, found church irrelevant, and blamed all my problems on church and God. He seemed to have nothing for me, but only because I slipped away from His plan and His heart. I thought people just didn’t understand. I wanted freedom, and I wanted to be left alone. My brother Taylor’s sweet girlfriend always tried to reach out to me. She would send me the most thoughtful notes about how she was praying for me and would love to be friends. I would laugh and tell my friends, “I don’t know what she’s praying for. I’m doing just fine.” I was blind to the truth and separated from the life of God.
I’ve often struggled with the question of whether I was really saved before my great rebellion. Did I ever really accept Christ? Did I truly understand all that Jesus had to offer before I ran so far away? I don’t know, but I do know that I never really knew Him like I should have. What I understand about God now means I can never go back to the darkness. Struggle and question I might, but I don’t think I could ever return to a life totally separated from God. God is so captivating, so amazing, so fulfilling that my old life seems like a distant memory.
“The Hardening of Their Hearts . . .”
If you don’t know whether you’re being deceived, here’s a quick way to find out: check your heart. Does it break when you hear of world tragedies? Do you ache when you see a homeless man on the side of the interstate? Do you well up with tears when you see an older man eating alone? (Okay, maybe that’s just me.) Does world hunger bother you? Do you want to help those in need? Do you want to listen to your friends when they hurt? Do you want to serve the helpless? Do you want to share the gospel with those who don’t know the truth? Do you care enough about God’s children to give up your own comfort and wealth?
Or are you constantly thinking about you? Do you wonder when the conversation will turn to your dreams and life? Do you pray that God never calls you to a foreign mission field? Do you reason away the problems of the helpless with the excuse that they have to live with the consequences of their decisions? Do you care more about your own agenda than God’s? Do you hope He takes care of you before He gets to all the orphans? Do you change the channel when the hurting children in other countries come on TV? Do you wonder where God is in the world’s hurt but refuse to serve the hurting?
I can only ask these questions because I’ve gone through the same thing, where I wanted to lift high my agenda and to forget the rest of the world. For a time, I lived in a world that I felt revolved around me and my hurts, and anything outside of that was irrelevant. I was cold, bitter, and hard hearted. It’s easy to fall into. The tiny worlds we create for ourselves are constantly generating the message that we, as individuals, matter more than everyone else. But what if we all lived in that lie? What if we all took on our own agendas and forgot the needs of the world? What if the orphans never got adopted and the brokenhearted never had a shoulder to cry on? Scary, right? Satan would love that! He would love nothing more than to convince everyone that we need not worry about anyone besides ourselves. If you can’t see past your own fingertips, then your heart is hardened, and a hard heart is deadly.
There were plenty of times during my high school years that I thought my life was over. I thought I couldn’t live another day with the hurt (that I caused myself), and I have one-too-many drafted suicide letters to prove it. I couldn’t see past my tiny world. When you’ve built your life around your wants and needs and then things start crumbling, you get caught under the rubble. I felt trapped, unaware that I was simply caught underground and avoiding the ladder to light. There was a whole world outside my tiny hole, but I just couldn’t see it.
“Every Kind of Impurity . . .”
When your understanding is darkened, you’re separated from the life of God. Your heart is hardened, and you search for love in all the wrong places. You lose the sensitivity or discernment to know the difference between love and lust, so you try a little bit of everything. Relationships that leave you wanting, one-night stands that leave you lonely, kisses that mean nothing, and anything else that imitates love. You give yourself over to lust and hope it might turn into love. It might not even be your lust. Maybe it’s someone else’s, but you keep hoping that it might turn into something fulfilling and lasting, like one of those great romantic comedies where they fall into bed and then fall into love. Not how it works in the real world!
If you’re giving yourself over without the foundation of commitment, then you’ll end up more hardened than you were before you met Mr. Good-Enough-for-Right-Now. Don’t be fooled by your hardened heart. You don’t need another man; you need a Savior to remind you why you were sensitive to the things of God to begin with. Don’t let your senses become numbed by your surroundings or by what others tell you. The morals you held tightly to yesterday are still the same today, no matter what Satan is trying to convince you of.
I was convinced I wouldn’t have sex. It was out of the question. I might have fooled around, maybe fallen in love, but sex was for the confines of marriage. I told myself that at fifteen, before I really immersed myself in my popular lifestyle. After a
year of drinking, a few of my friends were having sex. Then I met a boy and lost a significant amount of my sensitivity, and suddenly it was “just” a Friday night make out, “just” a hookup, “just” sex. Before I knew it, I had given over to every whim, every bad idea, every chance at love, and for what cause? I was broken and desperately lonely, and I had a reputation that was as dirty as my heart.
“A Continual Lust for More”
Let that sink in. A continual lust for more. It will never be enough; whatever you’re addicted to, it will never be enough. Hear me loud and clear: it will never be enough. If there ever could be enough, there wouldn’t be rehab, people wouldn’t die of overdoses, and broken hearts wouldn’t come in every shape and size. Whatever you’re chasing, it will never be enough.
When I first started drinking, I only needed three shots to be drunk. I was skinny and young, so I prided myself on how little I had to drink in order to get a good buzz. I’d take the shots all in a row, preferring the drunkenness to come on fast and strong, and then I’d be happy for a few hours. After six months of drinking, I needed five shots to have the same effect. After a year, I needed a little more than six. It kept going on that way so that by senior year I was drinking ten to twelve shots of straight vodka a night. It was never enough. I started smoking because I couldn’t get drunk at school and I needed something to make me feel different. It still wasn’t enough, and Satan knew it never would be. His plan was that I would drink myself to death. I could have, and a few times I almost did, but for some reason God decided I could do the world some good through my mess of a life.
When I started having sex, I told myself it would just be that one guy, just my first love, and I wouldn’t have sex again until I was married. But then we broke up, and the other stuff wasn’t enough. I ended up sleeping with my next boyfriend because it was never enough.
Whatever you can’t let go of, trust me when I tell you it will never be enough. The drugs will fade and you’ll need more, the buzz will wear off and you’ll need another drink, the moment will end and you’ll be more alone than before, the numbness will subside and you’ll feel pain again. It will never be enough. That’s why Jesus says that He is the living water (see John 7:37-38). He is the only thing that will ever be enough. Drink Him in, let His Word fill you, and let His love satisfy the need your soul has. Let His graciousness heal your hardened heart, and let His grace cover your wounds.
Don’t believe the lies. Please listen to your Savior’s sweet voice and trust Him.
Whenever people hear that I am writing a book, they ask, “What’s it about?” I tell them I want to help teenage girls see truth. The follow-up question is always the same: “Is it a self-help book?” I pray that it is not. I’m not a trained counselor, and I don’t claim to know anything divine. I just know a story that begins in darkness and ends in brilliant light. I know a story that beats all the odds and proves that God is a God who is mighty to save. One of my favorite things about Jesus is that He was a storyteller; He took life lessons and told them in a way that people could grasp. He told them in story form. I might not remember everything in the book of Romans, but I know all the Bible stories I was taught as a child.
Stories resonate in ways that simple advice cannot. I believe it’s because we all want to know someone understands; we want to know that other people are going down the same path we are, because sometimes the path is dark, and when it’s dark and you think you’re alone, life is scary. I wrote this to tell you that you’re not alone. I wrote this because you need to know that God can use you despite your past, despite whatever lies you might have embraced, and more than that, He desperately wants to use you. He can make you squeaky clean, and while it might take a Brillo pad to do so, let me promise you it is worth it in the end.
The Prodigal Son is a story most of us have heard, but no matter how many times I hear it, I always get choked up in the end when the father runs out to meet his son, despite his child’s wretched failures (see Luke 15:11-32). If you don’t understand why God could ever love you like that, then you’ve missed something huge. He is your Father, and while some earthly parents have really screwed up, God has a divine devotion to you that withstands every circumstance. He knows where you’ve been. He knows you have squandered His gifts to you. And yet He comes running. He knows where your head has been laid, and He knows you have broken His rules. And yet He comes running. He knows you have abandoned His love at times and spit on His blessings. And still He comes running. He will always come running. He doesn’t sit at the end of the driveway, arms crossed, tapping one foot, waiting to give a lecture. He runs at you full force until you collide with His amazing love. He weeps with you for your hurt, He comforts you with gifts you haven’t earned, and He takes you into His arms. You belong safely nuzzled in your Father’s arms, not in the arms of a stranger or in the chains of sin. He will clean your wounds and cover your shame. He will bless your return home to Him, even if yesterday you were lying with the pigs. That’s what your heavenly Father does.
Writing this book taught me something I thought I already knew but I hadn’t really grasped: God is not human. I know that sounds elementary, but I tend to view God through my human eyes. I think, How could He love me when I have been so sinful? And the answer is, because He’s not human. How could He forgive me when I have done nothing to earn it? Because He is God. How could He love me that much? Because He is God. He doesn’t wait until we’ve earned it, because He doesn’t expect us to earn it. He doesn’t give lectures, because He isn’t on a power trip. Everything He does is for us. He is already God. He made everything we see, and He commands it. He doesn’t need us for an ego trip. He just wants to love us. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but it doesn’t have to.
When was the last time you asked your dog to talk? I’m not crazy, I promise, but think about it. You don’t ask your dog to do something it clearly cannot do. The creature is incapable of speaking, so you don’t yell at it when it doesn’t speak. Just as you would show grace to your dog, so God shows grace to us. We’re not perfect, and God knows this. He knows we’ll sin, and He knows we’ll fail, because ever since sin entered the world, humans have been incapable of perfection. God doesn’t expect you to be blameless on your own; He expects you to run after Him full force, because that’s what will give you life. He came because we need a Savior. It is a fact of life. So don’t hold God to human standards. Just follow Him, love Him, let Him teach you, and let Him be your one and only God. That is as close to perfection as you or any of us will ever get.
Trade in your human desires for Someone, Something greater. And, trust me, not only will God fulfill your desires, He’ll give you so much more. Try Him—and live!
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