Discovering Something Shiney

The desire for love was so great that without even realizing it, I had invited my abusers from my childhood into my bedroom daily. Every relationship was a reflection of a past I was desperately trying to run from. Instead, “I will love you if” became a way of life. I was so desperate to be loved that I recognized love through the distorted lenses of shattered hopes and whimsical dreams. I truly believed that without the presence of pain love was unattainable. I had to feel it, to be touched by it, I needed a sensory overload to reach beneath the pain I caused myself in order for me to experience it. I was broken and nothing I tried put me back together; no relationship, no therapy, no friendship, no amount of success, and no amount of pain. Nothing worked.

It was not until I was at the end of myself, when I felt like I had nothing left, that the opportunities to give God a chance came knocking at my door or should I say my shower door. It was the strangest thing, I wasn’t expecting it, neither did I plan for it to happen, it just happened, and it all started with me feeling like my life was over or at least I wanted it to be.

There was nothing that could satisfy the depth of the loneliness inside of me. I opened the door to the shower as the steam cascaded out into the air. I stepped inside to reach for the faucet as my mind told me to make it hotter. I knew it could never get hot enough, but I turned the nozzle as far as it would go. I had no strength to fight them anymore, but the utterance from my mouth broke forth from the clutches of my lips, as these words escaped me: “take it from me, please, because, I don’t want this life anymore.” I held a razor blade in one hand as I cried out to God with the other. My words broke free from the prison inside my soul and I said to the Father of all creation, “If you are real, save me from myself!”

The shower never could touch or cleanse the depth of my sufferings. The hollowness from inside of me split out on that shower floor as I fell to my knees in full surrender to a Savior I never knew. In that moment, a Deity I once sang to as a small child showed up. His grace blanketed me because I was too weak to fight. Too weak for hatred, too weak for pain; but in my weakness He gave me strength; strength to face the truth. The truth about all the pain I had put myself through. Jesus not only heard me but He saw me there. He came and sat with me in that shower. It was Jesus who never shuddered at all of my ugly truths, but instead, He loved me there. It was Him who met me on the shower floor, right where I was, alone, empty, and hollow.

My soul bore the darkened truth of my past. It was a truth I could not hide from. It was the truth that stole my entire life and the very truth I tried so hard to run from. I felt as though He covered me with a blanket of His grace. Right there, surrounded by iridescent clouds of steam with the force of showered droplets beating down on my back, He found me.

He held me there as He showed me a memory from when I was twelve. My Mom had taken me for my first abortion. At the time, I had no idea the depth of pain it would cause me. I didn’t know that on that same day, a gapping whole would be torn open inside of my soul. A whole that could never be filled by the hopes of finding love, because I had just lost the most natural form of unconditional love that was ever created. The love between a mother and her unborn child, my womb had become a tomb and I did not even understand what had just happened to me. I did not understand that this ripple in time would vibrate horizontal transverse waves throughout the next eighteen years of my life. I didn’t know it would ruin the ability for me to feel loved because the one person in the universe who was supposed to protect me was relieved she had just destroyed part of me. But the truth is she didn’t know either.

Between the heat and the water pounding on my back, I felt as if it cleansed every ounce of pain my soul had ever suffered.  I cried as He gave me the greatest gift ever given to mankind. He gave me the gift of repentance, and with each breath, I confessed every abortion that came into my mind. My heart was so hard and I didn’t even know why. I didn’t know my pain, suffering, and self-hatred came from the death of my unborn children. I didn’t know the choice I made actually stole self-value and worth from me. I didn’t know with each death, I died a little more each time. I didn’t know, until that moment, abortion caused me so much pain.

My mouth felt as though it didn’t belong to me; its confessions bellowed out from the depths of my soul as I asked Him to forgive me for every single abortion I ever had. I watched every single painful memory of the death that I had caused go down that drain. Each and every tear was washed away and for the first time in my life, I actually felt clean.  

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