Chasing Jesus: Part One
She watched as the digital clock on the microwave changed from 4:47 to 4:48 am. The change in those small green numbers was brief and disappointing. Nothing was different. Nothing was ever different. She sat in the same quiet house, at the same kitchen table, offering the same unheard prayers to the same unresponsive God.
The Bible in front of her was open, but she wasn’t reading it anymore. She was tired of reading about a Savior she didn’t know; tired of hearing about miracles that didn’t happen anymore. The sky outside was dark and overcast, and both the stars and moon were hidden from view. It was too early in the day to be awake, yet too late in the night to go back to sleep. So she sat there, staring at the glass of water in front of her, wondering why she could never quite fit in, even when it came to something as basic as maintaining a normal sleep schedule.
The condensation running down the side of the glass made her mouth water and she swallowed hard, changing her focus back to the matter at hand with just a little bit of effort. It was only a glass of water. Eight ounces of fluid that would make her healthier, stronger, and more capable of recovering. She was home. She was safe. There was absolutely no reason to be afraid.
Her stomach protested loudly, breaking the stillness around her and briefly waking the German shepherd who lay ever vigilant at her feet. Another growl from her stomach filled the air before it was silent once again. She hadn’t eaten in almost 72 hours, but that wasn’t abnormal anymore. The hollow feeling in her stomach, while unpleasant, had become familiar because it was still a preferable alternative to the other things she could be feeling.
She inhaled sharply and put the glass of water to her lips quickly, before she could change her mind. Cool relief coated her tongue and soothed her dry throat. She swallowed back an involuntary whimper as she finished the last of her drink; an immediate longing for more settled inside her chest.
She didn’t have an eating disorder, despite the things her classmates often whispered in the halls. She wasn’t punishing herself for a standard of beauty that she couldn’t attain. And she wasn’t seeking attention, the way her middle school teachers seemed to believe. On the contrary, nothing had made her feel more invisible or less understood.
But she didn’t feel angry at them for the accusations they threw at her primarily because it wasn’t logical to be angry. She knew that they didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. Nobody expected a thirteen-year-old girl to sit alone and awake in the middle of the night, praying to a God for answers that didn’t exist, and for a body that didn’t fail quite so often.
She avoided eating because food, all food, shut her body down. There was no pattern to the chaos, no consistency in her triggers. Her stomach was a ticking time bomb that sent shock waves of pain throughout every nerve in her body. Yes, the initial attack began within her gut, but it never stopped there. Instead, it spread, fast as wildfire, until even her fingertips shook from the effects.
She glanced at the clock again, it’s green numbers indicating that ten minutes had passed. Warm hope filled her chest and she moved to refill her glass with more of that divine liquid. She had never anticipated that the water from her tap would come to taste so ambrosial.
The change occurred almost instantly.
One second she was at the sink, allowing a small smile of relief to lift her cheeks; and the next she was on the ground, her body curled tightly into the fetal position, shards of glass littering the tile around her. A small puddle of water caused them to shine iridescently.
The beginnings of a scream rose in her throat, and she quickly covered her mouth to muffle the sound. Her dog was fully awake and alert now, hovering amid the glass and confusion with worry apparent in her movements. The water she’d swallowed only minutes before threatened to come back up and she fought desperately to avoid vomiting. She had to keep something down. She was determined to keep it down.
Tears stained her cheeks and salted her lips, adding savor and substance to her appeal. She was praying to God again, begging for grace the same way she had each day for the last two years. He was ignoring her again, staying silent like He always did.
When she finally opened her eyes, they felt dry, and she wondered when the tears had stopped flowing. Her dog was watching her cautiously now, whimpering quietly in concerned question. The clock read 6:15 am. She should be getting ready for school.
A distant bedroom door opened and she forced herself into motion before the rest of her family found her catatonic on the kitchen floor. She picked up the broken pieces of glass and used a small towel to absorb the remaining water. Moving to the bathroom, she splashed cool water on her face, removing all traces of tears from her cheeks.
She gazed at her reflection in the mirror and saw the defeated girl that stared back at her. Dark circles of exhaustion settled beneath panicked eyes and her lips were cracked from dehydration. With a steadying breath, she forced herself to smile until her eyes looked a little less hollow and cold.
The rules had changed again, as they so often did, and apparently water was no longer safe.
Safe. She longed to feel safe.
Instead, she felt fragile and broken; a damaged person living a damned life.
She shook her head then to interrupt her thoughts. She didn’t have time to feel angry at God; she would yell at Him later. For now, it was time to start over. Another day. Another facade.
She busied herself by getting ready for school, eventually leaving the house quietly, and skipping breakfast once again. It wasn’t hard to justify her actions; She did it automatically. Skipping breakfast was alright, necessary even because she had a math test during first period. She couldn’t afford to be sick until it was over.
All day, every day, she moved forward amid pain and fear. She didn’t choose to. She had to. And this was her life.
This was my life.
For more than a decade, this is how I lived: alone, afraid, and accused of inventing the whole illness by pretty much everyone except my own immediate family. And it was hell.
Now that I’m away from it, I can look back with more objectivity and understanding. Of course, I still see the pain. I still see the girl who spent most of her conscious thoughts in personal prayer. But I also see a whole lot of grace and God that I couldn’t always acknowledge in the heat of the moment. But He was there, I know that now.
For a long time I testified of the grace of God privately, within my own church building and on my private social media accounts. I never wanted to share my story with the world because I didn’t want the world to know me by my illness alone. I wanted to separate myself from those experiences and simply forget. I would move on and never talk about it again.
But when you’re twenty-one years old, a decade of experiences becomes a hard thing to forget. The more I remember, the more I become convinced that my survival was only attained by the means of some divine intervention or godly grace.
Think about it. How did I survive going days between meals, drinking almost nothing, and barely resting without constantly being hospitalized? How did I get up every day for ten years and live my own personal hell all over again? How did I physically, emotionally, and spiritually survive? It couldn’t have been solely through my own resources. Most of the time my resources had long since been exhausted.
I can no longer testify of grace privately if I’m only doing so to avoid reliving a painful past. And I’ve experienced far too many miracles over the years to simply stay quiet altogether, especially when so many others are feeling just as lost and abandoned as I did at the time.
So it’s time to be brave for God.
It’s time to be brave for you.
This is for all of us; a candid recollection of my experiences paired with the key lessons I learned about heaven along the way.
My testimony. My story. My faith and fears laid out on the page. So if you find yourself awake in the middle of the night, questioning God and His grace, or desperately seeking that same Savior of old, I hope this helps.
The Bible in front of her was open, but she wasn’t reading it anymore. She was tired of reading about a Savior she didn’t know; tired of hearing about miracles that didn’t happen anymore. The sky outside was dark and overcast, and both the stars and moon were hidden from view. It was too early in the day to be awake, yet too late in the night to go back to sleep. So she sat there, staring at the glass of water in front of her, wondering why she could never quite fit in, even when it came to something as basic as maintaining a normal sleep schedule.
The condensation running down the side of the glass made her mouth water and she swallowed hard, changing her focus back to the matter at hand with just a little bit of effort. It was only a glass of water. Eight ounces of fluid that would make her healthier, stronger, and more capable of recovering. She was home. She was safe. There was absolutely no reason to be afraid.
Her stomach protested loudly, breaking the stillness around her and briefly waking the German shepherd who lay ever vigilant at her feet. Another growl from her stomach filled the air before it was silent once again. She hadn’t eaten in almost 72 hours, but that wasn’t abnormal anymore. The hollow feeling in her stomach, while unpleasant, had become familiar because it was still a preferable alternative to the other things she could be feeling.
She inhaled sharply and put the glass of water to her lips quickly, before she could change her mind. Cool relief coated her tongue and soothed her dry throat. She swallowed back an involuntary whimper as she finished the last of her drink; an immediate longing for more settled inside her chest.
She didn’t have an eating disorder, despite the things her classmates often whispered in the halls. She wasn’t punishing herself for a standard of beauty that she couldn’t attain. And she wasn’t seeking attention, the way her middle school teachers seemed to believe. On the contrary, nothing had made her feel more invisible or less understood.
But she didn’t feel angry at them for the accusations they threw at her primarily because it wasn’t logical to be angry. She knew that they didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. Nobody expected a thirteen-year-old girl to sit alone and awake in the middle of the night, praying to a God for answers that didn’t exist, and for a body that didn’t fail quite so often.
She avoided eating because food, all food, shut her body down. There was no pattern to the chaos, no consistency in her triggers. Her stomach was a ticking time bomb that sent shock waves of pain throughout every nerve in her body. Yes, the initial attack began within her gut, but it never stopped there. Instead, it spread, fast as wildfire, until even her fingertips shook from the effects.
She glanced at the clock again, it’s green numbers indicating that ten minutes had passed. Warm hope filled her chest and she moved to refill her glass with more of that divine liquid. She had never anticipated that the water from her tap would come to taste so ambrosial.
The change occurred almost instantly.
One second she was at the sink, allowing a small smile of relief to lift her cheeks; and the next she was on the ground, her body curled tightly into the fetal position, shards of glass littering the tile around her. A small puddle of water caused them to shine iridescently.
The beginnings of a scream rose in her throat, and she quickly covered her mouth to muffle the sound. Her dog was fully awake and alert now, hovering amid the glass and confusion with worry apparent in her movements. The water she’d swallowed only minutes before threatened to come back up and she fought desperately to avoid vomiting. She had to keep something down. She was determined to keep it down.
Tears stained her cheeks and salted her lips, adding savor and substance to her appeal. She was praying to God again, begging for grace the same way she had each day for the last two years. He was ignoring her again, staying silent like He always did.
When she finally opened her eyes, they felt dry, and she wondered when the tears had stopped flowing. Her dog was watching her cautiously now, whimpering quietly in concerned question. The clock read 6:15 am. She should be getting ready for school.
A distant bedroom door opened and she forced herself into motion before the rest of her family found her catatonic on the kitchen floor. She picked up the broken pieces of glass and used a small towel to absorb the remaining water. Moving to the bathroom, she splashed cool water on her face, removing all traces of tears from her cheeks.
She gazed at her reflection in the mirror and saw the defeated girl that stared back at her. Dark circles of exhaustion settled beneath panicked eyes and her lips were cracked from dehydration. With a steadying breath, she forced herself to smile until her eyes looked a little less hollow and cold.
The rules had changed again, as they so often did, and apparently water was no longer safe.
Safe. She longed to feel safe.
Instead, she felt fragile and broken; a damaged person living a damned life.
She shook her head then to interrupt her thoughts. She didn’t have time to feel angry at God; she would yell at Him later. For now, it was time to start over. Another day. Another facade.
She busied herself by getting ready for school, eventually leaving the house quietly, and skipping breakfast once again. It wasn’t hard to justify her actions; She did it automatically. Skipping breakfast was alright, necessary even because she had a math test during first period. She couldn’t afford to be sick until it was over.
All day, every day, she moved forward amid pain and fear. She didn’t choose to. She had to. And this was her life.
This was my life.
For more than a decade, this is how I lived: alone, afraid, and accused of inventing the whole illness by pretty much everyone except my own immediate family. And it was hell.
Now that I’m away from it, I can look back with more objectivity and understanding. Of course, I still see the pain. I still see the girl who spent most of her conscious thoughts in personal prayer. But I also see a whole lot of grace and God that I couldn’t always acknowledge in the heat of the moment. But He was there, I know that now.For a long time I testified of the grace of God privately, within my own church building and on my private social media accounts. I never wanted to share my story with the world because I didn’t want the world to know me by my illness alone. I wanted to separate myself from those experiences and simply forget. I would move on and never talk about it again.
But when you’re twenty-one years old, a decade of experiences becomes a hard thing to forget. The more I remember, the more I become convinced that my survival was only attained by the means of some divine intervention or godly grace.
Think about it. How did I survive going days between meals, drinking almost nothing, and barely resting without constantly being hospitalized? How did I get up every day for ten years and live my own personal hell all over again? How did I physically, emotionally, and spiritually survive? It couldn’t have been solely through my own resources. Most of the time my resources had long since been exhausted.
I can no longer testify of grace privately if I’m only doing so to avoid reliving a painful past. And I’ve experienced far too many miracles over the years to simply stay quiet altogether, especially when so many others are feeling just as lost and abandoned as I did at the time.
So it’s time to be brave for God.
It’s time to be brave for you.
This is for all of us; a candid recollection of my experiences paired with the key lessons I learned about heaven along the way.
My testimony. My story. My faith and fears laid out on the page. So if you find yourself awake in the middle of the night, questioning God and His grace, or desperately seeking that same Savior of old, I hope this helps.
[This is post one of a series about grace, adversity, and how I learned to seek out the Savior even when He seemed to be absent. I want to always be authentic about how life really was during some of the hardest years of my life. So I'm going to be raw about both the good and the bad that I experienced. If you'd like to read the rest of my story, keep an eye out for the subsequent segments I'll be posting. (Hopefully one each week!)
I hope this series helps somebody. I hope it brings you courage. I hope it brings you empathy. I hope it brings you some reassurance that even your darkest, most miserable days will end, just like mine eventually did. But more than any of those things, I hope it helps you recommit to the lifelong pursuit of chasing Jesus. Because honestly, chasing Him is the greatest thing I've ever done.]
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