As part of our Womanly Wednesday series, I’ll be sharing guests posts by different women who are bravely putting their hearts and stories out there for you to read. And friends, this girl is the bravest. I met Annie my freshman year in college, and her story is one of the clearest examples of God’s relentless pursuit of our broken, hurting hearts. She is radiant, with a joy and heart for people and adventures that absolutely shines and lights up whatever room she walks in. I bawled reading this post about how she found healing and hope in the midst of abuse and pain, and it is an honor to have her sharing her heart on the blog today.
Mine is a story of abuse and utter despair. It is a story of hopelessness and pursuit of worldly success that has no ultimate value; a chasing after the wind. It is a story of redemption, of God’s saving grace, of the Lord’s unfailing pursuit of a girl who bolted the other way – and his ability to capture and comfort even the most broken-hearted.
Maybe it’s a story you can relate to – perhaps not with the nitty gritty details, but with the heart of the matter. The insecurities. The shame. The confidence in no one and nothing but myself. The futile attempts to pick myself up by my bootstraps, without realizing that I had no firm foundation to place those boots on. The slow realization and denial of the simple fact that if your efforts are all that you rely on, you won’t stand for long when the terrain beneath those boots morphs to shifting, sinking sand.
Jesus reached me as a 20-year-old college student who had spent her entire life succeeding academically and athletically – because I didn’t have a choice. I was raised in an extremely broken home, physically abused until I was big enough to fight back and threaten real damage, and manipulated as a pawn between two warring parents until I achieved financial independence. College was my ticket out; I had to be successful because it was my only means of escape. I arrived at Davidson College in August 2008 vowing to leave behind my past, make a name for myself in the business world, and prove my value. I also arrived damaged – with no true understanding of what love means, deep-seated insecurities and unspoken fears of abandonment, a stunted ability to demonstrate any true vulnerability, a host of disordered eating habits, and a laughter-filled persona seasoned with very thinly veiled, biting defensiveness. I arrived at Davidson white-knuckling my life and in a pit of despair that I wouldn’t recognize until Jesus Christ lifted me out and gave me life.
That’s dramatic, right? Long story short, God let me continue to have my way and run my life exactly how I wanted for approximately 1 year from the day I arrived at Davidson. He let me experience the exhilarating highs of being a freshman in college, he let me think that I had left behind all of my issues and I had successfully transformed myself into a whole new woman simply by cutting ties with my past and choosing to start anew. He let me place the full, consummate weight of my value as a person on who I had made myself out to be, what I could do, how I could perform. He allowed it.
He also allowed me to fall into a pit of complete and utter despair when this foundation I had come to call my home at Davidson started shaking beneath my feet. He allowed me to crumble from the inside out when my eating disorder again reared its ugly head and I began compulsively filling the emptiness of my heart with anything I could find to stuff inside. He allowed me to be confronted head-on (again) with the reality that I had been abandoned before, and I would be abandoned again. He reminded me that I had lived my senior year of high school alone and scared while my mom whisked my little brother off to her new boyfriend’s house and left me to fend for myself. Everything I had so effectively bottled up and tucked neatly in a hidden corner of my heart bubbled up, and God let it happen.
If it seems cruel that God allowed these things, please know that it wasn’t. It was necessary. God confronts and presents himself to each of us in exactly the way that we need him to. He personalizes the way that he makes the truth of his overwhelming, unstoppable, infinite love and compassion known to us so that we know that it is him and can attribute it to him alone. God didn’t force me to believe anything; he just showed me the truth when I was ready to hear it. God intentionally let me walk my own way for 20 years, to try to be perfect (and to ultimately fail), to repeatedly attempt to patch up my holes on my own or through worldly means or through other people, and to fall flat on my face. God knew that someone who had gritted her way through such a traumatic childhood would relinquish control to no one and nothing until it was abundantly clear that her ability to fix herself was completely outside her control and that nothing in this world could put her back together.
As the college friends who led me to Christ said while I so vehemently denied any interest in faith, “I don’t think it’s any coincidence that you were placed on a dormitory hall with Jesus-loving women in complete pursuit of the Lord.”
As I clawed at a filthy, disintegrating, blue carpet on the floor of a Davidson sophomore dorm room that had seen the footsteps of far too many students before me, I cried out. Jesus. I will never be clean. Who I am will never be enough. I am dirty, and I am broken, and I am so far beyond repair. Heal me, Jesus, because I can’t. Because you’re the only one that can. I’ve tried everything, God, and I am too far lost. I am too lost, God, and you are the only one who can find me.
And he did. He took this heart of stone, and he turned it to flesh. And it hurt. Oh my, how it hurt. In my feeble attempts to heal myself and prevent further damage to this broken, mortal heart of mine, I had locked it away for 20 years – damaged. Its festering wounds had been improperly bound and hidden away by an amateur; we were never made to heal our own hearts, and we are completely and utterly incapable of piecing back together the meticulous handiwork of the master Creator. God had formed me in my mother’s womb, he knew me before I was born, and he had hand-crafted this sinful heart to be whole only through Jesus Christ (Psalm 139).
The Lord held my hardened heart in his loving hands. As he gingerly peeled back my bandages, I looked upon 20 years of bottled pain. It was a gaping, bleeding wound. It was disgusting, it was shameful, it was so imperfect. It was damaged and broken; it looked nothing like what I would expect of the smart, confident person that I presented myself to be every single day. But it was real, and it was beating.
He took out the black, damaged corners of my heart. He removed the shame. I knew, viscerally, in every part of me, that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior and that he is the only one who offers rescue. God told me that Jesus Christ had paid for my sins – for every decision I made to turn away from him. He told me that Jesus had paid for my parents’ sins – that his free gift of forgiveness was available to them and to me – this heart beyond repair – if only I declared that Jesus was my Lord and Savior and I believed in my heart that God had raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). He told me that it was finished, that I was rescued, that Jesus had taken the bullet I deserved. God told me that I am washed as white as snow, and that he will never leave me or forsake me. He told me that he is my Father, and my Creator. He had made the mountains and the oceans and the birds, and he had made me. I surrendered my life to Jesus, and the Lord stitched me together with eternal, immutable, immortal thread. He brought me to life (Ephesians 2).
Today, my joy is real. My hope is in the Lord. I know that I am valuable solely because the Lord declared it so. I am broken, but I am not lost. I am so imperfect, but I know that Jesus Christ has made up for my failures. There are so many things I could say that the Lord has changed in my heart and in my life – but I’ll save those for another day. Today I just wanted to tell you that the Lord is my RESCUE, and my story is evidence that no one is too far gone to hear his call. Every one of us is unworthy of his love, but he declares us infinitely valuable through Jesus Christ. He invites you to inherit the Kingdom of God – to go to heaven and have eternal life – because of who HE is, not because of who we are. Call on his name, and he will lift you up exactly where you are and bring you to life.
Annie currently lives and works in Washington D.C. and is one of the founding members of Praise on the Mall, a soon-to-be non-profit that organizes bimonthly worship services on the National Mall. If you live in the D.C. area or are traveling that way you should check out their website or Facebook to see the amazing things she and her friends are doing to point people to Jesus in our nation’s capital!
Want to get Womanly Wednesday posts and other posts sent right to your inbox? Click here to sign up for our newsletter!
