The MAN

God sometimes just picks the funniest times to talk to me.  I was in the middle of my very exciting workday when God was like, "So, Liko..." & I'm all, "NOW?  really?" cuz, y'know, I'm typing up a storm over there... & He's like, "Yes, now, I've got you listening.  Write this down." So I'm writing down all this stuff about when I first got saved my senior year of high school.  The reason I'm bringing this up is because we were sharing testimonies at our worship and prayer night.  When I tell mine, I usually discount the part where I first got saved and focus on a later incident where God really performed a miracle in my life.  God wanted me to revisit why I ached in my heart for salvation in the first place.

Flashback to October of 2002, a rundown of the state of my life:  At that point I had been through my father's death 3 years prior which I had never really dealt with.  I had a rocky relationship with my mother filled with guilt, fighting, and misunderstanding.  In retrospect she was doing what she knew how to do dealing with everything she was going through, but her love for me didn't come out in the best ways.  I was a social butterfly but emotionally reclusive, hiding my deep pain and personal problems from everyone, even my best friends.  I was proud to figure out to dissect a razor cartridge so I could cut myself and I had a couple of years of an eating disorder under my belt.  Things could have been worse, but needless to say, I was a giant mess.  What I knew of love seemed to be temporal, conditional, or performance based, especially because no one really knew all the things inside of me, they couldn't ever really love me for me, the REAL me.  I felt that all those things made me pretty unlovable but perhaps my facade made me tolerable.  Oh, and to ice the cake, my first love and I had just broken up September 1st.  Fast forward to September 14th, I'm not sure what I did that night, but usually the drama with me and my mama went down like: I have a fun night, come home, do something rude or say something sassy and we end up in a drawn out verbal battle where I always lost.  And every single time I've had it "up to here" with how my life was going, but really couldn't see any way out.  So I'm in the bathroom dismantling my razor cartridge and I remember something I was looking at on the internet the other day.  I'm pretty sure it was a link to NeedHim.org I had clicked on explaining why we need Jesus and forgiveness and how to gain salvation.  I left the page up but I wasn't ready to really get into this thing with Jesus.  I felt a tug to go back and read it again and I was so far down at my bottom I figured there was no way I could do life by myself anymore.  It's too difficult.  

I didn't know in advance God would stop the cutting or later miraculously heal my bulimia with one prayer or any of the other things He would change,  but at that moment I just wanted to know what real Love was.  Most people make another person the god in their life, expecting them to fill what's missing in their lives and cure that longing to be loved even though that's a lot of expectation on imperfect human beings.  So far, no person in my life could provide that for me and I so wanted to believe that someone could love me forever, unconditionally, no matter what I had done or said or would ever do in the future...just love me.  Jesus, with His perfect Love and Grace, promises that AND delivers.