When Grace Falls On A Waiting Heart.

I don’t think I have the energy to tell my entire life story. There is so much whose made me who I am today that to explain it all would be more than any human being would want to take the time to read. I know this after attempting to get it onto paper or a screen many, many times.

If depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide (attempts) are truly as common as the statistics say they are (and I believe those statistics to be true), than I am no one special. I am just like every other little girl or boy who has/had pain beyond what they thought was bearable, and so took any measure they felt brave enough to take to escape the pain. I still haven’t figured all of it out. Even through a lot of introspection and therapists pointedly asking me: “why do you think that is?”, I still haven’t come up with many answers that don’t sound ridiculous.

What I do know… what I can hold onto in the midst of all of the uncertainty and lack of answers, is knowing who I was then. And knowing who I am now. And knowing how they’re completely, totally, and drastically different.

At the age of thirteen, my heart began what would be a nearly five year outcry for rescue, for help. I walked through shadows that I could not measure the depths of, and somehow forged my way through nights that seemed never-ending. There was too much fear, pain, restlessness, and other emotions that I still haven’t identified, to express. After two attempts to extinguish the flame of my own life, my world was shaken back onto its axis.

As I grow, I begin to see how God can use tragedy to awaken a dead spirit. Through the death of a good friend, someone who had helped me through countless nights like the ones described above, I could have gone either way. I teetered dangerously for awhile on the fence between blaming God and hating him that much more for causing this to happen, and questioning whether there was more to life than what I was living and a higher purpose to her life that I should be seeking.

I still don’t know what made me take the latter route. It was my nature to blame and accuse at the time, and totally out of character for me to have the energy or initiative to seek any kind of “higher purpose” to anything. Death was something stronger than I’d ever had to deal with, though, and it turned my world upside down. So maybe the fact that I acted completely out of character actually makes sense.

I can’t really… verbalize, I guess… the way that God began to draw me back to him. Slowly, romantically, awesomely… all of those nights when I had angrily called out for him to prove himself seemed forgiven and even, maybe, just a little justified as he began to do just that. It still amazes me sometimes that I’m alive. And not only that I’m alive, but that I’m everything I swore I would never be, simple as a word: Christian. And that’s what it comes down to. My heart was waiting, his grace fell, and I was never the same.

My rescue was possible, even when I was convinced otherwise. It was hard work, there’s no way around that. Many days, it’s still very hard work. There are days that are blissful in their naivete, and there are days that take me right back to a night when I was thirteen, just like some sort of sick amusement park ride. It’s never easy, but every day I tell myself it’s worth it. If I can help one person, if one person can hear me and know they’re not so alone in this world… then it’s worth it.

Ashlee's Thoughts