Lost and Found: Finding Hope in the Detours of Life (12 page)

If I could get Robert to love me, then maybe I wasn’t damaged goods after all. All I had to do was get him to accept me. Then maybe I could be redeemed. He was the only thing I had left that wasn’t a reminder of my failures. I genuinely loved him for that. Life is so hard when you fall in love with being numb. I didn’t want to see my parents’ irritation about my life, so I moved in with Robert. Needless to say, they were not pleased. When their disapproval turned to flat-out disappointment, I stopped calling.

It’s hard to explain why I chose Robert, especially given our history and where I stand now. In many ways we were both trying to outrun the statistics of our past. I believed that if I loved him to health, then maybe he could figure out how to heal me in return. Our love was genuine, but it wasn’t healthy. Love does conquer all, but it must be used in its purest form. Love is too often diluted with lust, money, pain, and abuse.

I didn’t know that then, of course. All that mattered to me was that I had love, or what passed for it. Teen moms don’t get fairy tales, but I was determined to make my relationship with Robert the exception. We would prove wrong everyone who doubted us. I just had a few unexpected detours on the way.

———

While out one day job hunting, I ended up on a side of town I had never been before. There wasn’t a familiar exit for miles and miles. It looked like the Texas I imagined in West Virginia. Then, there it was. Off in the distance, standing higher than anything else around it, Texas Cabaret.

I pulled up to the building, parked my car, took a deep breath, and then went in. The topless club was pretty crowded. I noted that the waitresses wore a black top with black pants. There were three dancers on the stage. Before I could see anything else, the bouncer asked if he could help me with anything.

I was hired on the spot. No questions, no trial period. I trained that day and started the next.

There are these moments in life when we imagine who we want to become. Before the vision is fully realized in our mind, we are awakened by the harsh reality of who we are and what we have done. The distance between point A and point B stretches further than our faith allows and we give in. We cave in to the reality of our existence and give the ladder of hope to someone who has what it takes to go the distance.

Sure, waitressing at a strip club wasn’t the ideal job for the daughter of Bishop and Mrs. Jakes, but I had to survive. It took too much work, hope, and energy to attempt to live my dream. My co-workers at the club had no idea who they were working with; that didn’t bother them or me.

Life doesn’t take a break on anyone. All of us, sooner or later, will face incredible blows. Maybe they’re meant to strengthen us, but when you’re on the receiving end, it feels like it was meant to break us. Instead of rising to the occasion and squaring back off, we give in to the disappointment.

We gravitate to people who are too busy tending to their own mess that they have no time or energy to focus on our own. I found myself in the safety of ignorance. They didn’t know who I was, who I could have become, or why I had ended up there. All that mattered when I entered the dark building was that I had enough cash in my pocket to make change.

Each day I walked into the club, I felt shame. I let the shame comfort me because it was easier than love challenging me. In this space it was okay to be broken; it was okay to not want more.

I was lost and wasn’t sure if I could even be found anymore.

———

I worked at the club for over a month. I’d make small talk with the waitresses, but nothing too in-depth. They were friendly enough and I was quiet enough that we hardly had any issues.

I did not want that to be my life, but I didn’t see how anything else was possible. I gave up on me. On the sidelines of my life there were many people cheering me on. The cheers that were meant to motivate me scared me. I didn’t want to disappoint them by telling my secret: I was playing a game and didn’t know the rules. Little did I know that this wasn’t just my secret.

For years, everyone familiar with my last name expected that life was somehow much easier for us. With wide eyes and hopeful voices they asked, “What’s it like to be in that family?” I wanted to give them some type of hope that somewhere on the other side of the mountain there’s this place where you no longer have pain, secrets, or shame. I knew that, like me, they wanted to believe there was more to life than our current place.

I had no hope to sell anyone.

How could I tell them that you exchange one problem for another? None of us are born with a map. There’s no clear-cut plan on how to avoid trouble. We face critical life moments with no preparation and then become penalized for getting the answer wrong. I didn’t just give up on myself, I gave up because I was tired of failing. I graduated at sixteen years old in the top percent of graduates in the nation. A member of the National Honors Society, I was selected to go to Washington, D.C., where I was commended with a group of my peers for my commitment to my education. You would’ve thought that I paid my teachers when you read my recommendation letters for college.

Two years later, I was learning the difference between being among top-shelf peers and watching the young faces of other women like me settle into survivor mode. Dreams were for people who hadn’t experienced failure; life was for the rest of us.

———

So why share this with you?

Whether you were born with a silver or plastic spoon in your mouth, it doesn’t determine who you become. There has to be some fight in you. You have to be willing to become uncomfortable if you want to be stretched. There’s no way we get from point A to point B without recognizing that there will be pain.

If we’re lucky, we understand that the pain is growing us, but there will be days when all we can focus on is the hurt and the disappointment of being utterly broken. And, to be honest, sometimes it’s easier to be surrounded by people who know and don’t judge your brokenness than to come around those who want to infect you with their opinions.

Instantly, I knew what had happened to the people I grew up with who stopped coming to church. Little by little, our childhood entourage of ten to fifteen dwarfed to three or four. The others had learned, like I eventually did, that there was a whole group of people outside the walls of our church who would accept us broken and weren’t interested in condemning us. We could be our imperfect selves out there, but in the church or in our homes there were questions for which we had no answers.

The answers don’t come because you’re a pastor and certainly not because you’re a pastor’s daughter. I had to find my way, just like you. My journey wasn’t beautiful and it certainly wasn’t clean. Your life doesn’t have to resemble a fairy tale for your dream to come true. I wish I could tell you that I was born into a family that got to escape trouble just because God gifted my dad with an
incredible gift of interpreting the Bible. The truth is that our gifts come at a cost.

We never grew up believing in Santa Claus, something for which we jokingly say we should probably seek counseling. After having my own children and Christmas to prepare for, I understood how disheartening it is to work all year for someone else to take credit for the gifts that you give your children. When we opened our presents, we knew that we got them because our parents worked tirelessly to give them to us. We knew what it cost them to make us smile.

Very few people know the cost of ministry. Anytime you give away something that’s in you, you lose a piece of you. We trust that God will restore all that we have poured out for His glory. We pray that He’s covering us while we share His Word, but it is still a test of faith to leave your own home unguarded while you help others to rebuild. My parents’ gift didn’t save me from trouble, but it did plant a seed inside of me.

In the darkness of a strip club, dirt covered the seed that was in my heart.

If we aren’t careful, we will confuse the dirt that covers the seed of our destiny for a final burial. We have to be buried so that we can be rooted before emerging into the world. No one can grow your roots for you. But you get to decide whether your darkest moments become the death of you or the roots in you. I was applying for jobs during the day and working at the club at night. I didn’t want to be in accounting, but I couldn’t be a waitress forever. I wanted my son and I couldn’t work the late nights. Something had to come through job-wise before the semester ended, otherwise I would be devastated.

One day while I was heading to work, my uncle called and asked if we could meet. I told him I was on my way to work. As far as my family knew, I was working at an actual restaurant by campus.
When he offered to come in, and we could talk while I worked, I knew something was going on.

I called in to the club and told them I was sick.

At least that was true.

An hour later, I was in tears with my uncle Sean. My mother knew that something was going on with me, but because I wasn’t talking, she and my uncle conspired to find out how much trouble I was in. They knew I wasn’t in school, living in my dorm, or working at a restaurant. My uncle, also in charge of security at the church, made a few phone calls and found out exactly where I was working. Having never gone in to see exactly what I was doing at the Texas Cabaret, they assumed I was stripping.

I wasn’t upset. How could I be?

I understood too well that life doesn’t always go as planned. It was pretty unlikely that the girls dancing on the poles were there because they had dreamed of it since they were little girls. Life for them, like me, had led them to make some decisions that were in direct contrast to the fairy tales we grew up watching. There wasn’t much difference between us. We’re all one heartbreak away from bitterness, one bad decision away from calamity.

I was afraid of disappointing my family with my truth. I didn’t want them to see how low I was. I tried to play hide-and-seek, but love found me. My mother had given my uncle one charge: “When you find my baby, bring her back to me.” On the car ride home, thousands of things crossed my mind. I wondered whether I was walking into an intervention, confrontation, or prison. I wasn’t sure how my parents were going to react. When I knocked on the door
of my parents’ bedroom, my mother answered the door and I fell into her arms. There was no need for words. I just needed to feel her arms around me. I needed to remember what it felt like to be held together.

That was my last day working at the strip club.

———

I was shattered, but there in her arms I felt like I was whole again. There comes this opportunity in all of our lives when we must choose between becoming completely enraged and being silent. Determining which reaction is best is never easy. Just remember when you’re dealing with a person who is weary, you don’t want your rage to add to their brokenness. You see, most of the time, you don’t need someone to tell you you’re wrong. You carry the grief of being lost with every turn you make. The last thing you need when you’re stranded is someone yelling at you to find your way.

There’s no worse feeling than being lost in a strange land. I could get lost in the church and it never scared me, because I knew that I would eventually find my way or someone would find me. When I dropped out of school and started applying for jobs, I was in unchartered territory. I learned to make a résumé online. No one called in any favors to find me a job. I had spent most of my life wanting someone to see only
Sarah
Jakes, not Sarah
Jakes
. I wanted someone to care that I was someone other than T.D. Jakes’s daughter.

The one thing I had spent years seeking had been there all along. In my mother’s arms, I realized that my parents were the ones who cared about Sarah. They were the ones who didn’t need to use me
to further their own agendas. I was their daughter. Right, wrong, broken, or afraid, I was still theirs.

The best way to teach others, especially your children, about God is loving them. Before our babies can say
Bible
—let alone read it, understand it, and apply it to their lives—they know love. They understand that someone has been taking care of them when they couldn’t take care of themselves. They learn that love sometimes means sacrifice. We must work so that they can play, cook so that they can eat, and run so that they can eventually fly.

We don’t teach our children to speak; they listen and learn based on what we say. They watch the form our mouth makes when we prepare for words to come out. They study when to use which phrase appropriately. We teach love the same way.

How can we expect adults to understand that love is about being there when love for them meant being left alone to find their own way? How do we teach that love is about sacrifice when all we do is take? We can’t expect others to understand our selfless love when all they’ve known is looking out for themselves.

When I left my parents’ home, I made two decisions: I was quitting my job and Robert was going to learn my definition of love.

Both would cost me.

WE WERE
BROKE.

Not just living check to check, but getting eviction notices, waiting for the electricity to be turned off, and sharing a cup of noodles for dinner. It had been a week since the day at my parents’ when I decided to quit working at the club. We paid as many bills as we could given my unexpected moral epiphany. And I was excited to have a job interview for a position that didn’t require me to sell knives, cleaning supplies, magazines, or meat to get paid.

If I landed the job, I’d be working through a temp agency as a receptionist. It wasn’t accounting or journalism, but it was a start. I would get paid weekly and have benefits. I managed to make it past the first round of interviews with the agency; the next round was with the actual company.

It was Valentine’s Day, though, and there was no way on our budget to have reservations at a fine restaurant. I had taken a few odd jobs baby-sitting and cleaning homes, but it was nothing
compared with the tips I had been receiving at the club. By the time we put gas in our cars, we couldn’t even do a good grocery run. We survived on fast food, dollar store necessities, and ramen noodles.

But I was determined to stitch together some kind of special, romantic dinner. So I gathered up some of my old CDs, DVDs, and books and went to a resale store, hoping I could get enough to make us a nice dinner. I got a whole $30, but my gas tank was empty. I put $15 in the tank, then went to an ice cream shop and got our favorite combinations. After that I went to Dollar Tree and got frozen fries. Our cozy, candlelit dinner was ice cream and fries. It was the best I could do.

Juggling my purchases, I opened the door of the apartment and my mouth flew open. Robert had laid a blanket down on the living room floor, got our favorites from all the local fast food restaurants, and lit candles.

Who needed a fancy restaurant—or ice cream and fries, for that matter—when we had each other?

———

When you meet someone you suspect can do more to hurt you than enhance you, you grab every strand of hope extended. Regardless of our past, I clung desperately to every kind word and sweet gesture Robert offered. Any time he showed a small sign of becoming the kind of person I dreamed of, it was easier to stay a little longer. It wasn’t a balanced scale, but the hope he gave me was enough for me to stay.

I told myself he was on his way and that it would be worth the wait. I told myself that the more I loved him the right way, now with my family behind me (were they?), I could show him how incredible we could be. I had to help him see himself the way I did when he was at his best.

Regardless of how positive we try to be, there’s this quiet voice in our head that recognizes the statistics aren’t easily dismissed. Part of growing up means realizing that relationships are hard work, not sweet chick flicks or fairy-tale romances. We hear the songs about heartbreak and see the relationships around us that have fallen apart, and we’d rather accept an imperfect love than no love at all.

We tell our loneliness that it won’t last long, but it doesn’t hear us because we are with someone and still feel alone. Some company is better than none. When we accept that we are no longer worth more than what we have, we accept that others don’t see us that way either. We try to convince them that we’re worth it while their actions just remind us that we aren’t.

Ultimately, in most relationships I think that we confuse love and respect. The two are not mutually exclusive, but I had no way of knowing that because I had never known love that didn’t come with respect. My parents’ marriage modeled integrity, honesty, sacrifice, and leadership. They had a plan and a promise that they made to each other, and to us, and they kept it.

Having the foresight to look beyond surviving the moment and seeing a prosperous future is dreaming. Making a plan to get there is ambition. That same ambition was inside of me, misdirected at times, but in me nonetheless. I had a plan and a vision and I would
see it through. I might get scarred and bruised along the way, but it was possible for me to win.

If I could just survive long enough.

———

“You look great, baby,” my mom said. She had called me to see if we could have lunch before my interview. We were relearning one another, and I wanted her to know that she wasn’t going to lose me again.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, hugging her and remembering how safe I felt in her arms only the week before. “I’m nervous about the job.”

“Just be yourself,” she said confidently. “Everything else okay?” She raised an eyebrow in the way that mothers have to let you know what the unspoken question really is.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, trying to convince us both. We proceeded to enjoy lunch and catch up about other members of our family. Being with her made me feel calm and relaxed, like it all truly was going to be okay.

When we hugged good-bye, it was one of those holding-me-together hugs. She forced two hundred-dollar bills into my hand and told me to take care of myself. I started to protest, but I needed the money.

After such encouragement on every level from my mother, I went to my interview determined to get the job. I was surprised when I pulled up to Meacham Airport, a small municipal airport in Fort Worth. I had assumed that I would be interviewing in an office building, not at an airport.

Turns out the company that was looking for a receptionist was a contractor for the air force. With the supervision of in-house military support, the company prides itself on being the “leading supplier of aerospace and defense products to the U.S. government, its allies, and major prime contractors.” After some small talk and questions
about my work history, the interview was over. I wasn’t sure how to gauge whether it went well or not; the interviewers were pleasant but a little hard to read. They did tell me that I would know something either way by the week’s end.

Noticing the time, I knew traffic would be congested on the highways leading back to my home, so I plugged my address into my phone and started taking back roads. Within five minutes I was passing Texas Cabaret, my previous employer. Had I ever served any of the people I was hoping to work for? The place was pretty popular for lunch specials and entertainment. How mortifying would it be to walk in the first day of a new job and report to someone I’d seen drunk and hitting on strippers just weeks before! Or worse, what if they recognized me?

My phone rang and it was the temp agency. I sent the call to voice mail, not wanting to pull over for a conversation in which I’d have to fake understanding if I didn’t get the job. Using the money my mom had given me, I stopped to get some groceries and a little pick-me-up treat for myself. In the middle of cooking dinner, I remembered to check the voice mail from the agency.

I got the job!

All I needed was one shot and I had it. I would prove myself invaluable to the company and hopefully work my way up. I was ready to have some security. Robert and I celebrated with ice cream and fries. When I called my mom, she offered to get me some work clothes, since I was officially a career woman.

I was struck by how things were finally turning around. It seemed like the moment I admitted that I was lost, I was one step closer to being found. How poetic that the club was within just a few minutes of the airport where I had been hired.

Maybe we aren’t as lost as we think we are. We just can’t see beyond the shame of being lost in the first place. One of the goals of Christians is to learn to see ourselves the way our Creator sees us. The problem is that most of us can’t get over how we see ourselves. Our reality is so obviously flawed that the idea that someone, let alone God, is willing to look past that is incomprehensible. We forget that He sees the full picture, even when we fail, too.

So while objects in the mirror “may appear closer than they are,” as the song goes, we forget that this only applies because the mirror is curved. When we have been bent and turned by life, our perspective begins to change and our future becomes distorted.

———

Perhaps my reconciliation with my parents and a new, more respectable career choice would help undo some of the bends that life had created. I was beginning to see my way out. The reflection of my future seemed a little clearer.

Looking back on that moment, I see that I was still focusing on the closeness of my pain. God wanted me to see that I was looking at the wrong mirror. His image of me had all my flaws, distortions, and mistakes, but it also held my purpose, hope, and joy. Perhaps our biggest issue is not that we can’t see ourselves; it’s that we can’t accept that even when we’re broken, His love for us has not been distorted.

With my past just behind me, I tried to focus on how I could maximize the opportunity in my present. At work I stopped wondering whether anyone would recognize me and began to learn the company.

Within a few weeks I was doing the payroll for over a hundred subcontractors and completely organizing the office break areas and supply rooms. Anytime I received a task, I turned it around as quickly as possible. I worked ten hours a week more than my temp contract required so that I could help when large projects were due, hoping that if I showed enough initiative they would make me a full-time employee. Which would mean even more security for us.

Whenever the contractor made a proposal to the government, we had to create large binders with time frames, project schedules, budget needs, and expected outcomes. I started off helping a program manager with the filing, but as I proved my accuracy, I was trusted to do them on my own, happy to alleviate some of the burden of the program managers, who didn’t have any support staff.

Besides learning the ropes, I also made friends. I was hired during one of the busiest times for them, but when things slowed down I started going to lunch with a few members of the staff. I got to learn about the other people in the building. They taught me who was friendly and who was not so friendly.

One of my friends, Stefanie, had been the receptionist for seven years before me. She knew who would or would not speak when coming in, how many calls they received on average, and how they liked their coffee. With her guidance, I learned what the remaining staff expected from me. I wanted to have the type of longevity that she had, so I soaked in every word.

On slow days I would wander upstairs to Terrie’s office. She worked with contracts and often allowed me to help her create the proposals. While we sifted through paper work, we shared bits and pieces of our stories with one another. I started calling her my second mom. She was constantly looking out for me and giving me advice on how to make myself an asset to the company.

Since a lot of the contractors could be a little aggressive toward women, she taught me how to communicate pleasantly without giving the wrong impression. She had her children at a younger age and understood what I was trying to do with my life. Her encouragement helped me settle into my new role there.

I’m convinced my position there was a test of my faith. I was in a field I knew nothing about. Daily, words would fly by my head that I couldn’t define even with a dictionary. Government terms, the alphabet soup of acronyms, and information about specific weapons were daily topics. This little church girl had found herself in the real world, and I was determined to succeed.

Our biggest tests of faith don’t always come in the ways we expect. When we’ve lost our way in life, we usually have nothing left but our faith to guide us. While challenging, these tests are neither blissful nor miserable but simply the quiet moments in our life when we question whether He is still with us. I saw my receptionist job as an opportunity to show God that even though I hadn’t excelled the way I wanted to, I still had the desire to be great, even if it was just at answering phones.

So many people end up in roles they never wanted to play, but life left them with no other part. Instead of making the best of the situation, they punish all those they encounter with the bitterness from a dream deferred. Unable to let go of what could have been, they choose to make the present pay for the mistakes of their past. Seldom do they realize that while they grieve their dream, those around them grieve any hope of knowing their true identity.

Your life may not be where you want it to be, but things could be so much worse. If you don’t learn to adjust to the shifts in your life, the shifts will change you. One day you’ll wake up and you won’t have a clue who you have become. You will remember the days when
your smile reached your eyes and laughter cleansed your soul as distant, unreachable times.

Even though your life may not be what you wanted, it’s still a life that someone else isn’t here to enjoy. It’s
yours
. If we don’t learn to utilize our hope to combat our disappointment, our hearts become tarnished. What once was so beautiful has been left to rust, all because we didn’t take the time to remain present to the changes within us.

If there is anything more devastating than heartbreak, it has to be the feelings we carry when we feel we’ve lost our destiny. When the things we hoped for feel so incredibly out of reach, we resent our surroundings because it’s not what we envisioned. Somehow during these times we must learn to thank God for His provision. I’m convinced how you handle a setback will determine the strength of your comeback.

Each day we wake up we must make a decision to become a better person. The next time you find yourself at a rest stop on the road to destiny, look for the wildflowers blooming along the road’s shoulder. The beauty may seem fragmented or not as neat and contained as you would like, but it’s still there.

I searched for the blooms at my new place of employment and I found them. I didn’t have the background to be in the field or the experience to be in the position, but I had the job. I could’ve come in each day begrudging the fact that I wasn’t on a campus, but I decided to survive and pick a few wildflowers along the way.

———

By April I found a quaint three-bedroom townhome not too far from my job. Well outside the city limits, the rent was low enough to fit our growing but still small budget. I started searching sites like Craigslist for furniture. I could furnish it piece by piece, but most important was making sure that Malachi had his room. My mother joined in my excitement about finally finding my footing.