The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living (9 page)

He began to talk about different families he’d pastored over the years and, strangely, he began to spell out my life.

It was like the room was empty and he was talking directly to me. It creeped me out. When he finally finished his strangely personal sermon, the room was very quiet. That’s when he began to cry. I’d never seen an old white-headed man cry before, so I was riveted. Ignorant, sexist, bigoted rednecks didn
’
t cry.

But I was the hateful one. I was the one flinging my prejudice around. And there I sat, eyes and ears fixed on this old man who was crying like someone he loved had just died or was about to. His sensitivity to God’s heart and his humility infiltrated me and all my barriers. He continued to weep with genuine love.

“There is a suicidal spirit in the room,” he said through his sobs. The congregation sat, silent.

This
is freaking me out
, I thought to myself. Goosebumps popped up all over my skin.
I have to get out
of this place!

But I couldn
’
t move until it was all over because Granny was waiting right outside the doors, and if I bolted now everyone would think it was me who had the suicidal spirit! Then other people started crying with the pastor. I heard sniffling all over.

“Please, child,” he said, pleading. “Come up here and let us pray for you. God has a plan for your life, and he doesn’t
want you to die tonight.
Please
come up here and let us pray for you, whoever it is. Please come.”

There was no way I was going to go up to the front of the church, in front of all these Christians, and admit I had a problem they thought they could fix. My pride held me down. So I didn
’
t move. And no one went up. And it looked like Brother Edgar may have gotten it wrong. So he asked for people who had been dealing with depression to come up for prayer, and some did.

With the pressure off, the music leader dismissed the church. Finally, I was able to get out of there. I bolted for the door—and right in the doorway a man reached out and gently grabbed my arm. His gentleness was shocking, but when I saw his face I was even more shocked.

God Speaks

My mother always taught me to be suspicious of strange men. She warned me that most of them were perverts and I couldn
’
t trust any of them. It was a sad prejudice my mother taught me, one I continued to learn through my own life. I had my own experiences and things I had witnessed that made me hate men, and I didn’t really need my mom’s warning. I had seen men sexually and physically abuse people I loved, steal from their struggling families to feed drug and alcohol addictions, break promises to me and my siblings and my mother, and I’d seen seemingly nice, intelligent men turn into drunk, greedy, perverted monsters. A man had assaulted every woman I knew.

So when I looked into this man
’
s face I saw something I’d never seen from a strange older man like him. I saw
pure
love. It was just like how I would picture Jesus looking at someone.
He looked at me like he knew me. Like he saw my heart and all its pain. The compassion in his eyes was arresting.

This strange man held me in place with a look that conveyed his genuine, humble, selfless love for me. And I couldn
’
t go anywhere because I didn
’
t know this man and was completely perplexed by why and how he could love me. I waited for him to speak. He’d been crying, so he paused and steadied his voice.

“The Lord wants me to speak to you,” he said. “He wants you to know that even though you have never known an earthly father, he will be a better father to you than any earthly father could ever be.”

How could he know? How could he know my feeling of being orphaned? I fought to rationalize his mystical ability of knowing I’d never had a father.

Well, look at yourself, Lacey,
I thought to myself.
You have a Metallica shirt on and raggedy
, chopped-off purple hair. You don’t look like you
fit in here and most misfits have daddy issues. He
just guessed right is all.

“God has a great plan for your life,” he continued. “You have been questioning your sexuality as well, and the further you go down that road the further you will go from the plan God has for you. This road brings so much pain with it.”

Wait, what? Is he talking about my girlfriend?
There is no way he could know about that.
He kept going.

“God has seen you cry yourself to sleep at night. He has seen you rehearsing the pain you have gone through since you were a little child. You saw too much too soon and it has caused so much pain in your heart. Jesus died to take that pain away. There is pain in your heart from your own sin, and from other people’s sins that have affected you. Jesus died on a cross to suffer the consequences of sin forever. That way we
don’t have to carry that pain around with us. Do you want me to pray for you and ask Jesus to take that pain away?”

Every time he said the word pain it was like my heart broke into a million pieces. I was melting, desperate for anything to make the pain go away.

I nodded, shocking myself by my consent.

He laid his hand on my shoulder and began to pray.

“Heavenly Father, wrap your arms around this girl who you created, like the loving Father you are.” As he prayed, a great warmth wrapped around me. I felt a sense of holiness I had never felt before in my life, like God was embracing me. It felt familiar.

It felt like I was finally home.

T
o see beauty we must close our eyes, for it is far beyond what our eyes perceive. I know this now because I received a new vision of myself in the flash of a prayer, in the spark of a thought, in the gasp of a breath. That prayer changed me in so many ways, but stark in my mind is the new perspective it gave me about myself. When you encounter God
for
real
so much about your life and thoughts changes.

No one had to say anything about God to me in that moment, because I was encountering him for myself. It was as if I was standing in front of God.
The
God. It was so clear to me this was the only God, the King of everything. The first thing I noticed was his perfect holiness.

There was an order to my thought process, although somehow it all happened in the same moment. First, I saw
myself
.
According to my own moral code, I had considered myself a pretty good person. Compared to the people I hated, I thought I was at least much better than they were. But when you’re standing in front of God, saying “I’m good,” it’s like saying “I’m tall” when you’re standing in front of a mountain, “I
’
m big” when you’re standing in front of the ocean, or “I’m old” while looking at the stars. The thought is absurd. I realized that I had no idea what good was, because up to that point I had not stood in the presence of the God who made the universe.

Then it was like my life flashed before my eyes and I saw everything I had ever done wrong in an instant. I saw all my sins, and no one had to tell me what a sin was and what it wasn
’
t because it was very clear in that moment. I almost wanted to shrink away because I knew I had no right to be in the presence of this infinitely good, perfect, holy God.
This
God was perfect love.

The worst realization was that my idea of love was not really love at all, and because I didn’t know true love I had never loved anyone, and even if someone truly loved me I was never able to receive love from them because I could not recognize it. I knew all my ideas of love were only shadows compared to this painfully bright, shining, true love that fell all around me.

All the love I thought I had in me was nothing like
true
love. It was conditional, confused, and even hateful compared to the love I felt God lavishing on me. I felt a great sense of regret and remorse. I felt so sorry for the way I had treated others—how I had hated them. To know I’d been so full of hate and now stood before a God who was love nearly made me collapse from the shame. His holy and loving presence
overwhelmed me and sorrow welled up inside me, for his goodness exposed me to myself. My regret was thick, but not thick enough to keep his love from piercing me.

My reaction was a feeling of expectation mixed with a strange longing. I expected God to say to me, “Go away from me forever.” And in the strangest way I longed for him to say that to me. It was as if I understood I should be dead, or explode, or just disappear while experiencing the holiness of God. I felt like I was shrinking away, wincing with agony, as I waited for this good God to speak words of justice to me. I knew that if he would cast me away forever, it would be right. And in the presence of God, I was somehow painfully aware of what was right and was overwhelmingly compelled to want what was right.

But at the same time the horror of my true self was revealed to me, I sensed God reacting to me and was surprised when I realized he wasn’t casting me away but rather drawing me in closer. It was like he was saying, “Yes, I know you. I know all the things you have done. I am not shocked by any of it. Come close to me, my love, just like you are. I have already forgiven your past and future. And, if you let me, I will make you new. I will make you into all that I have planned for you. You are beautiful, my love.”

Where Beauty Hides

I felt that, on that day, I really understood beauty from God’s perspective. Our culture focuses so much on what we look like and the things we accumulate. I grew to hate culture for those exact reasons. But in what I felt was my justified indignation with culture, I adopted my own set of rules.
I
defined acceptance, success, goodness, and beauty. I was just
as guilty as the prude, or the redneck, or the Christian—all those whom I felt had put their definitions on everyone else.

Beauty, I realized, lay first in our createdness. God created you and me in
his
image. We reflect
his
glory. To all of a sudden realize I was not an accident, a burden, or a mistake but rather intentionally created by a God of holiness, love, and purity changed everything. As I recognized the majesty of God, I began to understand, as he wrapped his arms around me, that I was his creation. I was his idea. From my hair color to my shoe size, from my sense of humor to my taste buds, I was his beloved creation. He knew me better than I knew myself.

And, being a girl he created, I was his daughter. I was in my createdness the daughter of the King of the kings. In this sense I was a princess.

What’s more, we are all a mysterious kind of spiritual royalty, for you and I are created by the King of everything. C. S. Lewis talks about this in
The Weight of Glory
when he says: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”
1
I came to meditate on the idea of being a spiritual princess much later in my relationship with God, but when I first came into a relationship with Christ, it was as simple as this: there exists an infinitely good God who created the universe, and he also created me. I am a wonder made by God. A quote I love by St. Augustine says:

People travel to wonder

at the height of the mountains,

at the huge waves of the seas,

at the long course of the rivers,

at the vast compass of the ocean,

at the circular motion of the stars,

and yet they pass by themselves

without wondering.
2

Too often we don’t recognize our beauty because we won’t acknowledge that a loving God made us. It is in this, our createdness, that we find our beauty, our wonder.

The next thing that makes us beautiful is God’s unwavering gaze at
us.
We can blaspheme that image of perfect love and holiness by being our hateful, perverted, sinful selves—like I did—but God keeps his eyes fixed on us. I tremble at this thought: he does not turn away from us. He sees us inside and our every sin in all its horror, and he forgives us. He took our sins upon himself when he became a man called Jesus, and he was crucified once and for all, for the sins of the whole world. We are
forever
forgiven
. Because I stand forever forgiven I am always beautiful to God. I could finally see myself through his love.

A musician and speaker I love named Christa Black wrote a book called
God Loves Ugly and Love Makes Beautiful
. That phrase by itself was something I understood so profoundly in these first moments of encountering God. So, although forgiveness and true love were outstretched before me all my life, it wasn’t until I chose to believe it that I could actually receive it.

God sees us all as beautiful and lovely enough to forgive, even though it meant he had to be crucified. The only way to blot out sins in eternity was for God to do that himself, and the only way he could be merciful and just at the same time was to suffer the just consequence of our sin
himself
. God looks at you and me and finds us worth dying for. Forgiveness was a gift bought for me by the blood of Jesus. He offers the same gift to the world.

Beauty, I realized, lay in forgiveness. I found that when I saw myself through God’s lens of forgiveness, all my dirt and grime and muck washed away. I saw myself true and translucent, naked and unafraid. I found myself beautiful because God found me forgiven.

How can I explain to you your deep worth and beauty? And no, you don’t need to be a girl to be beautiful. And that’s just it, isn’t it? The beauty of the individual has nothing to do with gender; it doesn’t have to do with culture or nationality; it doesn’t have anything to do with our sexual impulses. God made us all, and his love leads us toward truth—the truth of ourselves, the truth of others, and the truth about him. When we grasp that truth, we do not grasp a vision of prettiness, but a vision of
worth
. Although I don’t deserve it, I am somehow worth God sending his Son to die for me, and so are you. You’re beautiful because God sees you as beautiful, and if I had the honor of meeting you, you would know that I see your beauty too.

__________________