The Story of Jesus and Me, I
I've already told this story to a couple of you who have me on your IMer, so you probably don't need to read through it. You may though, if you wish. I'm mostly writing this down here because I'm sick of retelling the story! I'd rather just say "I'm Married now - go to my Blog and read about it." For the rest of you, hang onto your hats. I'm glossing over a lot of stuff because I don't feel like going into a lot of graphic detail (what's that I hear? Don't look back or you'll become a pillar of salt? Ok, Hubby, gotcha...). But this story is important to be told, and even retold, if you have friends who struggle with some of the issues I've dealt with and actually come out on the other side of.
I'm going to skip through most of my childhood, and just say that there was a LOT of abuse that took place. In my teen years, I put myself through the wringer to gain acceptance and love from anyone who might offer it. It was "cool" to be physically involved with guys, and if you weren't asked out on banquet dates and weren't propositioned for sex, then something must be wrong with you. I was heavy, but worked hard to loose weight, wear just the right make-up, have my hair perfect... Issues with my mom's need for my perfection mingled perfectly with this until I finally really started to crack. In regards to physical relationships, there was no such thing, locally, as the "purity movement" that has been around for the last 10+ years or so. Back in my high-school days, "abstinence" (the lack of intercourse) was "in" and yet it was still a "compliment" if you were asked for sex. "Don't have sex but everything else is ok" was the message of the day. I got this from pastors, teachers, parents (my parents still believe this to this day), friends and their parents... There were abstinence related commercials on TV once in awhile as well, though those were few and far between.
When I was 15, I went to my youth pastor and said "I want to get to know God, and MAYBE get baptized." He only heard the word "baptized" and started me in a baptismal study of sorts. No, there was no workbook. He just had me read 4 verses of the book of John a week, come to him every Monday after school and read them back to him, and then try to tell him what those verses meant to me personally. Personally, after the 1st 4 verses, I was convinced that John must have been a druggie! I didn't say that to my youth pastor though. I just told him I didn't know what they meant at all, much less to me personally. In the end, I didn't get to know God at all. I didn't even know there were 27 doctrines of the SDA church, though I had been raised under at least some of them. I didn't know anything at all - just that one day, that youth pastor came to me and told me when my baptismal date was, and that he was baptizing another guy at the same time.
I started having relationships with guys in school, some were more or less just friendships (plus a little physical stuff, not much though) and others were emotional relationships of varying degrees, most of which were very abusive. In any case, I WANTED to give my heart away. But I kept getting hurt, and eventually just shut down. I had trouble in my friendships with other girls too - they thought I was weird (I thought they were weird, so hey, whatever). My teachers taunted me, my parents couldn't wait to get rid of me, and at church, everyone was just fake with me (when people were nice, it wasn't genuine, it was just to impress me about what a nice church they have and shouldn't I want to join it, or if I didn't, then why not? What was wrong with me? Shouldn't I want to be in God's house?). I had NO self esteem at all by the time I left high school at the end of my junior year and took my GED.
As an older teen and young adult, I started to think about my future and marriage. I asked God to show me who my husband was. I recall now what I forgot to tell anyone before (sorry) that I asked Him for a sign and He gave me a riddle that only one man could answer. But I lost faith in both, (har har - I lost faith because I realized that Gideon shouldn't have needed to ask for a sign. Godincidences never cease to amaze me. Inside story.) and two weeks later, I met a guy who I soon became engaged to, but who only wanted sex as the relationship progressed, and because I said no, he broke up with me. This ripped my heart out, at first. I then realized that if I wasn't going to marry him, then if I ever married anyone else, then that would mean that I had committed adultery against my husband by getting engaged to (and physically involved with) the first guy. Adultery is against one of the Ten Commandments, and so that made me a sinner. Since I had already *thanks Jesus for the hug* been baptized, I thought that any sin I committed after that meant that I was going to hell. And, since I thought that, I realized that I didn't care who I dated or what happened, because I was going to hell anyway. I was perfect prey, and satan tried to devour me. A year later, there was another guy who I had a very physical relationship with. He too asked for sex, and I said "no" again, by instinct this time. He asked why, and again, on instinct I said "because we aren't married." He said "We could get married." I couldn't imagine being married to him! So I just said "I'm not marrying you!" He relented and was ticked, and for me, the seed of a new thought had been planted, though I didn't know it yet. I'll refer back to an email describing what happened sometime after that...
"Then one day in August, I came home from one of our "dates" and went into my room. I wasn't in any particular mood, as I was going to do some homework or something (boring), so I know this wasn't some kind of mood swing or PMS or anything. I opened my bedroom door, and saw a sight amazing to behold. I don't remember now if I had cleaned my room before or if mom had gone on another one of her "condom" hunts (she liked to raid my room because she was SURE I was doing the real thing). In any case, it was spotless, and everything was in place. It was gorgeous. My room "colors" were a lot of white/lace with pink highlights. It was the August sunlight streaming in through the lace curtains onto my beautiful white bed that struck me. I had walked into a dream, and instantly thought of a bridal chamber. I looked out my windows, and instead of seeing the Napa Valley as usual, instead, God gave me a "vision" of sorts. I doubt that this was what a real vision is, as I was not "carried off" to anywhere, and I was perfectly aware of what was really in front of me, the Napa Valley. It was as if an imaginary screen had been put in front of my windows and God was showing me a home movie. In this movie, I was getting married, walking down the isle, and looking for my groom through my veil. Eventually, I saw him, but he was not smiling. In fact, he wasn't happy at all. As I got closer, tears were streaming down his face, and then he was bawling his head off, screaming in pain. He was hurting deeply because of what I had been doing with both [of these guys], playing the virgin-harlot with them. Oh, he knew I hadn't meant to, and that I was sorry, and he had forgiven me for that, but he also knew that he couldn't have those things all to himself. He loved me, all of me, deeply, but that love was cheapened (although not lessened) by what I had been doing. The vision ended with him sobbing so much, begging me to stop throwing myself around like that, that I couldn't recognize his face at all. He was just out of his mind with grief because he knew that I was hurting myself, not just him. This was not a selfish love he had, but a love that only a loving husband can have for his wife. This wasn't just about "purity" (as I later learned it was called) but it was about him and me not sharing each other with other people. And then my "vision" snapped to a screeching halt and it was over. But I was just at the beginning of a very long journey into the land of purity. My first step was allowing myself to grieve. You've seen the pain I've been through because of all of this, or you think you have, but really, you haven't. Only God knows what I went through that day. I closed the door to my room, fell beside my bed, and wept like I've never done before or since. I wanted to kill myself, and then remembered what God had lovingly said the last time I had felt that way, about having a future someday. My future? Did I really have one? I didn't know and this really scared me. It seemed I had only been crying for five minutes, but when I finally looked up, the sun was low in the sky - it had been 2 1/2 hours of non-stop tears, regret, fear, self-loathing, anger at [those guys], anger at other guys who's bad treatment of me in high-school had catapulted me toward this, etc. I sequestered myself for the rest of the evening and night. I did a lot more crying, but even more, I just sat there on my bed and thought like I've never thought before. I went over my whole life, and began seeing the patterns that had immerged over time that had led me to this point. I had many things to think about, and decisions to make."
This experience should have taught me more than it did. I had no idea that the man I was shown in that "vision" was my Groom, and that this wasn't just about human marriage, but about Spiritual things. In fact, I was in the dark about that until many years later. Anyway, I HAD to break up with that boyfriend - I was addicted to everything he and I were doing, and I knew that if I wasn't going to marry him, then we had to quit entirely. We couldn't even be friends. We just had to quit. That was so hard for me, physically speaking. Emotionally, I had shut down after things had started going further than they should have with him. But physically, I was hooked, and I had to put him out of my life in order to get away from all of that.
There were other men I dated, in a slightly more pure way, after that, but I still didn't have any idea what I was really doing. What was I really doing? The real question should have been "what was I not doing?" Well, I'd never had sex, and had really begun to clean up my act in regards to not allowing men to fool around with me too much, but what else was missing? In retrospect, I can see how I knew, somewhere deep down, that I was still not seeing the whole picture. Purity is one thing. Being Spiritually cleaned up by the ONLY One who can really do that, and who Loves you enough to do it - those are two different things entirely, yet they go hand in hand. God did help me along the way. First, He gave me books that deal with Christian dating guidelines, then with purity, and finally with waiting for His choice for me. But there were a LOT of details lost in the fine print, that I just didn't get. I floundered around for awhile, putting up profiles on singles sites that would take just anybody and everybody and had no real way of dealing with security issues or with privacy at all. I smiled at every guy who crossed my path - wondering "God, is this the one?" I was still throwing myself around - just not physically, and I was at least concerned yet again with who God wanted me to marry.
I had a lot of trouble really trusting God. I'll admit it - 9/11 got to me. While I was able to forgive the terrorists who were involved in that, because they were brainwashed into believing that this is His way of dealing with things, I still had to deal with the issue of why He had let that happen - that and so many other things in my personal life that felt just as bad. I was now living on my own, in the worst part of town (it was all I could afford), and had no hope of meeting anyone decent enough to qualify as a Godly man. I had been to church, but those guys were creeps (pretending to be Godly, but really just wanting sex, or to otherwise disrespect the women in their lives), and I didn't believe in using church for that anyway. I still don't. Anyway, in 2002, God forced me into a financial position where I had to move and live someplace cheaper. I knew how less expensive it is in Walla Walla, WA than it is in Vancouver, WA (where I was living at the time), so I moved. I tried the local churches - none of them came even close to my idea of what church ought to be. Where was the healing? Where was the guidance? It's one thing to preach about it - it's another thing to just BE it and LIVE it, and that's not at all what I found. So, I quit church and just stayed home.
My parents decided to buy a house in Walla Walla about a year after I moved here. But they wanted me to live in it and take care of it. I did so for three years total before my parents finally moved in (I currently live with them). I lived alone in misery, and quite honestly, confusion. Why was I in my late 20s and still single? Shouldn't I be married by now, having kids, and moving on with my life? What was I still doing living under my parents' roof? Why couldn't I find work? There was a lot of abuse that had been going on (emotionally) between my parents and I, and I felt very unloved and unwanted. I was sure that no one would ever love me at all.
(Continued in part II
& part III)
I'm going to skip through most of my childhood, and just say that there was a LOT of abuse that took place. In my teen years, I put myself through the wringer to gain acceptance and love from anyone who might offer it. It was "cool" to be physically involved with guys, and if you weren't asked out on banquet dates and weren't propositioned for sex, then something must be wrong with you. I was heavy, but worked hard to loose weight, wear just the right make-up, have my hair perfect... Issues with my mom's need for my perfection mingled perfectly with this until I finally really started to crack. In regards to physical relationships, there was no such thing, locally, as the "purity movement" that has been around for the last 10+ years or so. Back in my high-school days, "abstinence" (the lack of intercourse) was "in" and yet it was still a "compliment" if you were asked for sex. "Don't have sex but everything else is ok" was the message of the day. I got this from pastors, teachers, parents (my parents still believe this to this day), friends and their parents... There were abstinence related commercials on TV once in awhile as well, though those were few and far between.
When I was 15, I went to my youth pastor and said "I want to get to know God, and MAYBE get baptized." He only heard the word "baptized" and started me in a baptismal study of sorts. No, there was no workbook. He just had me read 4 verses of the book of John a week, come to him every Monday after school and read them back to him, and then try to tell him what those verses meant to me personally. Personally, after the 1st 4 verses, I was convinced that John must have been a druggie! I didn't say that to my youth pastor though. I just told him I didn't know what they meant at all, much less to me personally. In the end, I didn't get to know God at all. I didn't even know there were 27 doctrines of the SDA church, though I had been raised under at least some of them. I didn't know anything at all - just that one day, that youth pastor came to me and told me when my baptismal date was, and that he was baptizing another guy at the same time.
I started having relationships with guys in school, some were more or less just friendships (plus a little physical stuff, not much though) and others were emotional relationships of varying degrees, most of which were very abusive. In any case, I WANTED to give my heart away. But I kept getting hurt, and eventually just shut down. I had trouble in my friendships with other girls too - they thought I was weird (I thought they were weird, so hey, whatever). My teachers taunted me, my parents couldn't wait to get rid of me, and at church, everyone was just fake with me (when people were nice, it wasn't genuine, it was just to impress me about what a nice church they have and shouldn't I want to join it, or if I didn't, then why not? What was wrong with me? Shouldn't I want to be in God's house?). I had NO self esteem at all by the time I left high school at the end of my junior year and took my GED.
As an older teen and young adult, I started to think about my future and marriage. I asked God to show me who my husband was. I recall now what I forgot to tell anyone before (sorry) that I asked Him for a sign and He gave me a riddle that only one man could answer. But I lost faith in both, (har har - I lost faith because I realized that Gideon shouldn't have needed to ask for a sign. Godincidences never cease to amaze me. Inside story.) and two weeks later, I met a guy who I soon became engaged to, but who only wanted sex as the relationship progressed, and because I said no, he broke up with me. This ripped my heart out, at first. I then realized that if I wasn't going to marry him, then if I ever married anyone else, then that would mean that I had committed adultery against my husband by getting engaged to (and physically involved with) the first guy. Adultery is against one of the Ten Commandments, and so that made me a sinner. Since I had already *thanks Jesus for the hug* been baptized, I thought that any sin I committed after that meant that I was going to hell. And, since I thought that, I realized that I didn't care who I dated or what happened, because I was going to hell anyway. I was perfect prey, and satan tried to devour me. A year later, there was another guy who I had a very physical relationship with. He too asked for sex, and I said "no" again, by instinct this time. He asked why, and again, on instinct I said "because we aren't married." He said "We could get married." I couldn't imagine being married to him! So I just said "I'm not marrying you!" He relented and was ticked, and for me, the seed of a new thought had been planted, though I didn't know it yet. I'll refer back to an email describing what happened sometime after that...
"Then one day in August, I came home from one of our "dates" and went into my room. I wasn't in any particular mood, as I was going to do some homework or something (boring), so I know this wasn't some kind of mood swing or PMS or anything. I opened my bedroom door, and saw a sight amazing to behold. I don't remember now if I had cleaned my room before or if mom had gone on another one of her "condom" hunts (she liked to raid my room because she was SURE I was doing the real thing). In any case, it was spotless, and everything was in place. It was gorgeous. My room "colors" were a lot of white/lace with pink highlights. It was the August sunlight streaming in through the lace curtains onto my beautiful white bed that struck me. I had walked into a dream, and instantly thought of a bridal chamber. I looked out my windows, and instead of seeing the Napa Valley as usual, instead, God gave me a "vision" of sorts. I doubt that this was what a real vision is, as I was not "carried off" to anywhere, and I was perfectly aware of what was really in front of me, the Napa Valley. It was as if an imaginary screen had been put in front of my windows and God was showing me a home movie. In this movie, I was getting married, walking down the isle, and looking for my groom through my veil. Eventually, I saw him, but he was not smiling. In fact, he wasn't happy at all. As I got closer, tears were streaming down his face, and then he was bawling his head off, screaming in pain. He was hurting deeply because of what I had been doing with both [of these guys], playing the virgin-harlot with them. Oh, he knew I hadn't meant to, and that I was sorry, and he had forgiven me for that, but he also knew that he couldn't have those things all to himself. He loved me, all of me, deeply, but that love was cheapened (although not lessened) by what I had been doing. The vision ended with him sobbing so much, begging me to stop throwing myself around like that, that I couldn't recognize his face at all. He was just out of his mind with grief because he knew that I was hurting myself, not just him. This was not a selfish love he had, but a love that only a loving husband can have for his wife. This wasn't just about "purity" (as I later learned it was called) but it was about him and me not sharing each other with other people. And then my "vision" snapped to a screeching halt and it was over. But I was just at the beginning of a very long journey into the land of purity. My first step was allowing myself to grieve. You've seen the pain I've been through because of all of this, or you think you have, but really, you haven't. Only God knows what I went through that day. I closed the door to my room, fell beside my bed, and wept like I've never done before or since. I wanted to kill myself, and then remembered what God had lovingly said the last time I had felt that way, about having a future someday. My future? Did I really have one? I didn't know and this really scared me. It seemed I had only been crying for five minutes, but when I finally looked up, the sun was low in the sky - it had been 2 1/2 hours of non-stop tears, regret, fear, self-loathing, anger at [those guys], anger at other guys who's bad treatment of me in high-school had catapulted me toward this, etc. I sequestered myself for the rest of the evening and night. I did a lot more crying, but even more, I just sat there on my bed and thought like I've never thought before. I went over my whole life, and began seeing the patterns that had immerged over time that had led me to this point. I had many things to think about, and decisions to make."
This experience should have taught me more than it did. I had no idea that the man I was shown in that "vision" was my Groom, and that this wasn't just about human marriage, but about Spiritual things. In fact, I was in the dark about that until many years later. Anyway, I HAD to break up with that boyfriend - I was addicted to everything he and I were doing, and I knew that if I wasn't going to marry him, then we had to quit entirely. We couldn't even be friends. We just had to quit. That was so hard for me, physically speaking. Emotionally, I had shut down after things had started going further than they should have with him. But physically, I was hooked, and I had to put him out of my life in order to get away from all of that.
There were other men I dated, in a slightly more pure way, after that, but I still didn't have any idea what I was really doing. What was I really doing? The real question should have been "what was I not doing?" Well, I'd never had sex, and had really begun to clean up my act in regards to not allowing men to fool around with me too much, but what else was missing? In retrospect, I can see how I knew, somewhere deep down, that I was still not seeing the whole picture. Purity is one thing. Being Spiritually cleaned up by the ONLY One who can really do that, and who Loves you enough to do it - those are two different things entirely, yet they go hand in hand. God did help me along the way. First, He gave me books that deal with Christian dating guidelines, then with purity, and finally with waiting for His choice for me. But there were a LOT of details lost in the fine print, that I just didn't get. I floundered around for awhile, putting up profiles on singles sites that would take just anybody and everybody and had no real way of dealing with security issues or with privacy at all. I smiled at every guy who crossed my path - wondering "God, is this the one?" I was still throwing myself around - just not physically, and I was at least concerned yet again with who God wanted me to marry.
I had a lot of trouble really trusting God. I'll admit it - 9/11 got to me. While I was able to forgive the terrorists who were involved in that, because they were brainwashed into believing that this is His way of dealing with things, I still had to deal with the issue of why He had let that happen - that and so many other things in my personal life that felt just as bad. I was now living on my own, in the worst part of town (it was all I could afford), and had no hope of meeting anyone decent enough to qualify as a Godly man. I had been to church, but those guys were creeps (pretending to be Godly, but really just wanting sex, or to otherwise disrespect the women in their lives), and I didn't believe in using church for that anyway. I still don't. Anyway, in 2002, God forced me into a financial position where I had to move and live someplace cheaper. I knew how less expensive it is in Walla Walla, WA than it is in Vancouver, WA (where I was living at the time), so I moved. I tried the local churches - none of them came even close to my idea of what church ought to be. Where was the healing? Where was the guidance? It's one thing to preach about it - it's another thing to just BE it and LIVE it, and that's not at all what I found. So, I quit church and just stayed home.
My parents decided to buy a house in Walla Walla about a year after I moved here. But they wanted me to live in it and take care of it. I did so for three years total before my parents finally moved in (I currently live with them). I lived alone in misery, and quite honestly, confusion. Why was I in my late 20s and still single? Shouldn't I be married by now, having kids, and moving on with my life? What was I still doing living under my parents' roof? Why couldn't I find work? There was a lot of abuse that had been going on (emotionally) between my parents and I, and I felt very unloved and unwanted. I was sure that no one would ever love me at all.
(Continued in part II
& part III)
posted by Caroline Talita Ishshah | 12:52 PM
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