Tell His Story: My Sea Sickened Heart

I wrote this post last Saturday night and I posted it briefly Sunday night until Monday morning.  I feel that I have been called to be transparent, but I struggle with just how transparent that is meant to be. This piece is greatly transparent.  I took it down because I felt that maybe it was too much so, maybe sharing my struggles after sharing my victories would be too contradictory.  But I have changed my mind.  Our Christian walk is a walk.  When you are walking and moving you aren't always going to be standing on mountain tops and you aren't always going to stay in the valleys.  You are going to be doing both.  One doesn't negate the other.  Also, if we are unable to be transparent we give the false illusion that somehow we have it all together and that we don't struggle.  That illusion only helps to grow the lie that we are alone and no one else understands, or falls as low, or hears the howling winds and feels the salty waves hitting against them.  When we hide the hurts and the hardships we give foothold for darkness to grow and gather.  By being transparent I am going to choose to live in light and hopefully my transparency helps you to let light in too. 
*A warning that if you suffered at the hands of an abuser this writing may trigger some old hurts of your own.*



9/14/13

It is one of those evenings where the sadness sits ready behind the eyes.  The memories and the thoughts just float there behind the surface, like waves lapping at the shore.  One by one and all at once they come and bubble and I can feel their wetness spreading against the shore of my cheeks. 

Pastor’s words unknowingly bring fresh the childhood memory wished forgotten as I confess to him of recent actions.

And the feelings of being curse not blessing blow the waters into waves.

 “Look at what you do to me.” The memory echoes.

It all comes down to me.  Me doing this to him, that something in me is causing this that is so wrong and standing in front of me.  The man inside the memory is standing in front of me hardened and blaming me for the hardening.  I am sickened by the sight of it and so I do what I did the day it happened and I turn away with a pit in my stomach.  The nauseated feeling of being wronged but also somehow being in the wrong, because I know his words lie, but a part of me claims them as real. 

And the waves lap harder.

Blowing winds whisper loud that I am the cause of wrong, that I am curse, it is what I have been and always will be.

 “Know your place, this is what you are, who you are.” And these words on the wind whip at my heart. 

The waves and the memories are coming faster.

I am standing in the bathroom, walked into of free will.  All giggles on the outside as I watch him satisfy and relieve his aching manhood, the one I had refused to gratify, into the toilet.  Inwardly not knowing what to do, wanting to run but not knowing how, feeling guilty for not even trying. 

“You could have left and you didn’t, you could have run, but you stayed.” The wind blows harder still.

I close my eyes as the waves come crashing down one after another as these memories so freshly remembered are brought up by words of one and the actions of another and they wash over me.

Actions in which I stayed when I should have ran.  And the words of yet another asking if I did something to cause this, this new action, the one that brought up the same feelings as this memory.  I stumble to answer, because I don’t feel I did, but then again I cause this, this hardening of a man’s desire, so I don’t know where exactly the truth in the answer lies.

My mind and the waves wash up the time I was sixteen.  The time when the boy I wanted to love me most of all sat and touched all the places that his girlfriend wouldn’t let him, later to be cornered in a hallway, telling me that I am nothing.  I was just a ploy of Satan’s to cause him to sin and I had better keep it all quiet lest others know him as a sinner.

And those winds they blow even harder.

“Sin causer, your purpose, no running from that truth of who you are.”

The waves and the winds they keep on crashing, filling my little boat of hope and faith with doubt.

My Jesus though, He is known to walk on water, so I call Him in to walk on top of mine.  He scoops me up into His arms as I lean into Him and the winds quiet and the waves go calm.    I rest my sea sickened heart in His grace pierced hands.


*These winds are not the truth of me. I am a work in progress and there is progress being worked in me.  More on that to come later.*