a southern, small town girl who traded sweet tea and biscuits for 3-in-1 coffee and rice.
This is her story.
A friend of mine asked me the other day if I had a rebellious phase when I was growing up, as a teenager or in college. Honestly, I did not. I never really doubted God or who he was. I never questioned His existence, and really, from an early age, I loved Him. I was a really good girl who never got into trouble. I stole a quarter once when I was five, and I was so embarrassed by the experience that I never did it again. I was always jealous of the men and women who came to church with the amazing testimonies of how God delivered them through drugs or prostitution and abuse. My story was nothing like theirs.
My story is not so much about learning to love God, but learning to understand that God loves me, and grace exists for the good girls. I was the overachiever and perfectionist. I was president of every club I joined, president of my class, valedictorian, and a brain bowl nerd. I led my youth group and went on mission trips. I was the example for others, the good girl to emulate. However, when I look through those yearbooks and photographs, I do not see a girl who was enjoying life and had it all together. Rather, I see past the smile to her heart, and I know she was hurting. That girl was so desperate to be loved and accepted, desperate to have the boys notice her, desperate to be the perfect daughter, Christian and friend. She followed the rules, but she was empty.
By my freshman year of college, I had everything I thought I wanted…I finally was accepted into the friend group I tried so hard to enter, I was enrolled in pre-med classes, and I had the really, really cute boyfriend whom I adored and seemed equally crazy about me. But the emptiness was almost overwhelming. So much so that God, in his mercy, let a few things come crashing around me. My grades were good, but not pre=med worthy. My friends let me down. And the boy I adored? He eventually broke my heart, and I broke his as well.
As summer approached, following my second year of college, I was desperate to get out of my small town and away from the drama that seems to be my life. ON the outside, everything still looked great, but I was dying inside. This desperation took me across the world to a little orphanage in Manila, Philippines, where my life was wrecked and my heart broken for the best. That summer, I met poverty and pain in ways I never imagined. I held hands with adults dying of tuberculosis and wrapped my arms around dirty and neglected babies.
That summer saved my life. Not that I was headed for a life of crime and drugs, but God saved me from myself. The walls around my heart, the perfection I had worked so hard to obtain, began to chip away. The tiny black eyes looking into mine did not care if I won a beauty pageant or had my name on a plaque. She just needed me. I began to understand in bits and pieces how God saw me…not with accolades and perfection, not even covered in my sin, but as me, loved because of His son’s shed blood on the cross.
I could probably send in a few more pages about how this has played out in my life, but my story is not one of a rebellious girl finding Jesus. Rather it is the story of the “good girl” realizing that there is grace for her too and a God who pursues us, even when we don’t realize we need to be found.