I was a young girl in my 20’s who had just finished graduate school and was trying to make sense of a traumatic series of events that happened. The sins against me juxtaposed with my own sins as a means for resilience were enough to send me down a dangerous, self-sabotaging spiral.
A history of abuse had its way of painting a very distorted inner map of one’s identity that makes it very difficult to live with. And it had become impossible to keep up this external facade that everything was okay when it was not.
I remember taking a long, hard look into the mirror, trying to find some part of the image of God reflecting back. There were wrinkles from upholding fake smiles and silencing hard frowns. There were puffy eyes, red and swollen from unresolved pain. With a negative balance on my debit card, an empty gas tank, and only crackers and water for sustenance, I contemplated fleeing the country or taking my own life.
Thinking through these options, the story of Jesus waiting patiently at the well for the Samaritan woman came to mind. I wondered to myself as I looked into the mirror that perhaps this was my own well moment too. I thought: “Was I just as enough as the woman at the well? Was I worthy enough for Jesus too?”
I cannot explain what happened next, except that my eyes welled with tears. And in that moment, all shattering pain and shame were matched with His overwhelming empathy and grace as the psalmist writes in Psalm 42:7: “All Your waves and breakers washed over me.” I felt seen and known. My brokenness served as an avenue for God’s light to enter the most dark and misunderstood places of my soul.
In this moment of complete vulnerability, I can honestly say I met God. For the first time ever, I saw the grace of Jesus reflecting itself back to me in the mirror. And for the first time ever, I heard Him speak into every fiber of my being the words my soul had longed to hear: “You are worthy.” And if you are reading this, those words belong to you too.
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