A Letter To The One I Once Was

Where to even begin. It would be unfair to dump on you all of the things this next year will bring. What it will reveal and how it will reshape your entire perspective of the World and your place in it. I know that you are hurting right now and dealing with a constant battle in your conscious between the values you were raised with and the new ones being introduced. As you look around, you don’t understand how so many people could be hurt by such a good God and the religion you have claimed your whole life. Thoughts like, “this must not be all there is,” and “maybe what they have is better,” start swimming around in your mind. You were always a “good” kid in high school. Never had the urge to go party, cuss, sleep around or do drugs, but suddenly you find your curiosity about those things coming to the forefront of your desires. You conclude that you will never be fully content unless you decide to give this scandalous lifestyle a go. “Hey I can always back out if it’s not for me,” you reason.

It starts off small, with throwing around the occasional F word at work just to get a rouse out of your co-workers who thought you were goody-too-shoes. You love proving people wrong and exceeding expectations, so naturally you saw their commentary as a challenge to win their approval and display that you were no different from them. That mindset carries you into the Chicago bar scene, making out with random strangers, dabbling with dab pens and cigarettes and before you know it, that every other F word has become a part of your every day lingo and drunkenness is a normal state of the weekend. You don’t quite recognize who you’ve become, but you have no interest in dwelling on it. If you thought about it too hard, that means you’d have to recognize how far you have fallen from everything you once stood for. It would make you a hypocrite, a fake, and you did not need that on your conscious, so you just stuff the convictions down until you become numb. So numb, that you wind up at your friends house, then on his bed, then going home and hating yourself. Not wanting to face tomorrow with the realization of what had just happened. The next morning was filled with tormenting shame that infected every ounce of your being. You looked in the mirror and just for a second, the reality of what your life had become crept through. It was no full blown realization, but just enough to make you question the shiny branding put on this all-consuming lifestyle.

As time goes on, that reality starts rearing its ugly head more and more. You realize that a lot of the people you surround yourself with talk big, but are actually extremely broken people desperate to fill something. You realize that what you considered rebellious, was just an exciting cover name plastered on a lifestyle that everyone has and that there is nothing freeing about what decisions you had been making. You realize how many people that you loved got hurt or pushed away because you decided that they no longer fit into this warped mold you were creating. Worst of all, you realize that what started out as a decision, turned into lifestyle, that turned into habits that have now slowly built an iron cage with viels on all sides. You had gone so deep that you became blind to all the parts and pieces of your character you were throwing away for the sake of “acceptance”. There was decay in your life, and when all of these realizations finally came to a front, it was a hard pill to swallow. Sadly you didn’t change right away. The truth is that you had come to love those friends who took you out, and that there were fun times being had. Even though the ends didn’t justify the means in this equation, you weren’t quite ready to let it all go. Plus, you were convinced that if God were watching, and you knew He was, there’s no way He would want you back.

The World Race was always something you had been set on doing. Deep in your heart was this unexplainable pull towards it, but superficially, you just wanted to live up to the hype you had gotten from everyone cheering you on. You go back and forth about it. Knowing that if you go, you will have to face a lot of the decay that has slowly been eating at you, as well as pretend to have it all together so that no one assumes you aren’t fit for the experience. Stuck in indecisiveness, you do something you have not done sincerely in a very long time. You pray. And not just any prayer, but one asking for direction and guidance. Surprisingly, an answer is laid in your heart and so you decide to go for it.

From there, it is a transformative snowball that leaves you feeling a variety of ways and not quite knowing what to do with yourself. Training camp absolutely wrecks you and your heart posture towards the Lord and this experience gets flipped completely. You start crying….a lot, because you have discovered a tenderheartedness that you never knew was there. In Guatemala, the Lord reveals that there is no place for the shame you had been carrying in His love, and that He would wade through a million ponds of filth if it meant He could have you back.

As much as I have been tempted to resent you, I don’t. All that you are and all that you went through were necessary to bring you to this point. All your life you had grown up being told that the gospel was good news, but you had not gotten to experience the full breadth of that for yourself until you needed redeemed, restored, and reminded of your worth and identity. You have lived in the World and soaked in the temporary pleasures it has to offer, yet you were never content in them because deep down, the Spirit within you was eternally minded. Now you know what it looks like to “not be of, but sent”. How amazing it is to serve a God who is eternally patient and glorified in our weakness.

I know I said it would be unfair to dump all this on you, but you have to know that this is not it. What you are going to encounter will completely break and rebuild you. Please embrace it for the both of us.

Love, Redeemed, Restored & Reminded.