That's me in the picture. I'm in Iowa, where I lived from first through third grades. I didn't have electronics to plug my brain into for the purpose of smashing the pain of life into a remote corner of my consciousness, the way I've seen one of my sons do. So I used my imagination. I have no idea what I was pretending to do here, but I do remember this day. I remember that I was pretending.
That photo's on my refrigerator. I have no idea why. I guess a part of me wants to stay connected to innocence. To the idea that there was a me before there was the mind-numbing trauma of the last several years. If I had been told in advance, I would have laughed at the ridiculous suggestion that any of it would happen. I would have cursed the devil for lying to me. I'm walking through deep waters and, just when I think the current will hold me under long enough to kill my physical body, I get enough air to keep living.
Several times I've thought of that young girl, that me-before-real-life. I think about how I did not know what was coming for me, what was going to happen that would take all that's beautiful in life and turn it inside out, exposing all that is ugly. I think about how we just don't know what will happen to us. How happy we are in that not-knowing state.
Somehow, in all of this, God has managed to say something very profound to me. His Word tells me that He's an unending mystery that at the very same time can be known. He's recently changed the way I see that little girl in the photo. She didn't know the horror that lay ahead. Couldn't. There's something else she didn't know. There are riches that can't be described, even by a wordy know-it-all like me, in the knowledge of God. The discovery of Him. The Bible says he takes the upright into his confidence. God himself is a never-ending, constantly unfolding stream of beauty and majesty, all wrapped up in the most amazing love a human can touch. And He'll not only touch us, but enfold us. For the Christian who truly seeks with all of his or her heart, He is like a magnificent jewel that captures new light and shows new facets with each turn of the hand. Life has revealed hideous lessons of shame, degradation, fear, torture and terror. God will reveal glory, beauty, and intensely personal love that will drown all of that, rendering it all powerless over me.
