The Hope of Brokenness
We are beggars here together. Grace will surprise us both.
GORDON W. LATHROP
My parents attended church in Albuquerque for a while, and during that time, my older brother came to saving faith, but I was the last holdout. My parents gave me space and didn’t force me to go to church with them, but I knew they prayed that I would come to know Christ. My dad would say, “I believe God has a call on your life, Alia,” to which I would roll my eyes and mumble something like, “Yeah right, that’s never going to happen.” I wanted nothing to do with God.
They got another ministry job offer in the middle of my junior year. It would mean packing up our family, selling our house, and moving back to Hawaii.
They sought the Lord while I pleaded with them to turn it down. I had created an identity for myself, I had a boyfriend and a life, and I didn’t want to follow their stupid god to some island to do “mission work.” I knew how that had turned out for us in the past.
In the midst of their praying, they both felt strongly that I would need to consent to going before they felt a peace about it. Unbeknownst to me, they were waiting for me to accept it and agree to go. I didn’t know this the day my friend and I ditched school and instead drank 40s while sunbathing on rocks in Elena Gallegos Park all afternoon. I didn’t know this when I came home less than sober and heartily agreed to move to Hawaii.
It made no difference that later I retracted my consent and sobbed angrily and rebelled in every possible way, including but not limited to ditching school and getting busted for flipping and totaling my friend’s car while driving without a license. Until then, I had always been the good girl with exceptional grades and wholesome friends—on the outside. I called home and checked in, telling my parents where I was even if it was all lies. I always made curfew. I was a skilled and proficient actress and my fabrications were flawless. I was so good at pretending.
My brother was the one who punched holes in the wall, got into fights, or got expelled from school. He was the one busted for shoplifting and flunked out. He was the one who tried to hang himself on our back porch when I was in middle school, the one who took up most of my parents’ emotional energy. He was the one they were always worried about. I gave them no cause for concern, I was the well-adjusted one who always seemed to do just fine on my own.
We didn’t talk about things like mental illness. We didn’t go to the doctor or the dentist unless something was really wrong. We were not good with maintenance, or indeed self-care; we were always just trying to survive. It’s no wonder I wasn’t diagnosed with bipolar disorder until I was in my thirties, even though I started showing signs of it in my early teens. I was just trying to survive too.
We went to mandatory family counseling after my brother’s attempted death by suicide, but the assigned therapist spent most of her energy blaming my parents and trying to get us to confess they were horrible or somehow negligent or abusive. Only they weren’t. They were human, broken, fallible, and doing the best they could with what they had available to them. So my parents focused on keeping our family together, while taking all the blame for everything that had gone sideways.
But as they began to heal, to find that language of hope that had been silenced for so many years, they began to feel that old familiar ache in their hearts to serve God in unconventional ways. They never fit in with nine-to-five, punch a clock, pay the mortgage, and save for retirement normalcy. They wanted more than ordinary. They still had some idealism lurking in them. Once they started pursuing going back into full-time ministry, all options meant moving.
When it was decided we were packing up and starting over in some far-off place, I had no reason to pretend anymore. They were dismantling my life. The tidy facade I had created for them to allow their peace of mind and my freedom was of no use to me anymore. To them, my unraveling just solidified their decision to move. Little did we know that if Albuquerque had been the desert, Hawaii was the wilderness.
When we arrived in Pahoa, my dad surveyed the house the ministry had provided for us. It was unlivable. I don’t mean it wasn’t to our taste or the carpet was an ugly color. I mean it had no interior walls, only a concrete slab pooling with puddles of mosquito-infested standing water, no plumbing, and heavy green mold scaling the crumbling cement ruins. The jungle loomed in around the house, unruly vines strangling the walls and breaking through shattered windowpanes. No one had flown to the Big Island to inspect the house or property for years, and it had become uninhabitable, squatters gutting it over time. We lived in Nepal in the early ’80s in a dung-style hut, so we’d never be accused of being high maintenance, but this was ridiculous.
The ministry had also provided a vehicle, which amounted to an old Mustang that looked more like a Pinto. Its exhaust fumes leaked into the car; we had to drive with the windows down so we didn’t asphyxiate. This would have been bad enough, but it also rained for forty-two days straight when we first arrived. We had to sit in the passenger seat holding a towel up against the window, droplets running down our arms and soaking our clothes anytime we left the house.
The rain in Pahoa fell in constant sheets, pounding on our metal roof like an assault being sieged against me. And I took it as that. A personal attack. I sat on our back porch, which consisted of a slab of concrete with a tin covering, listening to the rain pinging like rapid gunfire while dragging hard on my cigarette until the cherry blazed with all the fury I felt inside. This was my personal hell.
And I mocked their God openly. If I had thought God was ironfisted and mean, a secondhand god of scarcity before, now I just thought he was plain vindictive. This is what your God provides? This is the way he rewards obedience? My foolish parents had offered their lives again and again in service to this stingy deity, and here we were right back where we started—homeless, with a broken-down car in the middle of nowhere. Nice.
Before we ever moved to Hawaii, I had all the fuel I needed to hate God. I practiced for years. It started with church but it spread to hating all of Christianity and eventually to God himself. How could a good God have such jacked-up people who claim him? How could a loving God allow so much pain and suffering? How could a merciful God allow the trials I had seen firsthand in my family? How could God let me suffer in the ways I had? I found no answer to satisfy. And now this?
Your God is laughable, cruel, and impotent, I cried.
My parents knew we couldn’t live there and contacted the ministry that had hired my dad. They agreed to pay half of the rent for a small rental after seeing the conditions of the “home.” At the same time, my father got another job offer to work for the Salvation Army, which included an ample salary and livable accommodations. Again, they fasted and prayed. Maybe this was God offering another path? It was certainly more secure, and so far, they had every reason to feel betrayed by the ministry they’d uprooted and moved their entire family for.
I knew nothing of this at the time. But my mom felt strongly they should remain obedient to what they believed God called them to even though things were bleak. My mom, who budgets everything and will travel to three different stores to save a few bucks on toilet paper or chicken thighs, who reuses all of our old sour cream and yogurt containers and will wash and rinse Ziploc bags, who’s cautious and tentative with everything, threw caution to the wind and did the most absurd thing. She said to wait on the Lord. Wait and see.
My parents felt quitting would solidify my view that God wasn’t trustworthy. He does not provide for his children because he won’t or he can’t. And so they dug into the small amount they had gotten when we sold our home and rented a sparse house with catchment water, a slab of concrete in back, and a tin roof to overlook the unyielding downpour. And like God preparing Noah for the floodwaters that would bring new beginnings, it made little sense.
When the Flood Comes
We still had no furniture and couldn’t afford to get any now that we had to pay rent. We had two lawn chairs in the living room and a futon pad on the ground.
I remember hitchhiking for the first time as a teen not because I was rebellious or wanted to take rides from strangers but because our family car had broken down and there was no other way for us to get home. Again.
Reconciling my years with a loving and merciful God seemed impossible. I could not believe in a God who continually abandoned us. I hurt everywhere. I fit nowhere. Home wasn’t a place I could feel. And I met God there. Or God met me. In our home that wasn’t a home.
It rained those forty-two days straight, and I considered taking my own life right there on the chipped and cracking bathroom linoleum. But I didn’t want to break my mom’s heart. I had seen the devastation a suicide attempt can leave. I had seen it in her eyes years ago when her gaze nervously traced the raised red scar that had turned into a grotesque palette of purples, yellows, and browns on my brother’s neck. She’d meet his gaze and see the whites of his eyes clouded with blood where all the capillaries had burst from lack of oxygen. I couldn’t forget that haunted look she carried whenever she looked at him.
But I was as sober as I’d ever been, and it was its own reckoning. I had no transportation, no license, and no hopes of getting one anytime soon with the impending charges for my car crash. I was miles away from any sort of civilization and it was still raining! Our house was its own haphazard rehab. Only now, the torment I had propped up and pushed away came crashing in and I had nothing to hold it back.
My brain abuzz with thoughts, wild and tangled, I felt frenzied and agitated and in so much anguish I just wanted to make it stop. In Albuquerque I had learned all the ways to silence the torment. I was the girl who ran too loud to keep from having to sit with the questions. I turned up the volume and lived a blaring existence. I didn’t know I had bipolar disorder. I just knew there were times my skin tingled with restlessness, my limbs possessed, my feet tapping out a Morse code. I felt invincible, immortal, immune to hunger and thirst and the incessant demands to slow down, to sleep, to recharge. My mind was a colony of secrets, schemes, and shenanigans. I palmed the key to the mysteries and the world unlocked before me, right before it unhinged completely and came crashing in on me. It’s an unfortunate law of the universe: what goes up must come down.
I’d roll the car window down all the way and let it blow my hair wild like the mania I felt inside. My fist thumped against the dashboard humming with the baselines of my mixtape while my friends passed the bottle that burned the length of my throat. I rode along the windy mountain roads, each switchback pushing me against the cold door frame while I tried to keep the embers of my cigarette from burning holes in my clothes. I flicked the ash into the endless black I couldn’t escape no matter how hard I pushed on the gas.
Drugs made me feel like a god for a moment, and that scared me a little, because there might really be a god and what then? Would I go to hell if I overdosed? Would I go to hell no matter what?
As a child, I lost myself in imagination and story and seemed to all the world a perfectly happy girl. And maybe I am remembering more into my past than existed. It’s easy to look back with the insight of thirty-five years and see that little girl, delicate and frail, as she fingers the pages of her favorite book, the one that’s illustrated but not on every page. It’s easy to imagine she understood her pain. She knew everything hurt a bit more than it is supposed to at six or seven. But how would a child know how much life is supposed to hurt? How would a child know that for all her days, she had accumulated more than her share? And what is an appropriate share of pain?
I’ve lumbered through a lifetime of it and only recently pressed into it instead of pulling away.
As a teen, I’d gazed wobbly-eyed and knock-kneed into the empty bottle, fingering the sides for another pill. To make you numb. To make you beautiful. To make you see or unsee. To make you whole.
I wondered if I was born with too many nerve endings. If my very soul was run through and coursing with every fiber needed to pick up and receive pain like a network of cables transmitting nothing but static. The fuzzy nothings of a life with no clear images. If in fact I was bundled so tight with synapses, packed end to end and top to bottom, that the very entrance into this brutal world devastated me from the word go. And every bruise from then on just deepened the bloom of sorrow. One can only manage that kind of pain for so long before nerve endings surrender and shut down, fraying and sparking like old wire, ready to burn everything down.
When the heart is damaged beyond what one can endure, the body begins to shuttle blood away and cordons off the broken bits. This shock often kills trauma patients before blood loss or the injury itself.
I lived all those years in this emotional state. Thready-pulsed and dizzy, lungs screaming to breathe. Wandering icy-eyed as my gaze skimmed over the world around me. Heart unable to pump and fingers numb. And the only quiet came when the pain was pushed down far enough, numbed by a deep-fingered plunge into pills or boys, food or things.
But I cannot escape my sobriety. I am trapped on a slab of concrete, seemingly adrift in our ridiculous box of a house in the middle of a jungle with forty-two days of unrelenting downpour.
I cannot love with a heart this broken. I cannot feel anything but the dismal beat reminding me it is not yet over. And I long for it to stop even as I rise and breathe and walk around in skin that never seems to cover me right.
And I face the rain and remember my childhood. I remember the voices coming for me. I remember following and hanging back and hoping to be invisible. I remember the monstrous shadow following me, and I hope no one else can see it. But it’s there, crouching at my heels; it’s everywhere I go. The devourer of beautiful days, the one who taught me the language of despair and doubt, of shame and silence.
And then the world is nothing but a terrible and infinite dark.
Until I’m blind with tears, ransacking the medicine cabinet and rifling through drawers. Coming up empty. Until I decide it’s time to quiet that thready hum once and for all. Until I decide it doesn’t matter if my mother will always be haunted by my ghost, or if the preachers who spit and pound the pulpit are right and I will burn in hell for this.
I cannot imagine any of that right now because my mind is a fathomless inferno, the scorch of the world blistering every inch of me. I only want the shadows to disappear and the voices to stop and I believe with all of my broken heart this is the only way. I am blown glass, combustible, I will shatter into a million pieces across the universe, I will return to dust, I’m just searching for the right sledgehammer to collide with. And I’m so scared my hand shakes as I pick up the flimsy disposable razor because I don’t want it to hurt. I don’t even know if it will work. I remember to cut from wrist to elbow, tracing the path of my bloodlines. I remember all the days I offered my veins in hospital rooms as a child while my parents prayed for a cure. But there is no cure for this life, no solace. How often I’ve felt myself punctured and drained. The whole world is a bloodletting and not one of us is being healed.
I don’t want to make a mess my mother will have to clean up, and I wonder if this is a cry for help or the real thing as I hold the razor over my skin trying to build up the courage to make the deep cut.
I’ve flirted with death before, but just enough to blow my hair back, just enough to make me feel the tiniest bit alive. But I’ve never gone all the way. I know you can’t come back from that. And my mind ricochets through it all, pinging and clanging against the edges, ripping through all rational thought, just like the rain that never stops pelting the tin roof with unholy clatter. And I cry, no, scream out to God, that I never asked to be born! I never asked for any of this! And I never in my wildest dreams or crazed-minded fantasies imagine for one second that God would answer me. But he does.
And I find myself silenced, barefoot and open palmed, splayed like an offering across the floor, and the monstrous shadow voice that stalked me since I was a tiny thing lies dashed by glorious light. And my heart kicks back into rhythm. The resuscitation of grace. I breathe again.
Making Sense of Miracles
After that night when I was ready to take my own life, and instead found myself laid out by God—physically knocked to the floor and flooded with a peace I, to this day, cannot fully describe—I began to make excuses.
One moment I was at the end of myself, cursing at God and in so much pain, I had worked myself past all the anchors tethering me to this world. The next I felt the presence of God from the place on the floor where I’d landed. And it was like nothing I’d ever felt. Like hope, like peace, like mercy. Maybe this was grace? Maybe God isn’t distant and absent. Maybe God reveals himself to desperate girls on chipped linoleum floors in the middle of a monsoon and says, “You belong to me. I have loved you with an everlasting love. You are mine.” But that was all too much for me to fathom.
I am not now nor have I ever been what I would consider a woo-woo Christian. While I absolutely believe the Spirit still moves and works miracles, I remain critical of some of the more charismatic claims I’ve witnessed. I’ve seen too many faith healers and prosperity gurus peddling heretical promises guaranteeing the will of God can be manipulated or bought for the low price of this seed offering made out to the name of their ministry. I’ve had preachers pray for me to be slain in the spirit while pushing their oil-drizzled thumbs firmly into my forehead, willing me to go down while people around me flopped on the ground like dying fish and laughed, babbling like maniacs.
I’ve known people attempting to cast demons out of their car when the engine wouldn’t start only to admit they forgot to get gas on the way home and their tank was empty.
I’ve seen faith and deliverance weaponized and used against the hurting. I’ve been told the only reason I still have bipolar disorder is because I don’t have enough faith to be healed. But I believe God can heal me. I also believe he is under no obligation to obey my will. Still, at that time, I wanted something to explain away the very real and terrible possibility that God existed and that he wanted something from me.
I thought perhaps it was my body’s response to all the stress hormones and cortisol levels and my legs just gave out. Maybe it was some sort of evolutionary self-preservation system and my body just collapsed as a protective mechanism? Maybe I had some sort of mini-stroke? Maybe it really was shock?
But even with all my own justifications to apply reason and logic, I could not deny that I felt something I had never felt before. I felt God. My parents had given me a Bible I never used and instead wedged under a tiny garage-sale table in my room to make the legs even. I pulled it out and began to read it at night behind my locked door. I didn’t want my parents to know. I didn’t want my dad to say, “I knew God had a call on your life, Alia Joy.” I didn’t want any spiritual I-told-you-so. I started in the book of Job. So began my long night wrestlings with God.
Wrestling with God in the Dark
My bed was a rolled-out length of eggshell foam, the kind you put on a mattress should you actually have a mattress, a whisper of softness not thick enough to keep my hips from falling asleep and aching through the night. As I read my Bible, I was confronted with the questions and fears that were ever present. I’d lie in the dark with God and whisper prayers into the void, hoping someone or something was there answering me back.
Like Jacob wrestling with God through the night, this grappling changed my identity and renamed me. Like Jacob, who had tried to manipulate and manage blessings by deception and self-protection, I too became the great pretender. When God initiated this match, Jacob was consumed with anxiety that Esau was coming and would slaughter him for his deceit. God could have just showed up and told Jacob everything was going to be fine. But when God initiates our wrestling, it is not because he is cruel. It is not because he is withholding his blessings or comfort or unwilling to provide for or protect us.
In the wrestling, in the questions, in holding on to God and not letting go in the darkest night when we cannot even see his face, when anxiety floods our soul and we have lived a life of so many lies, we just might find ourselves transformed. We might feel the touch of God dislocating our hip as dawn breaks. God might take us to the ground. In that tremendous pain we might cry out in desperation, “I will not let go unless you bless me,” and there, with our throbbing bones, God renames us and says you “shall no longer be called Jacob [the deceiver], but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed” (Gen. 32:26, 28).
It’s interesting that when Jacob first prays for protection and deliverance from Esau, he prays to the God of his father Abraham and his father Isaac. Yet after he has wrestled with God and his prayers regarding Esau were answered, Jacob erects an altar with his new name, Israel. He names it El-Elohe-Israel, which means “God, the God of Israel.”
When we wrestle with God, our faith is etched on our bones. It erases death and offers new life. It becomes personal. We name our altars to remember. There is no secondhand God and there is no secondhand faith. God is no scarce deity; he is not holding out on us. Instead, he brings us to that place of weakness where we are disjointed and he strengthens our fragile and imperfect faith.
This weakness doesn’t leave us more vulnerable before our enemies, real or imagined. Instead, it trusts that even though we walk with unsteady feet, we can rely not only on the God of our fathers, but on the God who reveals himself directly to us. A God unmasked, a God who lets us grab hold of him in the darkness. The weakness that remains testifies that God is infinitely merciful and loving and that his greatest good is always for our flourishing even if we are initiated into the great abundance only through our profound lack.
I haven’t arrived unscathed to this place. I carry the bruises of those restless nights, of a too-thin mat and a paralysis so severe I could only be laid at the feet of Jesus. Somewhere along the pages of my life, I lost faith that God was good. It took debilitating weakness to see his goodness.
Sometimes I remember that whisper-thin foam of my youth and the ache in my hips and the limp in my step as I wrestled with God. I think of my parents choosing to stay, to wait on the Lord. I thank God for their obedience. For helping bear witness to the goodness of God in that horrible rental where I first believed.
These days I have an ankle injury that flares up from time to time. I broke it in my twenties, only I never went to the doctor because we didn’t have insurance, and what I thought was a bad sprain at the time healed wrong. I never know what’s going to set it off, but when it happens, it’s excruciating and I can’t put weight on it. Sometimes, I still find myself limping, and when I do, I remember what is formed in the brokenness, in the weakness, in the ache. I came back to life in that home that wasn’t a home. The place I’d meet my God; the place I’d learn I’d always been called; the place I’d meet my future husband, who would become home to me.
To this day, when I can’t bear the weight, Josh drapes my arm over his shoulders and I lean into him and he holds strong as he carries me home.
It was always the plan that in the midst of the catastrophic brokenness in this world, grace would surprise us all.