A gentle touch of the brush on the canvas
A forceful blow in earth’s mine
A thin line hidden in a mighty oak
A faint cry of a mother in labor
A rising star in the dark sky of the mind
A never felt current in the deep of the heart
Andrea Danko, “Change”1
Sometimes the hardest part of spiritual healing lies in the moment when truth is realized. Truth brings its own hammer. It smashes deception. It pounds lies. The hammer of truth was upon me now. It had been weeks since I saw Nathan in the hotel; each week added more weight to my slumping heart. Finally, the pounding of truth’s hammer came upon my body, mind, and soul.
The Gagging and Heaving of Righteous Anger
It was impossible not to think of Nathan. Everywhere I turned were reminders. Triggers. I looked up at the stars. They seemed like the only thing I had left that wasn’t tainted. As if God protected the stars, to keep them for me and him. The worst part of living with my friend Mel was there was no way to climb onto the roof of her house. The rage washing over me was something I hadn’t felt since I was sixteen. I had no present coping mechanism for dealing with it. Somehow the neurons in my brain found a very old rut to ignite, and I wanted drugs and a roof to lie on while I did them. But even back then, even if I had no drugs, my refuge was the roof.
I remember the day I met the God I didn’t believe in. As I stood before him, my life flashed before my eyes and I saw those moments of searching on the roof. I knew in that moment of encountering God that even when I called the Texas sky a faithful friend it was really God who was calling me up to be with him and to be still.
I thought about driving to a different neighborhood with roofs I could climb on. What if I got arrested for climbing on someone else’s roof? That would be a new adventure to interrupt my rage and sadness . . . and I wouldn’t care.
But the longer I laid on the cold grass in my backyard, looking up at the stars, the more I sunk into the debris of my own heart. I saw a mosquito land on my arm out of my peripheral vision. I could feel the grass move slightly against my bare toes. Was a bug crawling on me? My heart and mind were too heavy and busy for me to find out. I was too engaged to spend one ounce of energy to move or care.
I let the mosquito drink. I let the bug explore. They owned the dirt, right? And this body was only a moment or a century away from becoming dirt anyway. This body wasn’t really me. I left it on the cold grass while I ventured into my soul. The more I saw, the more I broke. The more I remembered, the more I worried that vomiting would take over my body and interrupt my focus as I tried to sort through all this madness—sadness, anger, betrayal, deception, violation of all that I knew I was. The physical body I was living in was agreeing with my brokenness and sense of injustice to the point of making poetic metaphors.
It wanted to throw up.
You have ingested poison!
She was warning me.
Here let me help you get it out before it kills you!
Calm down, body, I said to the drama queen, annoyed. The poison is in my heart, not my stomach. I’m trying to get to the bottom of this. If you leave me alone, maybe I can just think and figure this out. Puking won’t help anything.
I made myself breathe slowly. Closing my eyes, I replayed my last encounter with Nathan. I held the sounds, images, and feelings of it out in front of me with open hands and an open mind. I sought to see the truth of the scene without any filters. I needed clarity. I needed objectivity. I wanted truth in my innermost being.
“I’m not going to do this anymore. I’ve asked you to stop calling me, and yet you keep calling. I will be changing my number,” I’d said firmly, as my heart threatened to beat out of my chest.
“I need you. I don’t know if I can live without you. I don’t know if I will. How can you do this to me right now?”
These words sat on top of the past ten months. I scanned the memories of those months. Each one was like a brick in the thick wall around my heart. I saw and felt his last few sentences block out any light or air I had been living on. They were like an iron cage, meant to seal off the top of the tower I was locked away in. His words were the fire of a dragon threatening to kill me if I tried to escape.
And I saw the lies. The mortar used to hold the bricks together were lies. I only needed to push the wall and watch the whole tower fall. Memory by memory, brick by brick, I pushed and saw the lies exposed. As the bricks fell, I felt rage mounting in me. I felt wounds bleeding. The rage was so strong I didn’t feel pain, just anger.
He used me.
He humiliated me.
He bullied me.
He perverted all the good things in me.
He turned me into a drug to replace his addiction, to abuse in whatever way felt good to him. And with all the good things in me perverted, I could find nothing good left in me. Only rage.
My Violent Rage
Before I realized what was happening, I was off the lawn and slamming open the door to the storage shed where my friend had let me keep my things. There was my innocent bookshelf covered in CDs. I screamed as I pulled the heavy thing away from the wall and threw it on its face. I picked up every CD case I could find and smashed it against the wall. I crushed them under my bare feet. I moved on to break anything around that could be broken.
When I could find nothing else to break, I wept. I sat in the mess, realizing the metaphor my body had sought out without my even knowing what had happened. Yes, his perversion of everything good in me had ravaged my soul. But in many ways I had allowed it, and in many ways I had done it to myself. How? Why?
I sat in my garage with bloody hands and feet and wept to see in myself a metaphor for my own heart. I walked into the house, tracking blood through the kitchen, into the back room where I slept, and I crawled under my sheets and fell asleep. It had been so long since I fell asleep crying. I remembered the words of the man who stopped at the door of the church so many years ago to let me know that God saw me when I cried myself to sleep at night.
Did he see me now? Maybe so. Maybe not. I wasn’t sure anymore.