Introduction

From Failure to Freedom

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I’ve wanted to write this book for more than ten years now.

But I wasn’t free to do it.

Too busy? Yes. And no. But I’m not even talking about that kind of freedom. (Freedom for a mother of four is sort of a relative term anyway, as far as having any time to herself goes. I’ll catch up when I’m fifty. Or eighty.)

What I’m saying is that it’s taken me a while to experience and taste what I’d call real freedom. To own the story of how Jesus chased me down and rescued me. And how even today He continues to pursue me, and to work with me, and never seems to grow tired of me or frustrated with me, or with the lengths I’ve required Him to go in getting through to me and molding me into someone who, I hope, is starting to look more and more like Him.

Ten years ago, I was still too fragile to talk about it. I was still believing so many lies about myself. I was still wearing so many labels, convinced they were all 100 percent true about me. In some ways, I’m just now starting to trust that what His Word says about me is far more important than what anyone else might say or think about me.

My journey to freedom has been a long one. And a hard one.

And I guess that’s why I feel so passionate now about sharing my story with you . . . because what I’ve found is that if I’d been willing to grab hold of freedom, at any point in my journey, it was right there, all along. The freedom of believing that God is bigger—always bigger—than anything we’ve ever done and any place we’ve ever failed, was offered to me at every step. All I needed to do was take it. Believe it. Toss everything else out—all the shame and guilt and fear—and just walk on ahead with Him.

The real freedom.

But I couldn’t seem to do it. Couldn’t allow myself to trust Him. Couldn’t accept that I was actually that forgiven. Couldn’t believe He really meant it. And so I stayed stuck in that place of unbelief, certain I was a failure. When in reality I was completely loved and understood and constantly offered something better than what I was living. That longing for freedom deep in me has been there all along.

I don’t know about you, but I talk to enough women today to know that this is a place where many of us are living. Trapped in our past. Hidden deep inside our secrets. Defeated by our struggles. The sum total of our depressing parts. Pretending, not empowered. Fake, not free.

And if that’s you, I’m here to tell you this . . . you don’t have to stay there. You don’t need ten more years like I did to figure it out, to pay for what you’ve done, to heal enough so that one day you might finally experience the freedom that you see shine from those you admire so much.

You don’t need to wait any longer on your freedom.

A young man we’d recently met was over at our house one night. I was out of town, but my husband, Aaron, who’d been helping this guy get into a program to start earning his GED, had invited him over to study and to help him fill out some of his paperwork.

Let’s call him Easton. I always said that if I had another son, I’d want to name him Easton, and since the Ivey shop is closed, we’ll use that name here. Easton.

He’d had a rough life up to that point. Both of his parents had died, and he ended up being raised by his older brothers who had no intention of pouring into his life or teaching him what it meant to be a man. As a result, he spent a lot of time alone, forced to figure out his own way.

And we all know what happens when that happens. He found other people who would love him and care for him. The only problem was that they were more interested in selling him drugs than anything else. Pretty soon, his life began to look just like that of his older brothers, which was the only life he really knew. Some of us go looking for sin; Easton’s sin came looking for him.

So, by the age of fourteen, he was already doing drugs, selling drugs, and basically sleeping wherever he landed at the end of the day. His world became so small, enslaved to an addictive, destructive lifestyle.

Then a Christian family interrupted his tragic world, and he began to live with them and go to church with them. Slowly but surely, he began to discover another way to live. The adults in his life were modeling unconditional love toward him. For the first time, he was living around a healthy marriage and caring parent figures in the home. He eventually got a job and began to work to save for a car. Life began to change for him. He was beginning to find freedom from the lifestyle he’d been accustomed to living.

But change comes hard.

We can still find ourselves resisting what freedom offers.

Aaron was working with Easton and simultaneously keeping an eye on our children, when at some point in the evening, a storm rolled in. Rain began hammering the windows. Noise, wind, lightning, the whole bit. A big, crazy, Texas thunderstorm.

What you need to know about our neighborhood is that whenever a storm comes in—especially a quick one, like that—all the roads flood. What’s more, there’s only one way in and one way out, which means if you’re Easton hanging around on a night when a heavy rain starts up, you’re not going anywhere for a while. In fact, when the rain kept falling with no end in sight, Aaron informed him that he was now part of the family and might as well make it a sleepover.

Having an extra person spend the night at our house is not all that uncommon for us, so Aaron knew exactly what to do. Once they finished up the stuff they were working on, he made Easton a bed in the game room, tucked him in, and left to go get everybody else settled down as well. (Okay, I’m most certain he didn’t “tuck in” an eighteen-year-old, but I can’t help but think a boy whose parents had died so many years ago might actually appreciate being tucked in at night. So I’m saying Aaron tucked him in, whether he did or not. Which I’m most certain he did not.)

Apparently, the storm stayed pretty crazy through the night; kids ran to our bed, where Aaron was sleeping, asking him if they were all going to die. (We might be a bit dramatic in our family, but whatever.) He returned all the scared Ivey kids back to their beds, but he decided, before going back to bed himself, to go check on his guest.

You won’t believe what he found.

Easton was sleeping, but not on the bed. In fact, the bed was still made up, just like Aaron had left it. Instead, Easton was stretched out on the ground—no pillow, no blanket, nothing to help him be comfortable—sleeping like a baby.

When Aaron saw him the next morning, he mentioned to Easton that he’d popped his head in during the night to see if he was okay, and was hoping he slept all right.

Aaron said, “I couldn’t help but noticing,” then paused. He continued by asking Easton directly, “How come you didn’t sleep in the bed?”

Easton laughed, a little embarrassed. “I don’t know, man. I’ve just slept on the floor so many times in my life, sleeping in a bed still feels weird.”

The floor was still his normal. The floor was where he felt most comfortable, accustomed, safest. It’s what he knew, and it’s what he kept going back to.

Just like us.

We don’t always seem to know what’s good for us.

Maybe we somehow feel safer doing life the way we’ve always done it, even if it’s done nothing but hurt us. Maybe we’re almost scared of trying anything different.

Easton understood this. I understand this, and quite possibly you understand this as well.

You’ll hear me talk several times in this book about the ladies I’ve gotten to know at the women’s jail in our county. Meeting with them each week and serving them has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. We’re mostly there to help them with job training, interview skills, addiction rehab encouragement, and other things they’ll need on the outside. But if I’m honest, I’d say we’re mostly there to tell them about Jesus and the freedom He offers them.

But I’ve noticed how talking about freedom in Christ with women who are literally behind bars throws a whole new light on the subject. Most of these women will eventually return to the free world. They’ll one day be able to walk out of the jail with all its restrictions and structure and schedule. But to hear them talk about what they expect when they get to taste that freedom . . . they’re a little afraid of it.

Oh, don’t get me wrong—they are so ready to go back home to their families and their lives. Even little things you and I take for granted are the things in their daydreams. (I once showed up with a cup of ice water from Sonic. The ice nearly put a girl over the edge. She just wanted ice from Sonic again!) But if you listen closely enough, you’ll detect a small, underlying fear. Being slaves to their drugs, their abusers, their addictions has been nothing but costly to them. But to think of trying to forge another way of life—even a better one, even a life of complete liberation from what’s bound them and harmed them and cost them everything—is a bit frightening. Because it’s so unfamiliar.

They know how to live their old way.

But this new way—freedom—they strangely wonder if they’re up for it.

Although it’s really not that strange at all. It’s exactly what you and I have spent way too much of our lives doing. Living in the old way because it’s comfortable, scared of the freedom that Christ has to offer us.

Freedom is waiting for my friends who are currently in jail, just like it’s waiting for us who currently do not believe it could be for us.

Even without the black-and-white jumpsuit, we all struggle to be free.

Yet it all goes back to our stories . . . stories that, at first glance, don’t feel like they’ve got any potential freedom at all written inside them. Stories of stupid mistakes. Stories of heartbreaking loss. Stories of glaring failures. Stories of embarrassing, confusing misdirection. Stories we don’t always like to tell. Stories we swear we’ll never tell.

But the thing that’s so unclear about them is that our stories themselves are not what’s actually keeping us from being as free as we wish. When seen through the eyes of the gospel, our stories are not obstacles to our freedom; they are actually the key to unlocking it.

And that’s what I hope to show you in this book. That’s what I hope you’ll begin to experience right along with me . . . not ten years from now, but right now.

I believe stories change the world. It’s why I want to share my story with you so badly, even though for much of my life I wanted no one to know my story. But I’ve discovered something: it’s by owning and revealing this story that God shines light through me on His Son, Jesus. It’s by owning and revealing your story that God can shine light on Jesus through you as well. It’s by owning and revealing our stories—no longer succumbing to shame because of them, but surrendering to God’s promises of what He can do with them—that we begin to experience freedom in every beautiful sense of the word.

I know it sounds crazy—crazy scary—but it’s true.

I’ve seen it happen. With a story. With my story.

The Bible is in many ways a whole book of stories. God could’ve chosen to make it nothing but rules, nothing but lecture, nothing but “sit down and take notes,” nothing but “drill these concepts into your head.” And yet He chose to largely communicate His truth and nature and love and power through the lens of real-life story.

If you grew up in church, you could probably tell me your top ten Bible stories without even hesitating. You wouldn’t even wonder if you could come up with ten, but would wonder how to pick the top ten out of the enormous number of stories you’ve heard and read in your lifetime. You might remember flannel boards and Vacation Bible School, maybe even Backyard Bible Club, where you saw some of these stories come to life for the first time. But if you have no idea what any of these things are, trust me when I tell you—the Bible is full of stories of people just like you and me.

Here are my personal top ten Bible stories:

1. Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (Because, oh my gracious, do I feel like her a lot!)
2. Esther becoming queen (What little girl doesn’t love this story?)
3. Mary talking to Elizabeth after she found out she was pregnant with Jesus (Can you even imagine? Virgin? Pregnant? The SON OF GOD in your belly? No space in my brain for this.)
4. Isaac blessing Jacob instead of Esau (Oh, that sneaky Jacob!)
5. Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (What an amazing thing to do for your friend!)
6. Martha and Mary cleaning and serving (And how we’re constantly asked today if we’re a Mary or a Martha.)
7. Sarah laughing at the promise of a child (Nobody should ever laugh at God!)
8. Daniel in the lions’ den (We’ve seen the lions at the zoo, and no one wants to fall in there!)
9. David beating Goliath (Because doesn’t the whole world feel like Goliath sometimes?)
10. Ruth and Naomi sticking together (“Where you go, I will go” . . . Oh, the love in this story. BFFs for life!)

The Bible is jam-packed with great stories—stories of real people who really walked on this same real earth we walk on. They had good days and bad days. They loved people and disappointed people. The women had emotions, and hormones, and periods that probably came on with a vengeance and made them crazy for (at least) three days every month. They most definitely had kids who wouldn’t sleep through the night when all their other friends’ kids would. The men had egos, and pride, and wanted to punch something when they were mad. (Who am I kidding, the women probably did too—right?!) The stories in the Bible showcase great decisions being made, like when Mary humbly trusted God with an unbelievable secret. And then they show us a lot of poor decisions being made, like . . . good gracious, Peter, did you really need to cut the man’s ear off?

But if I was forced to pick another story as one of my alternate favorites, it might be the one at the end of the book of Joshua, where this heroic leader of Israel reminded the people what God had done for them.

Following the death of Moses, God had chosen Joshua to guide the people’s conquest of the Promised Land. And not long before his death, Joshua brought all the tribes together with all their leaders and spoke the words of God to them, laying out the whole time line of their history in brief detail. He started with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, followed by their descent into slavery in Egypt. After this came Moses, of course, who led the people out of bondage and across the Red Sea into safety, followed by forty years in the wilderness before finally experiencing their promised victories in Canaan.

But let’s be honest. If you know your Old Testament history, you know that not all of their days had been good days. A lot of Israel’s history had been littered with fear and failure, with pettiness and forgetfulness, with pain and loss. The Bible, as part of the proof of its authenticity, doesn’t bang the drum for how unbelievably perfect the nation of Israel was, these people God had chosen to be known by His name. Truth is, they fell down an awful lot. And the Bible is hardly shy about telling it. It’s not always a pretty picture.

But as Joshua finished his speech, he took a large stone and set it up for all the people to see. In view of everything God had done, despite their many flaws in the execution, they were making a fresh commitment to follow Him with all their heart and soul. This stone of remembrance was a reminder that their God had been faithful to them throughout their entire lifetimes, and they had promised here in Joshua’s final official act to choose the Lord over all the false gods of their past and all the gods of their surrounding culture.

Because, see, more than anything, these stories from the Bible, just like the stories from our own lives, are not the stories of failure. They are the stories of God’s faithfulness. When you look at your own story, maybe all you can see are the goof-ups, the mess-ups, the things you’re afraid of ever bringing up, even the parts that happened this week or this morning or five minutes before you started reading this chapter today. But if you’d turn your head to look at your story just a little bit differently, you’d see it’s actually the record of a faithful God, willing His unwilling child to return to Him, loving you through all your unloveliness. His pursuit of you is simply unavoidable. And His desire is to set you free by His power to forgive, to put you to great use for Him.

The sooner we start looking at our lives and our stories in this clearer way, through the lens of a God who has been and will be faithful to us, that’s how much sooner we’ll be on the path to freedom. Wouldn’t you just love that?

I think sometimes we go through life so fast that we forget all the ways God has been faithful to us—all of the ways our story has twisted and turned for the good and the bad, and yet He was always there, always with a plan for every roller-coaster ride we felt we were on.

That’s what this book is for me: my roller-coaster ride. And I’m asking you to get in the cart with me—seeing your story through my story. This isn’t just a book about Jamie, because, for the love!, I would never expect anyone to buy a book just for that. It’s a book about God and His passionate, relentless pursuit of His people. I’ve written it for all of us as a reminder of what great lengths our Father will go to bring His children into His family, and then to keep loving us, even in those times when we hardly act like one of His daughters.

I’m not the first to share my story in a book, and I won’t be the last. But my hope and prayer for you is that as you read these words, you’ll find yourself in them. I pray you’ll look deep into your soul and see the things you’re afraid of sharing, and you’ll offer them to the world as your testimony of redemption and hope. Because if you are a follower of Jesus, then God is using your whole life—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to bring Himself glory.

Let’s offer our stories to those around us as a beacon of hope, so that even in seeing how severely messed up we’ve been and can sometimes still be, they’ll see the One who willingly sacrificed His own Son for sinners just like you and me. Let’s not be afraid of showing how much saving we need. Let’s show them, through our need, the greatness of our Savior.