Chapter 4

Chased by God

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The year was 1998. This was the summer I attached the first pin to my chest. Up until then, I never knew about all the pins I should be wearing.

Funny, isn’t it, that it wasn’t until I moved home and started going to church again that I felt the need to do this pin-attaching thing. The one place where I was supposed to feel the most freedom—at church—actually produced the most shame in me. I’m not saying the people there were looking down on me. Maybe they were; maybe they weren’t. Or maybe I was just so convinced they should look down on me that I created a world in my mind where they did look down on me. I don’t know.

Nevertheless, these letters began to make their home on my chest.

“U” for used.

“W” for whore.

“P” for pregnant.

“S” for shame.

Worse, these labels also began to become my identity and make their home in my heart. I believed I was all of those things. And if I was all of those things, then I had no right going to church and acting as if I wasn’t. My feelings about myself, symbolized by those pins and letters, formed my new identity. And I would acquire more pins along the way.

I didn’t know any other way to be identified. If you’re not a follower of Christ, how else can you be identified, except by the choices you’ve made, the things you’ve said, the places you’ve been. Not until God steps into our world and literally gives us a new identity can we be anything other than the life we’ve decided to live. As sinners. Unrepentant sinners.

But I didn’t believe this new identity could happen to me. If it already had, I couldn’t tell. And even if it still could, I surely didn’t deserve it now.

That’s how I was thinking.

That’s what brought on the pins.

Church in my mind at that time was still the place for people who already had their stuff together. I had no concept of church as a place where broken people could show up, be their real selves, and still receive love. If ever I’d tried to actually be myself at church, I felt I would’ve been asked not to come back. If they knew the real me, they would suggest other places for me to go. Because despite having been raised in the church, I really had no working concept of the gospel, the forgiveness of Christ, and God’s love for me. In my mind, you were either a good person and God loved you, or you were a bad person and God didn’t love you. I loved God as much as I knew how, but I was certain His love for me had been slowly fading through the years. And if I didn’t get my act together quickly, He would quit loving me altogether. I felt that I had strung Him along for way too long. Yet I had no concept of how to get started again. I felt so lost—even at home. Lost—even at church. Everyone wanted me to be different. I did too. But how?

Now, just for a moment, before going any further, I want to pull back from this scene, in order to say that this same dynamic I experienced is playing out this week, this weekend, everywhere that people and churches exist. And wherever it does, you and I are on either side of it. We’re either the church people that others feel too ashamed to be themselves around, or we’re the bottled-up people whose sense of failure or inadequacy makes us want to hide and maybe hate you.

Do you see the problem with this picture? Do you see the needless anxiety and waste of time we cause for others and ourselves when church is a place where people feel unwelcome to be real?

I realize, of course, sin causes separation. Sin must be dealt with. No one is helped by being coddled and petted in their sin, practically encouraged not to sweat what it does to all of us. But everything should be pointing to Jesus. Our churches should do nothing else but point people to Jesus, the true Redeemer of their souls. We can’t be giving off the vibe that says certain people don’t quite measure up. (Because that’s not true.) And if we’re the ones who feel like we don’t measure up, we can’t be beating ourselves to death for things that Christ has already taken the blows for. (Which actually is true.)

I’ll come back to this subject later, throughout this whole journey we’re taking together, because its implications are so important. But whether my story is unlike yours and you’re not sure what to make of rebel kids like me, or whether my story is all too similar to yours and you’re not sure what to do next, I’m praying that the experiences still to be shared in these remaining chapters will cause you to truly feel for the ashamed . . . and, if you’re the ashamed, will cause you to run toward freedom whatever it costs.

Because, get this straight—God is running to you.

Even if you’re sitting at rock bottom.

Something weird happens to you when you hit rock bottom. Your only view is what’s above you. Rock bottom is lonely. Rock bottom is scary. For me, rock bottom was an opportunity to reevaluate life as I knew it. My parents were gracious toward me and patient in my journey. They never made me go to church with them but, then again, it’s just what I always did. Going to church on Sundays at home was as normal as my family going to Grandma’s for Christmas. It’s just what we did.

But the funny thing about church for someone who feels as though they’ve hit rock bottom is that church can sometimes make you feel anxious. In your brain you feel as though everyone is on to you. They know your junk, and even if you were to try hiding it, you can’t, because they all know. It feels as if they had a big meeting before the doors opened, and everyone was clued in on your sin struggles. Of course, we all know church is nothing like that (or at least isn’t supposed to be like that), but for someone like me who was walking around with a big secret—with all those pins—this was my perceived reality.

This was exactly how I felt. I would protect myself and my heart at all costs, even from these church people. Especially from these church people.

But here’s when—looking back at least, even if not at the time—I started to suspect that something else, something highly unusual, was going on. Because even though church made me feel terrible, I spent that summer trying so hard to get involved in the college ministry.

Why? What was I doing? Why was I putting myself through this?

I didn’t even like them, the college kids at our church. They were so unlike me. I mean, if they were attending church, surely they weren’t doing anything wrong. None of them had likely been pregnant just last month, for instance. Or were mourning the loss of an unborn child that no one knew about. Or probably had ever tasted alcohol in their whole lives. None of them had ever walked in my shoes. None of them were living with a secret as big as mine. None of them knew what it was like to hurt—to really hurt—to make poor choices, to feel as alone as I was feeling.

Twenty years removed from this time in my life, I realize the reason why I made all these assumptions of them was because I was too afraid to tell anyone about myself. If I had, I might have found they’d walked through some hard stuff too. But I was so inwardly focused on my own pain and hurts that I didn’t look around to see others who were also in pain. All I saw were a bunch of goody-two-shoes who wanted nothing to do with me, who couldn’t relate to me, who didn’t care about me. I felt unaccepted by them before they even had a chance to ask my name. I felt left out, ignored, frowned upon, less-than, and didn’t really give them a chance to show me otherwise. And if those college girls couldn’t love me for who I was, then how could God love me? That’s how skewed my thoughts had become. I put their ideas of me (or at least my perceived ideas of their ideas) above God’s ideas about me.

From their side, I’m certain they felt I was the rude one—stand-offish, probably a little stuck up—when, in fact, the exact opposite was true. I was scared of letting anyone into my life for fear of their judgment, of their lack of love, of their possibly telling me what I believed to be true—that I was indeed unlovable. I feared that if I let them in on my world, they would reject me. So to protect myself, I put up a guard. No one was getting in that might hurt me, even if they were trying to love me.

I went from being someone desperate to be known to someone whose main desire was to stay unknown.

And yet I kept coming in—for reasons I didn’t even know or want. This was so weird. And so hard. But what I didn’t know until later was that God was amazingly at work. He was already beginning the process of bringing my secrets out from under wraps so He could bring my freedom into real life.

He was making my path back to Him . . . unavoidable.

By fall, I started back to school, this time locally in Houston. I knew I needed to get back into life, with a plan, though I honestly wasn’t sure what that even looked like. I’d spent the summer working for my dad’s company, hanging out with my family, and wondering if I would ever get back to a normal life again. In the past three months, I’d been pregnant, preparing to get married, dealing with a miscarriage, moving back home, and now living with a secret over my head. What would this mess look like if it went back to school now?

The only way I knew to make college better this time was to be a better person. I would stop getting drunk. I would stop having sex. I would start reading my Bible. Wouldn’t that make me feel better about myself? Wouldn’t that make God love me? Wouldn’t that make me feel like a good person?

So that became my goal: Stop getting drunk. Stop having sex. God would love me then, and I would be acceptable to Him again. Loved. Accepted. That was still what I wanted. And maybe at twenty years old, being good would finally do it for me.

But the problem with behavior modification is that it never sustains the test of time. Doing good things to be a better person can never satisfy the desires of your heart. We always fail. We always let God down. We never become good enough.

And not having sex was just behavior modification for me. It had nothing to do with saving myself for marriage because of my love for God; it had everything to do with trying so hard to do the right thing so that God would love me, and so that I wouldn’t get pregnant again.

So I entered the fall semester trying to do life better. And I tried really hard.

For about two weeks!

Probably didn’t help that I joined a sorority before school even started. Nothing against the Greek system, but it’s a super hard place to try and do “good things” like not drink and not have sex. In fact, as I began to embrace sorority life, I became the stereotypical sorority girl. Drunk and easy. Once again, I was failing at the “being good” challenge I had given myself. But for someone who’s immersed in a lifestyle, it’s hard to do anything other than what you already know. And for me, I still didn’t know how to date without sex being involved. I’d been doing it that way since I was sixteen. I didn’t believe a guy loved me unless he wanted to go to bed with me, and I saw nothing wrong with a first date ending in a sleepover.

So even with my big commitment again to be this good girl that I thought I needed to be for God to love me and for the people at church to accept me, I kept failing. All I knew how to be was the girl I’d been for the past four years. Becoming someone else was hard. Maybe impossible. It was an act I didn’t know how to keep up. I only knew how to be me, and the good-girl act wasn’t me. She was fake.

Halfway through that fall semester, I met a guy who became my boyfriend—the first guy I’d seriously dated since the miscarriage. I wasn’t living like I should, I knew, but at least I had this exciting relationship to be part of. He wasn’t a Christian, but I thought it would be fine. I mean, we were both good people.

But, boy, did it turn out to be a different experience than all the other times I’d been involved with a guy. Because while God had been pursuing me for the past few years, I was most unaware of His pursuit, but the next twelve months of my life would make it obvious that He was there. He had always been there, and He was about to flip my world completely upside down.

You may or may not understand what I’m about to say. But being pursued by God was the scariest thing in my life. Really? Scarier than being a pregnant teenager? Scarier than the doctor delivering the news that your baby was dead? Yes. Partly because He would eventually lead me to a point of unavoidable vulnerability that felt more crippling to me than anything I’d ever been through before. And partly because I felt like if He rejected me, the way I thought other people would reject me, I would truly have nothing. To be rejected and abandoned, rather than loved and accepted, wasn’t something I thought I could live with. And that’s what I was afraid of—if God ever really got hold of me—that He would reject me.

But there’s really no other reasonable explanation for what happened next in my life except that God just did it, that He was chasing me down, and that He wasn’t going to stop until He’d caught me. I look back at this time, and I see the hand of God all over it. Things I would normally scoff at, I was agreeing to participate in. Things I would never care about were actually keeping me up at night, thinking about them.

Places I would never go, and people I would never want to spend this much time with, were about to change my life forever.

Somehow I was invited to attend a conference in Dallas with the college ministry at our church (the college kids that I hated so much). We were to drive up from Houston, stay in a hotel together, and go all weekend to this big event. Fun, huh? No, not to me.

Then why, again, was I saying YES to this idea? Agreeing to hang out for a whole weekend with people I couldn’t stand? A weekend that was all about this God who was doing crazy things in me, all while I was scared to death of not being good enough for Him?

It just didn’t make sense.

Yet I knew I needed to go.

And so I went. I even signed up to share a ride, which ended up putting me with a girl named Erica (who I actually wish I’d gotten to know better because I think we were both living the same double life) and this guy named Aaron.

Aaron Ivey.

We already knew each other a little bit. A month earlier, in fact, he had asked me on a date. Can you believe that? But I’d recently started dating my current boyfriend, so I politely refused. Sweet of him, though—one of those perfectly put-together college kids, thinking he could mix it up with somebody like me. He had no idea what he was asking. He and I would never work.

But we did venture up to this conference together—Passion Conference, it was called. I remember only two things from that entire weekend. First, I remember this Aaron guy was hilarious. I’d been wrong about him. He was different from the other college kids that, at least from my perception, couldn’t wrap their minds around somebody like me. He seemed authentic and real. I didn’t feel as though he looked down on me, even though I was certain if he knew the real me, he would change his mind and get away from me as fast as he could. Yet for the first time since doing anything with these kids from the college ministry, this person made me feel safe. He made church and me feel safe together.

The second thing I remember was that something truly remarkable happened to me during that event. I can’t make it splashy in trying to describe it because it wasn’t something noticeable, I don’t think, to others. I wasn’t even sure I understood it myself. I just knew it was happening. And I knew it was real.

God wooed me to Himself that weekend.

For the first time ever, I felt known by Him, and yet loved by Him, all at the same time—not because I was doing something right or was on one of my good-girl kicks, but because He just loved me.

I’m sure we sang worship songs while we were there, but I don’t really have any recollection of them—nor of the place where we stayed, the restaurants where we ate, or who was sitting next to me at each session. I only remember a woman named Beth Moore (who I’d never heard of) standing on the stage and saying words that struck me as if she’d come there to say them only to me. I’d never felt God luring me toward Him like that, tugging at my heart like that. He was speaking, and I heard Him—really heard what was on His heart—for the first time in my life.

Incredibly, I’ve been honored to interview Beth on my podcast. (It sounds so crazy now, as I think back to the first time I saw her, and what my life was like at the time.) Being able to tell her in person how the Holy Spirit penetrated my heart that day and about the unexpected, unexplainable joy He brought to me in that moment is still one of my lifetime favorite moments.

But that’s exactly how it happened. There at a Christian conference, which was so not my thing, I found myself being drawn to Christ in such an unlikely way. I truly felt broken for my sin and I knew that Jesus—not my attempt at keeping His rules and expectations, but Jesus Himself—was the something that was missing from my life. I believe that I was experiencing a godly grief for the first time in my life. I’d always known His story and what He’d done, from having grown up in the church. But finally, I understood what His sacrifice on the cross, and resurrection from the dead truly meant for me. For the first time, I felt as though the church—which had lately been a place where I only felt shame—might actually have a place for me and my brokenness.

God had chased me down.

And changed me forever.

I love seeing Jesus interact with women in the Bible, how He loved, pursued, and included them in His ministry. I told Aaron recently that my next book would be called Jesus and His Ladies. Catchy, I think, but . . . probably open to misinterpretation.

Yet the story in John 4 of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well is a picture of Him meeting a woman right where she was. Literally and figuratively.

Most Jewish travelers of that day made a point of avoiding the region of Samaria. The history between the Jews and the Samaritans was a bit rocky, and so to prevent unwanted interaction with them, they would walk completely out of their way. Jesus, however, went there on purpose. To meet those people.

Goodness gracious, do I know what it feels like to be one of “those people.” I’ve felt like an outsider a few times in my life, and I can tell you this: you never expect an insider to join you on the outside. This woman at the well was an outsider; Jesus was an insider. Yet He entered her world—He came to her—creating an interaction that not even she wanted to happen.

Their conversation at first was a bit awkward and uncomfortable. You probably know the story. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink,” and instead of offering Him a drink, she basically said to Him, “Why are YOU, a Jew, talking to ME, a Samaritan woman?”

I felt this exact way when Jesus started pressing closer to me. I would wonder to myself, Why in the world does He want anything to do with me? I knew the fraud that I was. I knew the way I’d trampled His name and His reputation into the ground with my words and actions.

Have you ever felt this way before, when thinking about your relationship with God? How in the world could He love you? How could He want to be in a relationship with you? How could He possibly use you . . . the way you are? Know what I’m talking about?

Those were actually some of the same thoughts that prohibited me from following Jesus for so long. I truly didn’t think a girl like me could be loved by a God like Him. I had been given too many chances to turn my life around and I had rejected them all, so surely God would do the same to me. Rejection was the only option I could conceive in my mind. I had rejected Him, so therefore He would reject me . . . except for the fact that He is Jesus, and Jesus doesn’t do rejection. He pursues hearts.

In the case of this woman, if Jesus had wanted to do rejection, she was already holding all the ingredients for it. Five former husbands. Living with a man who wasn’t her husband. Now standing next to a Man who in reality was her Creator, the God of the universe. Do you see a rejection scenario setting up here?

But He wasn’t there to reject her. He was there to pursue her heart, to provide her with water that would satisfy her forever—a concept that must have blown her mind because she was so thirsty that she went for it. “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water” (John 4:15).

Ahh, that’s so beautiful. Jesus was the only thing that could quench her desire for being known, loved, and accepted as she was. He was the only one who could satisfy her so much that she would no longer need to venture out to this well at odd hours, times when other women wouldn’t be around so she could avoid the embarrassment, shame, and horror of them knowing her junk, cutting eyes at her, whispering behind her back . . . rejecting her.

Jesus came to free her, not to condemn her.

Her biggest sin wasn’t her five husbands and all the other junk we know of her from Scripture. Her biggest sin was unbelief. And that’s what Jesus came to deal with. To offer her “living water.” He is more concerned with drawing our hearts toward Him, not getting us put together enough so that we’re capable of coming to Him. The reason He wants us acknowledging and repenting of our sins is so that we can follow Him, not so He can confirm why He’s rejecting us. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).

If you aren’t a follower of Jesus, know that He isn’t asking you to get your life together before you follow Him. He wants us to follow Him, worship Him, and give Him our all. And when we do that, our life does start to get together. Our picture of this is pretty much all wrong—that we need be perfected before we come to God. In reality, the exact opposite is true. He does the perfecting in us the more we come to know Him.

He doesn’t chase us just to catch us. He chases us so we can follow Him.

The woman at the well was me. I was the one hiding at the well while the other women were at home. I was the woman at home while the other women were at the well. I was one that Jesus knew so much about, yet He still chose to love me, pursue me, and want to be in a relationship with me.

For the first time in my life, I felt known. And even if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be known for, I discovered it’s what we’re all known for, or should want to be known for.

Known for needing Jesus.

My experience at the Passion Conference truly changed me. But I wasn’t sure what to do with this change. I knew I couldn’t be a Christian and live the way I was living. But I didn’t know if I could live how I thought Christians lived. To me, they were boring, judgmental, too good for me, no fun. How could I give my super-fun life over to that? Was this what Jesus wanted of me now?

A few months later, I signed up to go on a ski trip with our church. My dad and brother were both going, and so it made sense for me to join them as well. The church rented a bus, and we traveled the grueling journey from Houston to Breckenridge, Colorado—and lo and behold, I ended up sitting next to that same guy from the Passion trip again. (Remember the guy who’s now my husband?!) Aaron and I had so much fun on that trip. We ended up skiing together a lot. I still don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much. Aaron was really fun to be around, and it might have been the first time in my life I was having fun with a guy who I wasn’t trying to entice sexually.

We were merely friends. He was that funny guy from church who sang on the stage during worship services. He was my brother’s youth pastor. But that was it. And that was enough. And it felt nice for me and another guy to just be friends. For that to be enough.

The best thing about this story is to hear Aaron tell it. He claims we frolicked in the mountains laughing and falling in love together, but in reality, he was the only one falling in love, not me. We did have fun, yes, but he was just a friend. In fact, when we arrived back in Houston, my boyfriend picked me up from the church parking lot. My fun, easygoing week in the slopes with one of the nicest guys I’d ever met was over. But as proof of what God was doing, the contrast that was forming between Aaron and my boyfriend—between my old life and my new one—would soon force me to make a monumental choice.

It was like I was now on two tracks, the life I was so used to living and this new life following God. And though the track that God was calling me toward was something I wanted—the life of following Him that He was calling me to choose—the other track didn’t just automatically merge with the new one. Other people were still on it with me. I was still in the middle of living there. So even in the midst of all this change in my heart toward God, my relationship with the guy I was dating continued to progress. And before I knew it, we were engaged and planning a wedding, all while moving along on two separate tracks, hoping they would eventually merge together.

I know you are wondering how this will work out. My life was radically changed at Passion, and now I’m engaged to someone who isn’t even a Christian. He was starting to come to church with me. That was good. Sort of fit with the life I was wanting to start living now. I was moving toward becoming a married woman, with a husband who sat there with me on Sundays and sang the songs and listened to the sermon. That’s how this was all going to come together, right? We’re all Christians, right? We’re Americans. We’re Texans.

Christians.

But, no, it still wasn’t exactly right. We were still having sex, for instance. Which didn’t seem to bother him but . . . like on that summer day around my sixteenth birthday when I’d had sex for the first time ever, it was really bothering me.

Over the years, as my conscience wore down, sex in a relationship had become such a no-brainer. Being in a relationship and not having sex would’ve seemed weird and odd. (I hate saying it, but it was true.) But now, all of a sudden, I was starting to feel incredibly guilty about it. Remember the godly grief I mentioned before? Here is a prime example of this newfound guilt in my life—it led me to repentance. I mean, here I was, progressing toward a wedding date with this man, and yet already drifting apart from him. He didn’t share the same newfound principles and love for Jesus that I was beginning to crave. We weren’t on this faith journey of mine together. It was just me, even if he’d temporarily been willing to add a Sunday-morning interruption to his weekend schedule.

But the hypocrisy, for me, had to stop. Jesus was pursuing me, wanting me to follow Him. And that meant following Him in everything.

I finally developed the courage to express my convictions on this subject to my fiancé. And it didn’t go quite as I had expected. I was naïve enough to think that he actually loved me for who I was, not only for what we shared in the bedroom. Sure, I expected him to be a little bummed to be missing out on sex, but—hey, we were soon to be married. Wouldn’t be like this forever. Surely he would still love me just the same. And would wait, for a change.

Except that’s not what happened. He couldn’t fathom my decision. And to pile on—to make it look like I was the one who should be ashamed here—he threw my past pregnancy in my face, and told me how mean I was being to him to force this kind of change on him so quickly.

Can we say, red flags waving everywhere?!?

What was I gonna do? My devotion to God was real, but it was shaky. And it was now causing a big source of tension between us. I was willing to give this “following Jesus” thing a try, but what if it cost me my relationship? And yet I was genuinely growing to love God more than ever, and able to get over my boyfriend’s frustration with me less.

I’ll never forget the day I walked into my dad’s office and told him I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t marry this guy. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with someone who would treat me this way, even if I had a wedding dress hanging in my closet, a church booked, and a caterer reserved. I could no longer picture myself with this man forever, though I was scared to death about telling him. My life was drastically changing, and—since we weren’t married yet—it wasn’t fair for him to be pulled along on this roller coaster. He didn’t feel convicted about the sex. Only I did. He didn’t have the life-altering experience at the Passion Conference. Only I did. He didn’t read his Bible and long to discover more and more about Jesus. Only I did. We were all of a sudden walking on two different roads. Our tracks were never going to merge.

I cried and cried and cried in my dad’s office, and then I drove myself to my office, where I was working, and asked my fiancé to meet me there. To this day, this conversation will go down as one of the hardest conversations of my life, right up there with telling my parents that I was pregnant. Because the truth is, I did love this man. Of course I did—I was this close to committing my life to him, for better or worse, in sickness and in health.

I said a lot of words that morning to him. We both cried a lot of tears. I handed him the ring back that I’d been wearing as a promise to him. And then he asked me one final question. He asked me what I wanted. If it wasn’t him, then what was it?

And I kid you not, I said to him these exact words: “I’m not sure what I want, but I think I want someone like that Aaron Ivey guy at church.”

The man I rode in the car with to Passion. The man I frolicked in the snow with in Colorado. When God starts chasing you, He changes what you want.

And in following Him, you find Him giving you what He knows you need.