baby steps & childhood scars

I have a good friend who was raised in a highly dysfunctional home. She’d experimented with cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, cutting, abusive relationships, and a number of other self-destructive behaviors by the time she had hit her sixteenth birthday. Her home life had disintegrated, her personal life was meaningless, and she was drowning in an ocean of depression—possibly going under for the last time—when Christ touched her heart and transformed her mind like He’s so very good at doing.

But last night she said something that rocked my world. We were sitting next to each other on a couch, talking about life, and she looked over at me, and sadly remarked, “Thea, sometimes I think I would trade my salvation if it meant that by doing so I could just have experienced a normal childhood.”

I was stunned. Shocked. The magnitude of what she’d just said stopped me in my tracks.

“Whoa, hold on,” I said slowly, silently praying for wisdom as I gathered my thoughts. “Let me explain something to you. Each one of us has a different home situation. Some people have what looks like a ‘normal’ family. Others of us grow up in homes that are clearly dysfunctional. But there’s something that I need you to understand: All of us grow up broken. Talk to any man or woman that grew up in an apparently perfect family, and they will tell you that they feel scarred, that they’ve had their hearts ripped open and trampled on, that they’ve felt dirty, and defiled, and worthless…because that’s what life does to everyone. Yeah, if we grow up in messed up homes, we feel more messed up. The scars are bigger, the pain runs deeper, and the sin is more obvious, perhaps. But those of us who grew up in idyllic families are broken in many of the same ways. Ask anyone on this planet, regardless of their home situation, and they will tell you that life hurts. It’s excruciating. It scars you. And sometimes the very pain of the brokenness of life causes you to doubt yourself, your worth, the love of others, their character, God’s heart...but in the end, it’s the pain of life that brings us—weeping and hopeless—to the foot of the cross where we find redemption and healing. No childhood, however perfect, has the capacity to spare us the pain of life. It’s only in redemption and forgiveness that we find the meaning and the joy that helps us to make sense of our childhood.”

I don’t know that she believed me. But as I thought about it later, I realized that sometimes God causes us to say words not because someone else needs to hear truth, but because we need to hear those words ourselves. And that night, I needed to see the events of my childhood from His perspective.