Gathered from the muck, and presented again as so much more than beautiful.

Today I went out for a walk and a cup of tea with a dear friend's mum. Yes, that's right, not my dear friend, but her mother.

Sitting at a patio table, able to look out on the beauty of the breakwater - people strolling toward a lighthouse, birds collecting unbelievable amounts of twig, and glorious blue sky breaking through the clouds. This dear woman turned to me, and began to talk about when she was a young girl. I am so honored, and a little taken aback that she felt so at ease to share it with me, and it blessed me more than she could possibly know.
Her story is so very similar to my own, oh thank Jesus that he gives us stories, that he pulls them up from the muck, and presents them beautiful and polished and new.

I think back on only a day before, when I was writing to two dear friends who have become my family. In a spattering of poorly connected paragraphs, I tried to get out some of the many hurts and anxieties that plague my head and my heart. Nearing the end of the letter, I entered into my fear in even sharing these things with them. To hold out my heart was, and often is something that demands fearfulness. I recalled the hurt I felt toward my own parents. The way, only a few years ago, I would go home after school and cry myself to sleep, every single day. Inside I was crying, pleading for an answer "Did you not hear me? Why didn't you care? Why didn't you do anything..you didn't do anything." I simply could not understand why I wasn't worth caring about.

Re-enter sitting on the patio by the water, hearing a woman's beautiful story. "I was a very sad girl" she said, "I was depressed. You know, I used to put the same sad song on repeat. I would sit there and listen to it over and over again, and all it would do was make me more sad. It would stop, and I would play my sad song again. No one in my family noticed, because they were all already damaged from life."

They were already damaged from life.

These words transformed my thoughts. They renewed my vision.
I see.
I see!

I can look at that hurt through the eyes of Christ. No longer feeling that I was unworthy of the love of a mummy and daddy, but that they were already so damaged themselves, they missed how I was being hurt. They were too were hurting, and they know not what they do.

My bind of crippling unworthiness is loosened.
I am free.