Fable

Once upon a time, a little girl sat in a field releasing the fuzz from seeded dandelions and watching the wind gather the wisps into the sky as it tousled her hair. Sometimes, she danced with the wind, her blue skirt swishing to synchronize with its rhythm.

One day the whimsy of her dance led her to a crater blistered with brambles and dagger-length thorns. She stumbled over the precipice into the midst of them. Her dress tore, and her skin scratched.

A herdsman from the village nearby heard a child crying. He looked down and saw her caught in the briars. He leaped down into it, wincing as the thorns tore at him, but he struggled toward the girl.

When he reached her, he half-smiled and reached out to pull her up. But she was crying so much that his face was blurred, and all she could see was the blood covering his clothes and hands. Shrieking, she drew back from him, wounding herself further.

Finally, she let herself be carried out of the thicket. The herdsman tried to soothe her, singing her a lullaby. All she could hear was the painful undertone in the song.

By the time they returned to the dandelion field, the girl had cried herself to sleep. The herdsman laid her down under a tree, cleaned her scratches with a damp cloth, and kissed her forehead. And he went back to tend his flock.

The girl awakened the next morning. Glancing at her scabs, she sobbed again, remembering the herdsman’s wounds. She sat in the field all day staring at the dandelions. She had lost the dance.

In the evening, she crept back to the edge of the valley, grasping at the brambles.

She separated out the thorns from the stems of the plants, clenching them in her fist.

If she hadn't fallen into the crater yesterday, she wouldn't have cried out, and if she hadn't cried out, the herdsman wouldn't have come, and if the herdsman hadn't come, he wouldn't have bled. It was all her fault.

She used the thorns like claws across her arms. Surely she must hurt, because she hurt him. Only her own blood could satisfy this.

Every night for years, she returned to the crater. The bleeding was never enough. The craving to satiate the guilt was as fresh each night as the one before. Sometimes the coyotes came out to follow, nipping at her heels, licking up the warm blood dripping from her wounds.

She thought she must be an outcast, even though the villagers never mentioned it to her. A word or sharp look made her tremble, thinking they blamed her. Surely everyone knew what she had done to the beloved herdsman.

She sometimes would see him or other men leading their flocks over the distant misty hills. He tried to approach her on a street corner a few times, but she shuddered and turned away, lest she see his blood. The blood. She could never forget the blood.

But the coyotes never left. They became the girl’s companions when she felt like the village hermit. They walked with her when no one else would.

The girl grew into a maiden. A lonely maiden, wearing a ragged blue gown that barely covered the dried clotted mess covering her arms and legs.

One night at the crater, she returned to the top with her fist full of brambles. A coyote was waiting for her. She could smell him. He would lick her wounds before he'd let her pass by. She wondered when he'd just lunge for her throat and the pain would end. Coming over the edge, lantern light fell across her form and she shrank back into the shadows.

"Little girl."

The voice.

"Little girl. Don't be afraid. You aren't lost, are you?"

She trembled and clenched her teeth. Of all the villagers, he especially she could never face. Not with her scars.

He reached down for her hand.

"Come on. It's all right."

The coyote snarled in the brush nearby.

"Wait here." She heard his sandals crackle against the dry grass, and the swish of his club.

His footsteps returned, and he peered over the ledge down at her. "It's safe now." He smiled.

She dared herself to glance into his eyes. "Thank you." A girlish whimper.

She let him pull her up into the lamplight. They both sat down, each looking off into the distance. Her gaze wandered to the herdsman sitting beside her, to his rough cotton robe, to his ragged sleeves.

His arms. So many white echoes of pain. But just echoes. No blood.

Without thinking, she traced one of them lightly with her finger, then drew back. "I'm sorry."

He turned to her. His eyes twinkled in the dim light. "No need to apologize."

Pulling her arm closer to his, he drew it into the light. "Those look painful," he said as he traced the dark crimson lines on her arms.

One wet drop fell onto the lap of the blue gown.

"You know," he said, "If a little girl fell into the crater tomorrow, I would pull her out.”

The sob couldn't be stifled. She looked down, eyes memorizing every hole and rip in her dress. His arm wrapped around her shoulder like a winter's cloak, warm and safe.

“I carry my own lambs high above the thorns when I pull them out of the crater. I can handle being scratched, but I don’t want them to bleed,” he said.

Tears trickled, refusing to be shoved back. At last, she relaxed and lay against his shoulder.

He plucked a dandelion head and handed it to her. They blew it out together.  And dandelion seeds floated past in the moonlit breeze, the wind gathering the fluff up into the stars.

He spoke again, his hand held out towards her. “Would you like to dance?”

Self-injury: A Worldview

“Told I talked too much
made too much noise
I took up a silent hobby—
Bleeding.”

― S. Marie

Self harm. When the darkness inside at last leaks out and mars your body.

The reasons most people give for hurting themselves are complicated and diverse. Verbalizing the pain, punishing and satiating guilt, desiring control, a grasping to keep out the numbness.

My years of personal self-injury were mostly guilt-driven. As a preschooler, I saw an Easter play and believed that I needed to hurt myself for hurting Jesus. Every year, the repeat of the same drama I desired and dreaded so much drove deeper into my heart this need to crucify myself.

Little girl me thought that Jesus had to obey His father in the Garden of Gethsemane and die for me because she was a child and had to obey her parents. Surely it would be wrong not to, and Jesus couldn’t sin. Therefore, little girl me believed Jesus was like this abused child that was forced to sacrifice Himself for her. She couldn’t understand free will. That Gethsemane was not about “I must” but “I choose.” That His love could never be forced.

So self injury was more than just cutting. The bruises in hidden places and perpetual scabs all around my fingernails were just a symptom of an underlying issue. The proverbial iceberg that sunk the Titanic. An entire worldview lay under the icy waves.

When you believe that you are worthless, that you deserve to be punished and denied love, this perspective seeps mercilessly into every area of your life.

Self harm can be subtle. Some of my closest friends have said that they don’t deserve friendship or to even simply enjoy life.

“Aren’t we supposed to be focused on the next life and not enjoying this one? I don’t have to have friends. I’ll just be alone.”

“Why I am so stupid?”

“I don’t want to inconvenience the waiters at IHOP because I’m in a wheelchair. I don’t have to have pancakes.”

“Wouldn't you eventually get over it [my suicide]?”

The words from our conversations drip like blood. Emotional wounds seeping silent tears. They don’t see that every person’s unique genetic composition and personality combination makes them irreplaceable.  John Powell explained it like this: “You have a unique message to deliver, a unique song to sing, a unique act of love to bestow. This message, this song, and this act of love have been entrusted exclusively to the one and only you.”

The voices in our heads telling us that we are worthless are lies. Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

Abundant life. Abundant even in the little things. Enjoying hot, syrupy pancakes with friends. Late night laughter. Life contains hardships, but we don't have to seek them out. My friend Cynthia Jeub recently wrote that we don't need to live like we were born to be martyrs.

I can live free, and be “free indeed.” I have not been denied love. I am (and YOU are) so loved.

P.S. Me and Pastor Mark Adams from First Baptist Church of Beaumont who used to play Jesus in the Passion Play. I went back to visit last month.

Purity Rings

I was one of those pre-teens longingly looking through the True Love Waits catalog back in the early 2000s. Wondering. Waiting.

Somehow, I wanted to believe that wearing one of these rings and promising to keep my thoughts pure and my body untouched would magically cause the man God had prepared for me to appear, just like Prince Charming of the fairy tales. I composed letters in my head to my future husband. I dreamed of the day when he would remove my purity ring from my finger and replace it with our engagement ring. I would save myself for him, and we would live happily ever after in the enjoyment of each other's company.

My parents didn't buy me a True Love Waits ring. Instead, on the Christmas I was 13, my dad gave me a simple tanzanite ring. I wore it until last year, when the gold band finally snapped.

I didn't put it back on. And I haven't repaired it yet. Someday, I probably will. But I was already questioning the thinking behind the purity movement of my teen years. Now don't get me wrong. I still want to remain a virgin until marriage, and I think there is something to be said for seeking to live well. But now I have a different definition of purity.

Many Christian girls of my generation - including some of my closest friends - committed themselves to the "pure girls" movement, yet ended up wounded by it.

A blogger who posts under the pseudonym gracefortheroad explains it in a post called, "I don't wait anymore."  She says, "A lot of girls were sold on a deal and not on a Savior" and ends with this thought, "I just didn’t want to wait anymore – didn’t want to live like I was waiting on anyone to get here. I already have Him … and He is everything."

The Recovering Grace website has an article regarding the pitfalls of the emotional purity teaching prevalent ten years ago, which argues that if you have a crush, you are sinning and giving a piece of your heart away to someone or losing your emotional virginity. Believing these ideas caused me to become paranoid of hugging a guy friend or allowing myself to become attracted to a man.

Last year, my friend Anna G. shared a story with me called "The girl and the glass heart." It confronts the lie that if I freely love, I am left with less to love other people with in the future. The lies that tell me that if I love and I am left heartbroken, I am tarnished and used up, unfit for another relationship. The Heart-Healer in the tale tells the girl, "Only in brokenness can [your heart] truly be whole. .... Wholeness does not come from perfection. Wholeness comes from purpose. There is no purpose in a perfect heart. There is purpose in a broken one."

I had forgotten about my old purity ring until a few weeks ago. Last December, over Christmas break, I finally told someone about my history of self-harm throughout my childhood and my youth. For the first time, the darkest lies I believed and deepest wounds I carried flowed out of my heart in a 3 am chat powered by Mountain Dew. Later, I bought two rings engraved with the words "Forgiven" and "Jesus" to remind myself of why I never need to punish myself.  But when my friend Cynthia B. first saw them, she said, "Congratulations on your first real purity rings."

I drew back and paused, then smiled. "Yes. They are my purity rings." The rings I wear now are not to symbolize something I do or don't do. They don't have much to do with me at all. Instead, these rings point to what He did. For me.