The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living (10 page)

I
was not supposed to have woken up. Waking up on the day after I planned to commit suicide was not part of my plan. I remember the moment my eyes opened to the new morning. I could
see
.

There was a clarity that hadn’t been there for as long as I could remember. Not a clarity like when you understand something, but the clarity of a blank canvas. The clarity of a flyleaf page in a new book.

If you don’t look at the cover, you can’t know if the flyleaf is the one in the front or the back of the book. You can’t know if it is the end of the story or the beginning. I think each flyleaf is always both. That’s what my blank ceiling reminded me of when I opened my eyes that morning. It was a strange thing to feel like I had died yesterday, just like
I wanted to. But I hadn’t planned on waking up. I hadn’t planned on feeling resurrected from the dead world I had “lived” in for so many years.

So what now? I knew God was in my room that morning. Nothing physically about my room was different from yesterday. The little Christmas tree I kept up all year was still blinking its multicolored lights in the corner. My dresser was still cluttered with overflowing memory boxes. Dimebag Darrell’s picture was still tacked on the wall beside my bed.

The only thing different was me.

I stared at the ceiling, thinking about how phenomenal it was that the very God I had hated so much had intervened in my life at the exact moment I was about to throw away the life he gave me. My heart grew warm as I thought about it, until tears streamed from my eyes. It made me cry to think that God was not only real, but that he wasn’t far away. He didn’t just make life and then watch the pieces randomly and chaotically fall where they may. He was involved. I never would have believed that if I hadn’t experienced the presence of God so tangibly the night before. The man who prayed for me spoke so specifically to me and about me. “He has seen you cry yourself to sleep at night,” he’d said. That amazed me, humbled me, and comforted me.

“Well, I wasn’t supposed to wake up today,” I spoke out loud to the God who had saved my life. “So . . . why am I still here? Why did you save me? What do you want from me today?”

Leaves Falling from Trees

I lay awake for hours, just thinking. When it came time to eat breakfast I wasn’t hungry, and asked permission to walk to
school instead. October had brought its normal relief from the Mississippi heat and I kicked down the road, on my way.

As I turned the corner at the end of our block, I dug through my bag to find the lone cigarette I had stashed in the pocket of my notebook. I hid it there since Granny didn’t allow me to bring cigarettes to school. A row of trees to my left, an empty church to my right, all looked on as the tobacco flared into a glow. The air felt different. It seemed so perfect on my bare arms. It seemed thoughtfully measured as it played with my hair. But my cigarette clashed with the perfection of the breeze around me. The same birds that always mocked my dreaded mornings now sang songs of celebration, like they knew it was my birthday—their coronation of my new physical and spiritual life rose into the autumn beauty.

Here’s a new
daughter! What glory! Oh, the wonder of the great things
that are in store for her!
they sang.

I felt the wonder of their song. It was everywhere.

It began to overwhelm me, and I dropped my head to turn away from the undeserved kindness of the gentle wind kissing my face. When I looked down I noticed the golden leaves I’d been walking on. Then I looked up at the evergreens and wondered where all the leaves I’d been trampling on had come from.
They could have
traveled very far
, I thought. The idea of their origin plagued me. I imagined they had followed the wind all the way from somewhere I could never picture myself going, like
New York. Then I thought,
But
God
knows where
each leaf came from
. The thought surprised me and made me giggle with the idea there was a real person like God who knew not only what state each leaf had come from, but what tree and seed, and when and where that seed fell, and how long it took to grow, and on and on and on back to the moment he created trees.

God knew.

And he knew the exact moment the leaf I was standing on fell, and why. I stopped walking and stared at the leaves. I began to laugh at the romance of it all. The mystery and beauty and wonder of an ancient, intricate, creative, thoughtful, mathematical, brilliant, artistic, playful God.

How immense and overwhelming! My mind struggled to grasp the fact there was a living God who still made trees grow, lose leaves, and spread seeds. I laughed at the beauty of God and fell a little more in love with him.

Understanding Love and God’s Art

The first thing I understood about this new place or state in which I now existed was that God wanted me to know he loved me. It was as if he kept reminding me he loved me with breezes of joy randomly tickling my heart all day long. I believe this was the first time I encountered joy. Joy is not mere happiness. It’s as if happiness comes from our souls, but joy comes from the spirit within our souls. Joy was a beautiful and astonishing melody singing in my heart all about how much God loved me.

Next, I realized how much God cared about other people. He wanted me to know this about him so I would learn from him and do the same—he wanted me to love others the way he did. At school that day, I would see someone I had hated yesterday and have to walk away from her because I would start to cry with an understanding of how much God loved her.

I remember sitting in the lunchroom, alone in the corner, and just looking at everyone. I was one day into my new love affair with God. I fell in love with him because he’d been so supernatural, powerful, and present, and mostly because he gave me grace by loving me enough to embrace me as I was. And because I was so enchanted by the love of God, I wanted to know more about him. As I looked at the lunchroom full of people, I had a revelation of God saying something very simple about all of them:
This is my artwork. These are my masterpieces.

I began to cry when I understood that the God of holiness, love, and mercy I’d met yesterday had made every person in that room. This was especially sweet for me to understand, because my favorite thing to do when I made a friend or started to have a crush on someone was to explore their artwork. I knew that people’s art, whatever kind of art it was, said something about the deepest part of who they were. I always knew that seeing people’s art would make me fall even more in love with them. You could always see the artist’s fingerprints in the art, like their signature.

To suddenly see people as God’s art overwhelmed me with humility. I had hated people so much. I had oversimplified them; I had judged, condemned, ridiculed, perverted, abused, and used them. It was like I’d spent so much time spitting on God’s art and calling it worthless. It broke my heart to understand this.

“Oh, my God. Forgive me,” I said under my breath.

Not long after that, my girlfriend, Amanda, came over and sat by me at the lunch table.

“Oh, you cut your hair. I’m not gonna lie, it kinda looks like crap. You’re probably gonna need to wear a hat for a while.” She laughed. “Too bad they don’t let us wear hats in school.”

Then she started cussing our assistant principal because the rules seemed stupid and made no sense to her.

As she talked I was in awe of how Amanda’s life said something about who God was. She was God’s creation. I became so fascinated by this revelation that I just stared at her.

I noticed the way her freckles—which she despised—looked as random and enchanting as the stars in the universe. God had put them there.

I noticed the way her eyes were moving so quickly around the room and perceiving so much. Eyes are amazing. God made them.

I noticed the way she bit into her apple and realized how crazy it was that we had taste buds. I thought about how I gave my dog the same dry dog food every day, but God gave us taste buds and all kinds of different flavors of food to eat. It seemed so loving of him. He made taste buds.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

I had no idea where to start.

How do I explain?
I thought.

I remembered what the guy at church had said to me about my relationship with Amanda. In that moment, I understood that God wanted me to love her and let her go. If it wasn’t God’s best for me to have this kind of relationship, then it wasn’t God’s best for her either. God had something better for both of us. It was a subtle feeling, but I knew God wanted me to really love her like he did in that moment.

I told her, “I’m just thinking about a lot, is all.”

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“I don’t know how to explain it right now. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about it later.”

I excused myself and went to the bathroom to cry alone. I sat in the bathroom and, for a few minutes, just processed the fact that God made everyone and loved them all. All day as I thought about it and felt the truth of it deep in my heart, it would overwhelm me and drive me to tears.

God loves everyone.

He made everyone.

Each person has his fingerprints on them. Each person’s life says something about who God is. He is so vast that if all the grains of sand and stars in the sky were alive to say something amazing about God, it would not be close to saying all the good there is to say about who he is. I find myself, even now, living in the glow of thankfulness for such a magnificent and all-powerful God.

When I arrived home from school that day, Granny returned my cigarettes.

“Your Gramps is doing better today. Thank you for going to church yesterday. You look a lot better. I love you, Lacey.”

I just thanked her and took the cigarettes. I sat outside smoking, thinking about everything that had changed inside of me. I didn’t tell Granny. Not yet. That night I lay in bed and listened as Billy Corgan sang about how life was changing. “What is love?” he asked. He didn’t like change; he was afraid of it. I thought about my desperation. I had wanted something—anything—to change so badly I was ready to die over it. But I couldn’t imagine anything different than what I had known. Life outside of my grungy cave of bitterness and hate was completely foreign to me. It was mysterious, like a blank canvas in my mind. Kind of like looking at the ocean
for the first time and being unable to imagine what kind of world exists inside it.

Our Decisions Define Us

I think so many people get Christianity wrong, and it makes me sad. It’s viewed as a religion of dos and don’ts. God cares about our hearts and the state of our souls. He wants us in relationship with him. God wants us to have life, and only he, the Creator of life itself, can tell us the truth about the difference between life and death. The One who formed our spirit within us is the One who knows what is poison to our spirit and what is healthy for it.

Whenever God would point out something in my life that I was holding back from him, he was always so gentle with me about it. He was always so loving when he would ask me to let him into something in my heart that I’d rather keep him out of. And it was as if he always left it up to me. He was and continues to be so very kind and patient.

I remember how God started to squeeze my heart whenever I thought about my relationship with Amanda. It was one of the first major decisions I had to make after my encounter with God to really choose him. I knew that I’d be dead if he hadn’t saved my life. I knew that if I ended my relationship with Amanda, I would have to be very distant friends with her, if we could even stay friends at all. Deeply emotional romantic relationships are the most difficult things to walk away from, and “staying friends” can create unhealthy cycles. I wasn’t sure how she would take what I had to tell her.

I knew that if I were going to die tomorrow, the short time on earth I had left before I got to eternity had to be spent saying yes to whatever God was calling me to. I also knew how much deeper and more perfectly God loved Amanda than I ever could. God had saved my life, so the least I could do in return was give it to him for whatever he wanted. So I decided to talk to Amanda about what had happened in my life and let her know that I couldn’t date her anymore. It would be much better for Amanda to hear about my encounter with God than for her to hear about my death by suicide.