Floor Boards

There’s some worn down floor boards in my bedroom in my parent’s house. In fact, I grew up in houses with wooden floor boards.
I would pace back and forth there, trying desperately to chase after peace.

That house, to me, stands for many things but mostly growing pains.
I finished my first song there but it took me years to record it. I gained friends and lost friends while living there.
I struggled through understanding life there.
I tried to heal from self-inflicted wounds there but it was still during a time where people wanted me to break them open and show them my pain in order for them to trust me. Looking back I think they meant to help the wound heal better – constantly asking me to clean out the infection but with each dissection the scar got more evident. Now I walk around with it tattooed on my soul.

Mostly I ached there.

I learnt a lot about darkness. To live in it is one thing, to understand it and turn it over in your mind as you pace back and forth listening to your feet hit the hardwood floor well that is an entirely different thing.

I watched darkness form around people as they spoke. I watched it dance in the form of shadows.  I watched people claim what they had was this bright, radiating, eternal light but it was darkness with a flashlight. A disguise, they would learn, that has a short validity.

I learnt about what I was capable of there – that I could survive just about anything.

Which also brought me to understand surviving doesn’t actually equal being alive. You can survive tragedy and selfish actions and persecution and retribution but not really live in the sense that your soul is full or flourishing.

I almost settled for surviving there…
I wrote my first sermon there.
My nightly prayers, there, were sobs into my pillow case.
I felt pretty lonely there.
I learnt that many say they will stay but only few mean what they say.

I learnt the value of words – that grand but empty promises cause deep, wounding holes in the souls of people counting on you. I both experienced those wounds and caused them.

I learnt that your mother will always love you, even when you come up short. I would learn that lesson several more times before you would find me here in present day.

I learnt that everyone wants their pain to be beautiful but most only allow the superficial pain to really surface – they are more satisfied with the look of healing than the actual act of it.

I learnt that I was a judgmental person there – which was a disturbing realization being that I was in youth ministry and painfully well liked despite all my discrepancies.

I learnt that one’s social abilities are insanely powerful and it wasn’t just Spiderman who held great responsibility. I learnt that most people, including myself, would abuse that power simply to have people pat them on the back and tell them how right they are.

I paced the floor night after night rolling these lessons over in my head and jotting them down in journals until I couldn’t feel my fingers. I would feel liberated of them by the time I fell asleep but burned all the more the next morning with new thoughts that pricked like thorns into my once rosie universe.

Those journals begin my real journey to the understanding of grace and those floor boards the very thing that kept leading me back to the same place over and over and over again. It was this vivid, soul destroying moment that I realized I would never fully comprehend grace. That every time I judged someone and condemned them I was only showing them how small I was. That I was weak and unstable. That I needed the consistency of rules and who’s better than who simply to feel better about myself.

I didn’t heal at the house where my pacing started. I wasn’t better when I left. Too many of us have been handed the illusion that healing and growth come as we ask as if there is a drive through for the heart process of it all. There isn’t. When I closed the door of that house my hurt didn’t stay locked in those rooms. Healing is a process that takes a lifetime to understand.

Recruit #LWDR