This I Believe

This is an essay I wrote for Creative Writing a couple of months ago and I though I'd share  (:

 

This I Believe

I pleaded with the God I knew existed, with the God I thought I knew everything about, the God I hoped wouldn’t allow pain to sear through my being like a laceration deeper than skin. I prayed, telling myself He would listen to my heart. Convincing myself that if He was the God I thought to know, Death was not around the corner. It was all a nightmare. He would not take a mother from a child the time she needed her most, when my prayers were entwined with silent pleas and selfish bargains.

   Yet when circumstances seemingly got worse, and God seemed all the more silent, I had to redefine the god I created Him to be, into the God He really was.

In my mind He had become the god I prayed simple prayers to. Prayers to help me succeed on a test, not to allow my mother to be sick. He was my Sunday friend and only that.

The jolt of a cancer diagnosis, an earthquake forgetting to end, brought a carefree, brand new teenage girl to her knees. Because it happened to other people. Not me. It threw me onto a thin tightrope with the promise from God, “Don’t look down, Trust me.” Looking down meant falling, it meant denying all I’d learned as a child about the God above.

As I pleaded for healing, a young girl desperately trying to be fluent in prayer so that the God above would hear my silent call, I learned that maybe He had something better. Something concrete to walk on, rather than the unstable ground moving beneath me in the never-ending aftershocks of the earthquake. But my plan had seemed perfect. It made sense, my mother would get better, and we could glorify God with the story to others of the miraculous healing.

My plan was beautiful, I could see it all mapped out before me. I wouldn’t be hurt, she wouldn’t suffer. But God’s was different. He had the blueprints. I did not. The part of my heart He planned to remodel, after it fell apart with an earthquake, was not a room I was willing to surrender. Walls I didn’t want torn down. I had carefully constructed them.

This is what my heart began to believe even when the ground beneath me is threatening to shake with yet another aftershock and the new buildings I try to construct will yet again, collapse.

This I Believe.
   I believe that the broken shards of a tragedy can be beautiful when God’s light shines through. I believe the dark, dusty and cobwebbed crevices of a sinful heart can be ignited when God is the source of their flame. I believe when sifting through the rubble of your heart after a tremor of the earth, you discover the true friends that help you build back up, you find the friend that allows tears to soil their shoulder, and they are so close that they feel some of your pain. I believe God uses the people in your life to provide antiseptics for the gaping wounds that seem to never heal. I believe in an overwhelming peace in a nearly unbearable pain. I believe in a faith slowly reviving through the ruins that loss leaves behind. And most importantly I believe in a holy, omnipresent, and omniscient God, and His sufficient, never-ending love, mercy and grace for a heart that deserves nothing of the kind.

This I Believe.