Someone Like Me

If it were up to me, I’d never leave my protective shell. After all, I’ve spent a lifetime building it. One shame-laden, mortar-filled, crimson-stained brick at a time. I’ve grown rather comfortable behind cocooned walls. The outside world can be a scary place for someone like me.

I prefer the dark.

Call me crazy, but lately I’ve been hearing voices. One screams, “You’re not good enough, smart enough, rich enough, pretty enough, skinny enough, Christian enough!” Another shouts, “Will I ever feel whole?” And the last one whispers:

“I want to use you.”

The third voice is the most disturbing. “No thanks. Not interested. Been-there-done-that. Was chewed up like a wad of gum, ’till all the flavor’s spent and I am spit upon the floor.”

That’s how it feels to be used, only it’s a million times worse, and I don’t ever want to feel that way again.

But the voice keeps whispering; I can’t ignore it any longer. It’s relentless. It behooves me to obey or risk winding up in the belly of a whale—a little too dark a cavern, even for someone like me.

So I crack open the shades, my Bible, my journal, my heart and wait for God to speak. But this time He’s no longer whispering. His voice is loud and clear:

“I’m calling you to write; I’m going to use you.”

My heart leaps for joy!

“But it’s not going to be easy.”

And then plummets to the floor.

Nothing in my life ever is.

“In fact, it’s going to be downright painful at times, maybe even get a little messy.”

I know what that means: cue scalpel; I’m going to bleed.

Amazing writer, Ann Voskamp, stated on a recent blog: Words for write in the Anglo-Saxon language originally mean to carve, scratch, cut.

Carve

Scratch

Cut

No matter how you slice it, equals: BLEED

Yep, it’s gonna get messy, alright. Like a sacrificial lamb, messy. Hook up the IV.

“Do we have to go there? Can’t we just skip a few chapters and segue instead to the exciting, joyful and pain-free moments, like when the knight in shining armor arrives and the princess trots off into the sunset and lives happily ever after?”

“I want you to go there.“

But I’ve spent my whole life running as fast as I can FROM there: The Land of the Living Dead. I plead, “Not that road again.” It’s teeming with cobras, scorpions, tarantulas. I’ve been stricken with venom and it stings. My caterpillar heart catapults into cardiac arrest.

Maybe it’s time for open heart surgery.

Maybe it’s time to stop lurking in shadows.

Maybe it’s time to help a girl break free.

Someone like me.

Check out Ann Voskamp’s book: “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are,” by Ann Voskamp