Redeeming Love.

Oh, I am ashamed to admit this.
In the past week, I have read not one but two Francine Rivers novels.

I’m not a romance-y person. and I certainly am not huge on fiction. But after reading The Atonement Child {which I thought was a horrible book} I figured I should at least read the one with all the hype, Redeeming Love. So I did.

The whole time I read the book, I kept thinking about my history and where I’ve come from and what it means to me to have been redeemed. My story is different, but I can still relate to being brought out of darkness. I spent much of my childhood in fear, faking courage and growing dead on the inside. Still to this day, most of my pain is self-inflicted as a preemptive defense. It is easier to pretend like I know everything and care about nothing than to admit my sensitivity and concern.

I have been called from darkness to light, from death to life. I walked around the Birks house when I took a break from reading and thought back to one night that I will never forget – the first night I called 911. I was 4. As soon as I heard the operator pick up, my dad turned the hallway and began storming towards me, so I hung up. He hit my mom with a hairbrush with enough force that she fell and blacked out. The police responded to the call and took my dad to jail overnight. I kept putting the gray hairbrush back in the place I had stared at my mom’s body for what seemed like eternity. I was alone. My dad was in jail, my mom was hardly in any place to be of real comfort to me, and I had nobody. All I longed for was a sibling.

Could that little girl – me, though I separate myself from her – ever imagine being here? On that evening where 911 became a routine part of my life, would I have ever been able to dream up being in San Francisco, sharing the bed of a girl who on her own accord calls me her sister? And there is a dog, and a set of stairs, and two parents who love God and each other and their kids. And me. Somehow, me.

Could I have ever fathomed what God had in store for me?
And even now, can I fathom it?

It looks nothing like I’d expected.
It feels so normal I worry that I take it forgranted.

I finished reading that book. It was good, even if a lot of characters hugged their knees close to their chest a lot. Mostly I appreciated that moment, where I remembered the darkness in which I came from and the way God has used people to show me love, grace, redemption, and hope.

But I hated The Atonement Child, in case you were wondering.