Article By: A Fellow Broken Girl

“Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, and come along.” Song of Solomon 2:10

Ouch. That hurts. But do I tell anyone? No. I stuff it. I hide it away from the world because no one needs to know that I am weak or fragile. Ugh! They went to the mall without me again? Didn’t it ever cross their minds that I might want to go too? Not that I’ve given them any reason to think that I might want to go with them. They don’t like me anyway…cuz I’m weird. And they don’t understand me. They don’t even try to understand me cuz I don’t fit into their perfect idea of what a girl should be like. I’m not like those girls. I’m not pretty. I’m not bubbly. I’m not into make-up, shoes, shopping, boys, or chick flicks. And I don’t want to be. That stuff is dumb. Why would anyone want to do that stuff anyway? Fine, they can go and have fun. I don’t really want to hang out with them. They’re just girls.

I was seventeen years old, and I was as much of a tomboy as a girl could get, chasing after adventure and rough-and-tumble playground sports, not boys, and longing for a friend, not a romantic relationship. To be honest, I never really put much thought into why I was the way I was, I just was. I hated being a girl and did everything in my power to be as un-girly as possible. And that was my life. Pink is gross. Jeans should have straight legs, not flared bottoms and tops should be t-shirts or hoodies. Hair should be as short as possible without actually buzzing it all off. If it happens to be a while between haircuts and your hair gets in the way, pull it up into a messy bun to get rid of it. Or dye it blue. Don’t bother with “nice” looking clothes; they’re uncomfortable and never fit right anyway. You have to be polite because the Bible says so, but whatever you do, don’t let on that you are compassionate or caring. That would show weakness or allude to the fact that you actually do have basic female emotions. And whatever happens: do not cry in public.

I am a broken girl. Or at least I was. I have been through one of the hardest forms of pain that a girl could ever go through. Only I didn’t know it. I would just go about life being me. Or at least being the me that I had created me to be. But God was going to bring me through a roller coaster ride of a healing process that would cause me to become the me that He had created me to be: a beautiful representation of Himself to show the world that He knows. He knows. And that it is by His wounds we are healed (1 Peter 2:24).

One day when I was six years old a girl in my first grade class told me she didn’t recognize me that morning when I first walked into our classroom. I was sporting my new haircut, so proud that I had been brave at the hair salon. The night before was my first time going for a haircut. My mom let me have it done however I wanted. And I had wanted it as short as possible. The girl in my class told me that at first when she saw me, she thought I was a new boy that was starting at the school.

Every girl , no matter their age, wants to be called pretty and cute. It’s natural for us girls, so her innocent, childish remark cut into my heart just like the hair dresser’s sharpened scissors had cut off my hair, only in a strange way it almost felt good. It was a pain that subconsciously expressed what was buried inside my heart, deep down somewhere, in the places of my heart I was not allowed to talk about. The place that was forgotten and calloused over. The place that was only confusion and shame. The place that one time, a while back, had made Mommy cry and Daddy speechless. The place that I never wanted anyone to know about, not even myself. This incident with the girl at my school was only one of many that would cause me much embarrassment, pain, callousness of heart, and bitterness over my lifetime. But it felt good because with every biting word or rejecting comment, I had accomplished my secret, subconscious goal: to not be a girl anymore.

This was the first of many times where people would question my gender or comment about it. Many times people would mistake me for a boy and I liked it that way. Yes, it was somewhat embarrassing but I learned to let the embarrassment roll off each time and smile inwardly, enjoying the feeling of being in control of what people thought of me and letting it cut into my heart a little bit deeper.

This wasn’t the only form of pain I experienced over the years. When you live in a way that is different, people do not usually make an effort to be close to you. People just didn’t understand me, and I had developed a hard attitude toward other people from constantly feeling the little snips at my heart.This made my life pretty lonely. Most days I couldn’t understand why people didn’t want to hang out with me or be my friend, but I think after a while I started to get the hint, and I took it for granted that I would never have any friends and that the world just hated me. So what did I do when the pain of people’s rejection or misunderstanding hurt in a way that didn’t feel good? I tried other ways to hurt myself. Not cutting or anything obvious like that, but by finding ways to bruise places that no one else could see, or scratch myself with sharp objects in places that no one but me would know about. I knew it was wrong, but somehow I always found myself thinking clearly about it only after the damage was done. Then I lived with the guilt and fear of other people finding out.

After I turned eighteen I started having nightmares and daydreams that were so scary and weird I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. I had started really pressing into the Lord and seriously committing my life to Him as His servant. I was willing to go where He wanted me to go and give up whatever He put His finger on. I was spending time with Him faithfully every day and learning to make Him my first and only love. He was my best friend and my life was finally starting to have meaning. I felt His real love for me like no one else could love me.

That’s why it was so random to have these visions or dreams or whatever they were. I knew that the devil always attacks God’s children when they start getting close to Him because he wants to try and get them to slacken their pace in seeking the Lord, but this didn’t really seem like that. It wasn’t like the normal way that the devil presses in… it was so… so real. For some reason, the unsettling pictures that would come into my mind, flashing through so fast I couldn’t keep track of them or rolling through my mind like a fuzzy old movie, were very personal. They affected me somehow. It was as if the things that would pop into my head were part of another world, another life. It was as if I had lived those things I saw through some other person’s body. And it scared me. What was wrong with me?

When I had these dreams I would startle awake in the night or shake in my sleep and wake up crying. I started having these every day and every night and I needed help. I seriously needed help.

I set aside some time alone and I cried out to Jesus. If anyone could show me what to do, it was Him. It wasn’t long before He made it clear that the things I was seeing were flashbacks. Memories of a traumatic time in my life that I had subconsciously blotted out so that I would not have to feel the pain or the shame. Memories I had hidden as a secret deep in my heart and never talked about it. It was like a splinter wound that had healed over on the outside but was still embedded under the skin.

I was having flashbacks from a time in my childhood when I had been sexually abused on several occasions by the same person. I had actually lived through the horrible things I saw in my dreams. Tears streamed down my face as years of numbness began to wear off. The callous on my heart had started to soften the moment I started to diligently make time with Jesus in my daily schedule, and day by day He had been bringing me slowly and gently to this point in my life because He always does a thorough work in the heart of the one who has fully given herself to Him. He doesn’t leave anything undone. His work is always complete. And now it was time for Him to bring up and dust off that painful subject which I had chosen to bury in the past.

For the first time in years I allowed myself to remember. And I was broken. So very wounded. I sought the Lord with all my strength and refused to allow myself to not feel it. I knew that it was time to allow the Lord to dig up the splinter from the past and begin to clean out the wound, even if it was painful. I knew that I could trust Him to hold my hand while I let Him do the painful work.

I took time to pray at intervals throughout a period of forty-eight hours. All I wanted was comfort and relief for my raw and throbbing heart wound. During this time, Jesus showed me that the lifestyle I had been living, wanting to be as unfeminine as possible, was not just a personality bent. It was a self-protective armor I had put on in order to keep what happened from happening again. It was my way of becoming as unattractive as possible in hopes that that would keep the world of men from wanting to harm me for their own pleasure. Instead, in choosing to live in this supposedly “safe” lifestyle, I had brought more pain into my life.

The first thing I needed to do was talk about it all with someone. I needed to get it all out and let someone into the fortress of my heart. I grabbed my two best friends, both older than me and exceptionally godly people who had been encouraging me in my walk with the Lord for several years. I knew I could trust them to help me through this intense struggle.

We sat down together in a private place and I shared with them about all the awful memories that had been resurfacing. It was the first time in my life that I had told anyone what had happened to me. In all honesty it was the first time in my life that I had allowed myself to think about what had happened to me. We talked, cried, and prayed for a long time for the Lord to remove all of the pain and bitterness that had developed in my heart. I tried to be as open with them, with God, and with myself as possible. I just knew that it was time to be done with the pain of all those years. It was time to move on.

After I was able to share and pour out my heart before my friends and before Jesus, I felt a sparkle of sweet joy flickering to life inside of my heart. I felt a lightness and purity that I had never felt before. I felt like I was going to float up to the ceiling and I burst into laughter! My friends were laughing, too, and we were all in tears. I can’t even explain adequately the feelings that were overwhelming me, but that day my heart felt the salve of Jesus’ love being applied and the removal of the chains of bondage that had been holding me a prisoner to myself. The world became beautiful that night, not because it hadn’t been beautiful before, but because Jesus had made me beautiful in His sight.

While we were praying God showed me that I needed to forgive the person who had hurt me. I asked that Jesus would help me to do this immensely difficult thing. Forgiving is something that usually takes broken girls a long time to get around to, but God wanted to do a thorough work in my heart that very night, so He and my two dear friends, coached me through a prayer of forgiveness and victory over the power of the devil in my life. I indeed had been in a bondage to the devil for all of those years without even knowing it, and it was time to be free. Free. Free from bondage. Free from the cage in which I had enclosed myself for protection. Free from all of the terrible memories. Free from the horrible guilt, shame, and loneliness. Free to be who God created me to be. A girl. A woman. A beautiful representation of His love, compassion, humility, and gentleness.

God would then bring me day by day through a dramatic time of life changing healing where He would peel off more and more layers of the old me and replace them with the brand new, clean, whole, and pure me. And now several years later, girls who meet me can’t even see a trace of what I used to be like. I’ve even had girls who didn’t know my story comment on how I’m “such a girl”. God has done such an amazing, healing work in me. I am now a joy-filled, ticklish, pink-loving, scarf-wearing, sparkly-eye-shadow-applying, beautiful-in-Jesus’-eyes wife of an amazing godly husband.

One of the sweetest parts of my story is how God was working out His plan for me to marry one of those two friends who had been helping me through the healing process. My tender husband knows my deepest secret and has been there by my side through all of the changes, the praying, the sobbing, the remaining flashbacks, and the forgiving. He is my best friend and he is constantly encouraging me in my new life.

I praise You, Lord, for You have truly done an impossible thing in my life. You have turned my mourning into dancing and girded me with gladness. How could I ever repay what You have done for me except by giving myself to You thoroughly and wholeheartedly. I desire to show this broken world that Jesus is bigger than the painful things we have gone through and He knows.