Black Sheep.Daughter.Rebel.Self-harmer.Girlfriend.Criminal.Sister.Failure.A handful of labels over a handful of decades of life so far, formed and carried following experiences, encounters, words spoken over me and choices I had made. I was convinced for several years that many of these were true, proudly identifying myself as so or shamefully covering the label so as not to be seen.
* * *
I’d pushed my sleeves up without thinking as we rehearsed for our ballet school’s next show and, with the eyes of a hawk, my teacher had spotted the vivid lines on my forearms. “Joy, what is this?! You have to stop this, you hear me? I don’t want to see this again!”This wasn’t an isolated incident, other people had seen my marks of self-destruction and reacted with similar alarm, imploring me to stop and change. But how could I change when this was who I was?Shame. "I am the black sheep."
* * *
“So Joy, do you think you guys are going to get married?!” The carload of women all turned their beaming faces towards me, their hearts alight with excitement and anticipation for me.I smiled back, my best fake-it-till-you-make-it smile, “Yeah, maybe.”They responded with delight for me as the car continued to speed north along the motorway and I turned to gaze out at the passing countryside, eyes hidden behind sunglasses and my heart a cavern of nothingness. The man they were enquiring about had ended our relationship the previous day and I was now traveling to one of our dear friend’s weddings.I wasn’t worth fighting for. I wasn’t worth loving that much. I couldn’t bear to admit that truth.Failure. "I am a lying failure."
* * *
The duvet was creating a fortress for me to hide in; a safe place; a cloak of invisibility. I didn’t ever want to come out. I didn’t want to be seen, looked at, talked to. I just wanted to slip away and disappear.It was the day after the night before. The night where my virginity was taken. When my drunken foolishness had landed me in a place of vulnerability and now that thing that I had been protecting, saving and honoring, had gone; the remnants and evidence littered about my bedroom.Tainted. "I am damaged goods forever."
* * *
Lies, that sounded like truth, had become my identity.I would still be believing that I was a failure, unloveable and unworthy of love, a rebel who always messed up and disappointed people around me, if I had not had an encounter with truth; if love had not found me.We assume roles or take on identities like we get dressed in the morning, an outfit of clothing that informs the world about who we are, or at least who we want them to believe that we are. We polish and shine our labels, like trophies on a mantelpiece, even if we abhor the event that it came from. It’s better than not winning anything, right…? We walk away with ugly imitations of truth, settling for a lifetime of shame.But for the grace of God.Like a rainbow of promise stretched across my life, grace, love and truth had found me and given me hope, welcoming me to receive from their heavenly treasure. In my scar-riddled body with my broken heart and lie-entangled mind, I accepted the invitation, surrendering all that I had believed to be true and in exchange receiving a new identity; my true identity.Grace isn't just a nice quality or merely the elegance of our stance, it is God’s love in action towards humanity who merited the opposite of love. We don’t always get it right and sometimes we do fail but God’s currency is grace, not rejection.When I was in the midst of one of my hardest seasons, and regularly self-harming to try and cope with the pain I was feeling in my heart, a friend of my family encouraged me by sharing with me the image of a key. He said, “Joy, I feel like you are a beautiful skeleton key that is hidden in mud but you’re going to be pulled out, washed off and used to unlock restoration and reconciliation in the lives of your friends and family.”It was an image and a word of hope.Ten years later I walked into a tattoo parlor in LA with a key design tucked into my bag. Three hours after entering, I walked home with a new image on my left forearm. Instead of the white lines of my past unhappiness being the prominent feature on my arm, I now carried a beautiful key of restoration. Every shape and intricate line of the drawing speaks of value and worth, the beautiful exchange of beauty for ashes.Recently I read a verse from the book of Romans in the Bible and it has stuck with me all week. It sums up exactly how I feel every time I look at my tattoo.
‘Could it be any clearer that our former identity is now and forever deprived of its power?’
img_0263
