Stained Glass

            They say if you look closely enough at the stained glass in a cathedral wall, you can see God. If your fingers search the expanse of a colorful mosaic, you can feel Him, and that threaded deep within the crevices, peace for all your questioning, but all I got out of religion in the years growing up was cut fingers. Question after question, and in reaching out to touch the glass, it felt like God wasn’t there—it felt like no matter how much I knocked on the big, golden doors, no one would ever answer.

            At the age of eleven, the house I lived in was one-part joy and love, two-parts chaos and confusion. My father was an alcoholic, searching for faith and searching for something to hold onto, all in the bottomless clinking of a beer bottle. As a preteen, I became more and more aware than I had been at five: I couldn’t fix his problem if I tried, but imagining a day where I’d wake up and he’d be gone hurt so much more, so I still tried. If waking him up to get off the couch, and getting him to go to his bed were one of the beatitudes, then I was an apostle by the age of nine.

            “Breathe,” I’d tell myself, running to sit in the corner of my bedroom. The walls were covered with a pink and flowery wallpaper, my protest to hate the color pink a strong-willed truth I held onto until my late high school years because I wasn’t the one who chose the wallpaper. I wanted my walls to be blue, or “electric lime green,” my favorite color at the time. Considering I now love the gentle, kind grace I find in a color such as blush pink, it reminds me of how I hated it then—and so I have come to realize that redemption comes in every color, even that of a blush pink as I shop the aisles of a home décor shop at twenty-two. And as I walk the aisles of a store, or wrap around the corner of a park, there it is that I find God, reminding me of a time when I sat in a pink bedroom, wishing He would just take a moment to sit beside me and reassure me that He felt my pain too.

            I knew He was real though. Abandoned, and resentful, but nonetheless aware, I felt God in the moments when my mom would stroke my hair as I rested my head on her lap and she would sing this song that said: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, Jesus loves them all, Jesus loves the children of the world.”

            I had no other responsibility, but to be a child in those moments. Resting in her lap, and caught in what I wanted to be God’s embrace—I was loved, above all the pangs, and above all abandon I felt. And so maybe God was real to my mom too—maybe we both had seen the distant glimmer of a thing called hope, but needed it to come closer, consuming us until it filled the messy parts we tried so hard to brush over with neglect. Maybe just maybe, if He saw what I truly needed, He would come down, sit with me, stroke my hair, and tell me He loved me too, but as far as hope could reach, things remained the same.

            Struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts, I strove for perfection, and I sought every corner of my fragile mind for a sense of purpose, all to find a weary and tired me. God was nowhere to be found, except in the stories I’d been told, and at the peak of my depression, I needed something much more real than just words to hold onto. I spent my life getting lost in the pages of books, but I craved more. I’d been prayed for before, I believed in God, and I’d gone to church, but I needed God to be personal with me, and I needed Him to come and break down my every wall, because by the time I was ten, I considered myself an architect in the realm of building things up that needed to be torn down.

            One month after turning eleven, I was with my mom’s best friend in Savannah, and she stopped by the house of her new pastors. One of them asked if they could pray for me, and I obliged. At this point in my life, no one knew I struggled with depression or suicidal thoughts, because, in my striving to be the perfect daughter and student, faking a smile was one of my many strong suits. But that night, one of the pastors took me by the hand, looked me in the eye, and told me God loved me. She told me He heard me, and He saw me every time I was in my bedroom wanting to end it all, somehow telling me the prayers I had cried out, word for word, without even knowing who I was, or where I came from.

            Sometimes, you don’t find God in cathedral walls, but at the end of a plastic bottle—a sacred place where you once wanted to end it all. Sometimes, you don’t find God behind big, golden doors, but you find Him in the eyes of the broken, the orphaned, the drunkard, the addict, the forgotten, and the imperfect, because after all, it was there that I found God—deeply imbedded in my imperfection, and never in my striving for it. I am now confident in nothing less, and nothing more than the fact that I am the stained glass, and while I was searching for God in the crevices of my questioning, He was searching for me, deep in the ugliness of my doubt. For a Father, highly esteemed, and all the more holy, He can take my honesty, and never for a moment, did my emotions or doubts scare Him away. Picking up all my shattered pieces, jaded and fragile, He made a beautiful mosaic out of the mess I thought was useless—a grandeur poetry forming out of the phrases I was too tired to even say on some nights.  

            I wish I could say that my life did an automatic 180 by the next day, but it didn’t. The dusted corners, and the faulty structures, and the rigid wounds, however—they all led into a new kind of light, and in that light, I found that there’s a God who prefers my mess, much more than the picture-perfect canvas I ever tried to hand to Him. And so it is that I’ll spend my life remembering: God was in that little pink bedroom after all, and He too, cried and kneeled down next to me, His heart for mine a pursuit I now see, far beyond the things I ever felt.