The Sand In The Oyster

Most of the time when I write a blog post I end up finding out more about myself, life, how my heart works, how life works, etc., so I desperately hope that is the case again tonight. Maybe this will just end up in my giant scrape pile of blog posts that had one good paragraph and no resolution that never make it. I never know unless I try, so here goes. 

I learned about oysters this last week. Oysters with pearls inside of them, to be specific. When you do science with a six-year-old girl, the pearl part is important. And maybe for twenty-something-year-olds, too, because I found myself thinking about the pearl making process a lot for the rest of the week. 

See, pearls come from pain. A grain of sand gets inside the oyster and in an attempt to make the pain go away, they end up making a pearl. I’m not a huge science fan so I’m not going to outline the process. If you’re really curious, google it; for me, the important part is that the pearl is made. Something that caused discomfort, something that hurt the inside of the clam, is turned into something that is breathtakingly beautiful. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had pain in my life. I’ve had little grains of sand sneak into my heart and it hurts. Sometimes it feels like an entire bucketful of beach has been launched at me and everything hurts and I can’t breathe and my one thought is, “God, there’s no way You can make this into something beautiful.” 

Because, guys, growing up with an autoimmune disease that breaks down your body before you’re even a teenager sucks. Moving to the other side of the world when you’re 15 is terrifying, and always feeling like you’re too far away from the people you love the most is a type of feeling I know so well. Wanting to be married and have your own babies is a real desire, but one you can’t just carry out on your own. It hurts being so aware of the flaws and weaknesses of your heart and trying to forgive yourself for, once again, doing the things that you promised you never would, never again. 

Sand.

Sand.

Sand.

It’s all over in my heart and I don’t like it. “Where’s the beauty?!” I ask. “Where’s the good thing that comes from this hard situation that You promised?” And maybe if I stopped crying for a minute I would hear Him whisper so quietly into my ear, “My love, it’s right there.” 

Right. There. 

Because, guys, I’m not who I used to be. I’m so far from perfect, but if only you knew the way my heart used to fly around, grasping at every little thing, hiding from the light and running wild in fear, you would know that the tangled mess of weeds is a little less prickly. A little. 

Maybe I forget about the word “process” and its meaning. Processes aren’t instantaneous. You can’t start a process and see immediate results, it’s the steady day in and day out of saying yes, of reminding myself that if God was faithful before, He’ll be faithful again and I’m so safe with Him. I look beside me and sure enough, He’s still there. 

“Aren’t you tired of this yet?” I ask, tears streaming down my face as I realize the thing that I thought was dead is still very much alive and roaring with a ferocious appetite inside of me. “This ugly beast has gotten the better of me again.” 

“But look at this!” He points to the very center of my heart and I can’t even see what He sees. I can’t see it, because I’m sure that the ugly, the broken, the dirty, the sand, is all there is to see. “I see the beauty.” 

He sees my beauty. When? Where? I mean, sure I see the tiny baby steps but what about the great expanses inside of me yet to be dealt with? It’s like entire black holes of failures and misguided intentions and flashes of passion that end in regret that are just waiting to spill out of me. 

“You remember this grain of sand?” He reminds me, gently. So, so gently. 

And I do, because it was one of the most painful ones, where I was snatched from my home and planted in a place I was determined to hate, and then I watched as my friends turned their backs on me, one by one, breaking every tiny shred in my heart that I had left. I’ll never forget the way it hurt to wake up and open my eyes, to walk down the street, to eat food and engage in conversations. 

But it’s not a piece of sand anymore. It’s one of my biggest pearls. I look back and in between the dark days of hating life and screaming into my pillow, I see the brilliant love of God carrying me through everything. I can’t deny it, the way He fixed my broken pieces. I learned how to dance again. I could smile and laugh and just breathe. He did that. He’s still doing that. 

Tireless.

Faithful.

Committed. 

Why does He come so close to me? I think about that sometimes. Why is He so happy to be with me? I mean, sometimes I’m alright. And by alright, I mean that I’ve done all that I was supposed to and now I feel like I’m good enough, but not really, because… really? Am I still trying to pull that card? Still reverting to my old ways of striving for perfection before I ask God to notice me? *sigh* Like I said, the deeply rooted weed patch is still very present in my life. 

It’s hard for me to look at the smile on His face as he asks to see more of my heart. “It’s ugly in there!” I argue, as if I’m not talking to The One who created every star in every galaxy and can easily see my poorly hidden secrets. Yet He asks anyways, and like an idiot, I think that maybe I’m just too far gone for Him. Maybe this part of me is unredeemable. The cracks go from my head to my toes and surely that’s too much? 

“Never, my love.”

And He’s smiling again. Why? WHY?!? I’m not… 

“Shhhh…”

And the light of His face is the most powerful thing in all of creation and He shines it on the brokenness that is my heart and nothing can stand against Him. Every chain that held me back, every lie that sucked the life out of me, every bent desire and faulty view of God can be— will be — fixed. Every day it’s fixed a little more, as much as I say yes to. Every day He asks to work on me. Not because He’s impatient to rid me of my flaws, but because He sees the beauty of what is yet to come. I can’t see what He sees because it’s not all there yet. 

But it will be. 

One day. 

Because, guys, when God says He’s going to complete what He started in you, He means it. Not in a rough, “let’s get this over with” way, like a parent trying to bathe an unruly child, but like a steady companion in this journey of life.  “I’m with you,” He says. “Always. Everywhere you go, I’m with you, and I will never leave you to face those broken parts of your heart alone. I know they seem overwhelming, but they don’t overwhelm me. Yeah, you have cracks from the top of your head to the bottoms of your feet and there are black holes of darkness waiting to spill out of you, but I already know them, and I’m here to turn them into beauty. I can fill you with lightening slices of wonder and galaxies of grace and warm embraces of mercy. Let me fill you with beauty. Let me turn these grains of sand into pearls.” 

It’s the invitation that I’m sometimes the most reluctant to accept, but why? Isn’t He like the father in the prodigal son who ran to embrace his wayward child and rejoice over him even as he smelled like pigs and famine and who knows how many days on the road? Does famine have a smell? All I know is that if God can see every single particle of my being, see my end from the beginning, see the depths of my weaknesses and still have an overwhelming ocean of love for me, then saying yes to His invitation is the only thing to do. 

But refiners fire?

Yes.

But north winds on my garden?

Yes.

But the world hating me?

Yes. Because, do you see this pearl? This is the pearl that came from learning that God is faithful despite a very bitter situation that made me want to spit everything out of my mouth and drink the comforts of the world. I poured myself out before Him, gave up everything and opened myself up until I was completely bare before Him. I learned that only He satisfies. Only He can take the mess that is me and turn me into something beautiful, something filled with light. He is a faithful God and who I am doesn’t scare Him. My hurts are not too much for Him to turn into something beautiful. 

Well, here I am; at the end of my post. Maybe someone else needed to also be reminded they they are not too much. Your sin is not too much. Your hurts and grains of sand are not too much. What you’re feeling is not too much. He doesn’t look at you (at me) with weariness and a sigh, because He doesn’t see me with the same eyes that I see myself. When I look at myself I sigh. When I look at myself I shake my head. I see weeds and stubborn thorns, but God sees the tiny buds that are popping up, putting down roots and soaking up the water in the soil of my life. He sees what I cannot, and He smiles at me. Perhaps we should smile, too, because this is a process, and it’s long, but it’s not hopeless and it’s not unto nothing. Right now I feel sand, but one day I’ll see pearls because God is faithful. Every time. 

My Broken Body: A Love Story

My body is broken and has been since I was a baby. I wasn’t born that way, but I don’t remember the two months of my life before the sickness set in. I don’t remember being a few months old and never learning how to crawl properly because my wrists hurt. I don’t remember being one year old and screaming when my mom got me out of my carseat because my body was stiff and to move it caused me pain. I don’t remember it, but I know what it felt like, because I still experience it to this day. 

I was barely three years old and dressed in a pretty pink dress with flowers on it when I went to a hospital that had a giant fish aquarium in the waiting room. There was a doctor there who told my parents what was wrong with me. They finally knew why I limped when I walked. They finally knew why my knee looked funny; I had a disease.

The chronic illness that took over my body is named Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, aka JRA. The Juvenile part was there to remind me throughout my childhood that I had the kid version. As an adult I don’t know if the J still applies to my sickness or not, so sometimes I leave it off. Kid version or not, JRA broke my body. 

I’ve met people since getting older who have had arthritis set in as adults and they look at me and say, “And you’ve experienced this your whole life. I’m so sorry!” And sometimes they cry, and I think to myself, “Yeah, but I don’t know anything else.” 

What is it like to walk without pain? 

What does it feel like to be able to grab onto things and twist off lids and pump gas without wondering if you’ll be able to do it yourself or if you’ll have to ask for help? Again. 

What about waking up and literally being able to jump up and use every part of your body? 

What does that feel like? 

I’ve never lived like that, so I don’t feel that loss the same way as an adult who has that torn away from them halfway into their lives. I feel sorrier for them in a way. Not that I don’t feel the loss in my own way, because believe me, I do, but it doesn’t feel the same. 

I honestly don’t remember ever being told I had JRA, I feel like I was just told so many times until I was old enough to understand it. I didn’t have a moment where my parents sat me down and said, “Baylea, this is why you’re different.” I also don’t remember when the bone changes started. They must have started when I was young because I remember one summer I could sort of do cartwheels with my grandma, and the next summer I couldn’t even try because my wrists had grown so much worse. 

Things didn’t get really bad until I was twelve. That’s when I started going to the doctor’s again. My neck became affected and my hands hurts when I did certain things with them, like washing the dishes, cutting vegetables and using scissors. All I did that winter was lay on the couch and read, which sounds like a lovely thing, right? I still remember the feeling of new pain, pain in places that hadn’t hurt before. Pain that was worse than it use to be. I was watching my peers grow up and embrace their journey into adulthood and I was on the sideline wishing I could be like them. 

My body is broken. My knees swell up until I can’t walk. My wrists ache, and my hips get so stiff I walk like a pregnant lady with a nine-month bump. I can’t grip things because my hands are weak. When I eat something that stresses out my body the first thing to start aching is my right shoulder, and my feet have walked so many painful miles, sometimes to the point where I don’t think I can go one more step. But I always do, because that’s what I have to do. I wake up in the morning, feel pain, get out of bed and feel more pain, slowly warm up my joints and hope that as the day goes on, some of the pain will dissipate. A lot of the time it does so that I don’t even remember I’m in pain. And some days, like this past week, I feel so much pain that I can’t do anything except cope.

My room is a mess at the moment. I hate it. I have a basket of laundry and a half-empty suitcase from my trip to Turkey. I have checks I need to mail in and a pile of clothes to put away, but I couldn’t even handle getting dressed. And I hate it, because I don’t want a broken body. I don’t want knees and hips that don’t work right and hands that hurt too easily and dealing with an overworked body that wakes me up in the middle of the night with an ache that goes all the way to my bones. 

But this is what I have. I have a broken body. I’ve lived a life of limitations and that’s just what I’ve had to go through, and I am thankful. Guys, I am so thankful. Because I’m the first one to say that I’m not strong enough to do things on my own. The story of my life is to lean into the strength of others. My family. My friends. Jesus. I can’t live on my own because I’m not capable of doing the things I would need to by myself. I’ve had to push through really hard things, but do you know how amazing you feel on the other side of really hard things? Having a broken body doesn’t mean I can just move houses or schools or find new friends to escape my problems. This body is with me until the day I die. There is no cure for JRA. There is no way to regain what I’ve lost aside from a miracle (which I do hope and pray for). 

I have learned the sweetness of persevering until breakthrough. 

I have found comfort in the fact that Jesus was a man, who knows the weakness of human flesh. 

He knew pain. 

He knew loneliness. 

I know Him in ways that people with healthy, whole bodies will never, ever know Him and I honestly wouldn’t trade that for the world. He has been my friend when no one else had time for a girl with a broken body. His body broke for me so that one day my body won’t be broken, and I think that is the most beautiful thing in the world. I long for eternity in a way people don’t understand, because their bodies aren’t broken. 

In two years I will have had this disease for three decades. That’s a long time to have a broken body, but it’s also a long time to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that in my weakness, God is my strength and my friend.