She sits in a dark room; a thousand voices surround her. Some tell her she’s not good enough, some ask questions that she doesn’t have the answers to, some mock her ignorance of finding a way out. The voices grow louder until it’s a thundering roar. Her heart rate increases and her breathing quickens. In this array of voices, she hears a kind whisper telling her to come home and telling her to ignore the lies around her. She spins around in the dark room in an attempt to pinpoint the source of the kind whisper. As if knowing she couldn’t find it on her own, the whisper shines a light in the darkness. She tries to run towards the light but the voices claw at her ankles while attempting to force chains around her and pull her towards darkness. As she falls, still reaching for the light, she feels hands gently prying her away from the  darkness. She’s led into the light and realizes the whisper, the gentle hands, and the light came from the same being. Her God. 

For her entire life she’s been attending church. She has grown up in a family largely centered around Christ. The problem was, she didn’t know Him. She had an understanding of who God was supposed to be, but didn’t have a relationship with him. Throughout elementary school and the start of junior high she began to form a relationship with Him. Even so, she was still uncertain; that is, until the loss of her papaw. 

Her papaw was in the hospital for six months before he passed. The night he passed her parents were at the hospital, but she and her three siblings were at home being watched by their other set of grandparents. They got the call telling them to go to her papaw’s house and so they went. When they got there, her parents came outside and all stood as if they were in a football huddle. Her parents lightly told them her papaw had passed; her younger sister, only nine years old at the time, let out a gut wrenching scream and immediately started sobbing. She stood there and felt as if her soul left her body. She heard nothing for that minute after. Not the sobbing, the gentle speech of her parents, nor even the cars going past on the road behind them. In a rush, every sound came back to her just in time to hear “stay strong”. They slowly walked into the house and hugged their extended family and friends. They were greeted with a small living room filled with two worn couches on either side and two felt recliners in the far corners of the room. Lingering in the air was a sense of despair, pain, and longing for a presence that was no longer there.  There were people on every piece of furniture and every spot on the floor. She walked in and, sitting in her grandpa’s recliner, was a different family member. That is when it became real to her. She was hit with a flashback of her cousins and her piling on that worn leather chair and her papaw walking into the room from getting a travel cup of coffee and pretending like he was mad. He never really got mad though; she never saw him mad. Ripping herself from the flashback, she sat on the beige carpeted floor next to her cousin and held her while telling her  “we’re gonna get through this”. 

Days turned into months and months turned into years after this loss. A girl who was once full of energy and full of expressions turned into a girl who lived her life in a book and was known to family and friends as emotionless. She was thought of as a robot and was teased for not laughing at their attempts at humor. What they didn’t realize was that she wasn’t emotionless, she was healing. She was crying out to God; praying for peace. 

She decides to go on a retreat; during which there was a small group time. She went into a room with her leader and close friends. Her friend’s hand gripped in hers and her leader’s arm wrapped around her as they called out to God. Everyone else was sitting on the various bunk beds with their hands reaching out towards her and towards Heaven; begging to a God that wasn’t physically visible but what could be seen in the hearts of those around the room. Pleading for release of the emotions built up inside her, she felt tears slowly fall down her face. Afterwards they walked into the dining hall and everyone stared at their puffy blood-shot eyes, but she realized that for once, she didn’t care what they thought. 

“The girl in the story is me.” I said with a note of finality “This is my story of how I found God and I let Him find me”. God spoke to me and told me to share my story at my church youth group. I hand off the microphone to my youth pastor and look out at the crowd; there are tears in over half the congregation’s eyes. I can tell they understand; we’ve all experienced the shadows. To this day, I feel the shadows try to close in around me and keep me from going to God. I never realized how important faith was until everything I went through. My faith and my God became where I placed my identity. When faith isn’t a priority, going through grief can prevent God from helping. God isn’t hard to find; I just needed to be willing enough to run from the shadows and hear the gentle whisper in the middle of a storm.