Jennifer’s Story

Whenever I try to control my life and the things in it, I inevitably fail and end up running from myself and life in general.  I lived the majority of my young adult life this way.  Growing up, I first tried to live to please my parents.  I tried to be good at sports and get good grades.  There was just one problem: I have always struggled with my weight and have dyslexia.  So it became practically impossible to live up to their expectations.  I don’t think they ever meant to play favorites with my older sister; it just kind of happened over time.  She was “Suzy High School,” and I could not live in her shadow.  So I then decided to buck the system and tried to find significance with my friends.

My social network in early high school was in the choir department.  It quickly became my life.  I would spend every waking hour trying to be the best in the vocal department.  My sophmore year, we got a new director and had to reaudition for all the choirs.  At the time, I was in 4 choirs; choir gave me worth and significance.  However, I had a really bad audition and got cut from all but one choir.  I clearly remember the day I stood looking at that posted list and hearing people—who claimed to be my friends—laughing and making jokes behind my back.  My life felt so empty.

I just needed to escape.  This was the beginning of many years of trying to run and find myself.  That afternoon, I drove my car out of the city and found an empty gravel road where no one could find or hear me.  I stood in the middle of a cornfield and literally yelled at God.

I grew up in a family that went to church, and I remember hearing things like, “God knows every hair on your head.”  “He knit you in your mother’s womb.”  I recall yelling up at the sky, and swearing at God!  “If you are real and this is how you created me…a failure…a dyslexic fat girl…I want nothing to do with you!”

From that day forward, I tried to put God out of my life and live independently.  When my friends failed me, I turned to alcohol; when that left me feeling empty, I turned to drugs.  I started living a life I couldn’t have even imagined.  It was during this time that I got accepted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to study painting and photography.  It had been a dream of mine for years to go to college there and study art.

So off I went for my freshman year.  For a while, I thought I had arrived!  I left my parents, their expectations of me, and their God back in Iowa.  I tried to reinvent myself and my life.

The only part of my former life that I kept was my boyfriend Kyle.  Even though he was across the country in Boston, I thought that we would stay together and one day get married.  We were classic freshmen.  In the beginning, we would talk multiple times a day on our way to class and every evening.  It dwindled to once a day, then a couple of days a week.  Naively, I still thought we would make it.  But it was getting on my nerves that he kept talking about this girl named Ashley.  I had not met Ashley, but I did not like her!  Kyle swore that they were just friends and nothing else.

When we went home for Christmas break, things were weird and distant.  But we were in love, and I still believed we would make it through this dry patch.  But things did not improve once we were back at school.  We grew more and more distant.  Finally, on Valentine’s Day, he called me and was acting more strangely than ever.  I demanded, “Just be honest with me, Kyle, are you dating Ashley?”  He actually started laughing and went on to explain that there was no one in his life named Ashley.  In fact, Ashley was just a code name: my boyfriend had been dating a man named Michael since September.

That night, I felt like finally my life was spinning out of control.  Every time I tried to control things, I failed.  I did what many freshman would do: I drank myself into an oblivion and got stoned out of my mind.

Over the next few months, I started thinking about God and where He fit into all of this mess.  That summer, when I went home, Laura, a friend of mine, invited me to a Bible study at her church.  I was so desperate for friendship that I said yes.  For the first time in my life, I really wanted to know truth.  I learned that summer a lot about the man the Bible calls Jesus.  I learned that there is a God that loves me and does want to be in a personal relationship with me.  But because of my passive indifference and willful disobedience—what the Bible calls sin—that relationship was broken.  Because He is a holy God, He cannot be in the presence of sin.  God saw that this problem of sin was keeping us from Him; since we could not fix this problem ourselves, Jesus came to earth, took my place, and paid the penalty for my sin.  He died on the cross for me.  I learned that I need to individually accept this gift that He offers me.

Somewhere in the course of that summer, I decided to put the flag in the ground and say, “Yes, this is truth.  And I want to live for Christ.”

Since making this decision, my life has not been perfect.  I still have hardships.  I am still part of an imperfect family, and I can never live up to their expectations.  The difference is that I now have hope in place of feeling the need to run from every hard, lonely, or painful thing in my life.

 

Check out http://www.everybadger.com to explore questions about life and God.