A gang of handsome men burst into laughter when I spectacularly dropped the ball during a volleyball game today.
I grinned and took a bow. Then I did a little dance that was at once self-mocking and genuinely joyful.
This is a miracle.
Some years ago, I was a shattered soul who cowered whenever people laughed around me, convinced I was once again the butt of their jokes. I usually was. For many of my early teenage years, verbal and psychological abuse was thrown at me every day in school. I learned the hard way to never trust anyone's smile and to assume the worst at the sound of laughter.
Can you go on to live a trusting, loving life as an adult after that?
I don't know how, but I know I am. In all the years after that, my life has been crowded with women who entrust me with their darkest secrets and men who love me deeply and aren't afraid to say so. I don't really know where they came from so I have to say they were sent by heaven.
When guys I barely know start laughing in the volleyball court, I don't get that horrible, terrifying coldness inside. I laugh with them, somehow incongruously (and probably somewhat mistakenly) assuming they all adore me - and even if they don't, that nothing they do or say can really hurt me.
During those awful, lonely years I prayed many times for God to save me. He didn't exactly smite my oppressors. At the time, anyway. And I was never much of a fighter myself.
But not so many years later, this soul of mine that I thought was destroyed has a diamond core. It is whole and safe and feeling loved.
It shouldn't be possible. I think God gave me a miracle.
No power of hell, no scheme of man
can ever pluck me from His hand
Till He returns or calls me home,
here in the power of Christ I stand
(excerpt from song "In Christ Alone" by Getty/Townend)
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