The Fence (excerpt)

I can’t remember the first time I learned about Jesus Christ. I try to peek into the farthest corners of my mind to find a place and time that He was not there and I can’t find a single instant when I didn’t know Him.
Children possess almost a Santa Clausian vision of Jesus Christ: a man who is kind, who loves children, who gave them the gift of life, the gift of heaven. Christ felt very real to me when I was young but in hindsight I hardly understood a thing about Him. Some might argue that I understood the most important thing about Him: He loved me.
It wasn’t till a little later in life, perhaps around adolescence that I began to wonder if God and Jesus Christ don’t give out their love as liberally as I had once thought. I was very aware of sin. In fact I was consumed by it. I spent years of my life believing that there was a right way to do everything: to pour your cereal, make your bed, do your homework, talk to people, etc. and as a result I started every day sitting over a bowl of cereal feeling quite sure that I was going to hell.
How, I don’t know, but somewhere between 8 and 12 I started to view God as the God of the Old Testament, the one who is always beating the crap out of Israel for doing stupid things, for never listening, for flagrantly disobeying day after day. In my mind I was Israel, and I was bad, very bad.
Many things came as a result of this closely held, albeit false belief. First off, I spent every waking moment feeling guilty. Not only was I guilty for things I’d done, including things that don’t fall under even the widest umbrella of sin, but I even felt guilty for things I hadn’t done. For things other people had done. I don’t know how that works. I have no logical explanation, but I just felt like everything was my fault and somehow I had to pay.
Secondly, I felt that because I was responsible for everything wrong in the world that I myself didn’t really deserve to be happy. In fact, I had no concept of what happiness really was at that point in my life. When I was 14 I believe I thought happiness had something to do with chocolate ice cream and someday going to Oxford University and being fallen in love with by some bloke wearing tweed.
Thirdly, I believed that life was really just a long, sadistic, laborious, and ultimately unattainable checklist of minutia.
Fourthly, if a single item on the minutia list was not checked, it was straight to hell.
Lastly, though I could go on and on, I had no concept of or real belief in the Atonement. In my twisted little brain it was just another thing to feel guilty about, to flay myself over. I had no idea why Jesus Christ had ever done anything He did.
It’s another story, another book even, but I suffered from depression for many years. As anyone who’s experienced it knows, depression is a strange and incalculable mix of things. Yes mental illness runs like white water rapids in my family. Yes I had completely false and damaging beliefs about the gospel. Yes I had a bad body image. Yes I had horrible menstrual cycles and hormonal swings. Yes I was lonely and always struggled when it came to the opposite sex. Yes I was a perfectionist and had completely unreasonable expectations for myself and others. And yes there is such a thing as Crazy. I’d write a travel guide but I don’t want anyone booking a trip there.
For the purposes of this story, the only point I’d really like to make about my whole experience with depression is that I was in a dark, dark place for a long time. Winston Churchill called it “The Black Dog”. When I was young, living in Bangkok, Thailand with my family I had nightmares about falling into one of the holes in the sidewalk under a rickety grating, straight into the sewer. For me, depression was like a pitch black abyss that I kept falling into again and again. Sometimes I’d be in the hole for days, sometimes months. But even when I was atop, the fear of it remained.
Early on when I was sitting at the bottom of the hole with no way of getting out I wondered many things. Though most of my thoughts were as dark as the void around me there was a single flicker of light, not strong enough to illuminate my escape, but bright enough to remind me that somewhere it was day. That light was Jesus Christ. Never in all the darkness I endured, in all the agony and hopelessness, never since I was a small girl who believed that Christ loved me, never did I ever doubt His existence, His reality or His promises. I knew Jesus Christ was real, I knew it and even in the pitchest of pitch blacks, I could not deny it.
He was the reason I never followed through on any of my nightmarish plans to end my own life. I knew this life was not the end and that I’d probably be just as sad on the other side. I knew that Christ didn’t want me to and that was just enough to stay me.
One time when I was sitting in darkness a series of questions popped into my head: What if I could be happy one day? What if I could be mentally stable? What if I could fall in love and have a healthy relationship? What if I could learn how to be a good Mom? What if my life was completely different than it is right now?
I thought for a good long while about it and decided that if there was even the remotest chance that any of those things could happen that I would give up anything in the world for it, that I would suffer any pain, perform any task and wait any length of time for just the possibility of being happy. I said to myself, I would endure ten more years of this if I thought I could be happy and stable and married. I would endure even longer if I thought that it could happen ever in this life or the next.
Little did I know that at that very moment I experienced my first real understanding of the atonement of Jesus Christ. I decided to hope that something good was possible even though I had no proof that it would ever happen. I decided that life was worth it for even the possibility that something better lay ahead.
Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world. Yea, even at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God.
Hope for a better world. That was the gift, the gift Christ gave. Until that moment I’d never really believed that something better was possible and without first believing that the gift existed there had been no way for me to receive it. The first inkling of an atonement had begun to swell inside me and fill my inner void. I’d never known. I’d never known.
I’m not sure how, but somehow over the course of many rocky and sometimes excruciating years, I began to learn the truth about the atonement of Jesus Christ. Of course, I’d always known the correct Sunday School answers, but I’d never really understood and never fully believed. Somehow, almost magically, Christ turned back into the man who loved me as a child. He’d always loved me, I’d just forgotten.