Sunday Stories

Sunday Stories: Unexpected Hardships

If you’re getting the idea by now that much of what I’ve learned has been through suffering, adversity, and seeing how wrong things go around me when people make bad decisions, you’d have the right idea. Today’s lesson I’m sharing about is no different.

Where it all began

I was beginning my junior year of high school and starting out on my journey as a dual credit student in the year 2014. For those who don’t know, dual credit is when a high school student takes college level classes for credit both in high school and towards college later on. I was majoring in business and was there to not only finish out my high school education but also to earn my associate’s degree. But the journey to that goal was anything but easy.

Class work wasn’t as hard as I expected, but I had more responsibility because I’d started working a job that required a lot of long, difficult hours. I wasn’t full-time, but with full-time school and a job that could give me upwards of 30 hours a week, I didn’t exactly have much free time or room to rest. This was fine by me as I frequently did more in a day than most people would consider normal. Granted, I spent most of that time in less physical labor than I was doing at work, but that was fine. I knew how to work hard and had grown up doing a lot of different manual labor tasks around the house.

At this time in my life, I was very withdrawn, however. I had serious social anxiety, and I still remember that my dad’s advice to me my first day of school was: “Don’t hide in a corner. Make friends and avoid doing what you usually do because it makes you look like a snob who doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”

Maybe not the nicest way of saying it, but honestly, it’s what people usually thought. They assumed my reservations about interacting with people was just me being stuck up. Whether it was or not really didn’t matter.

My point in saying all of this is to lay the stage for you. At sixteen, I was doing far more than most high school students would be doing. I thought I could handle it no matter how stressful it was. I was wrong.

My entire first year of college, I had one cold or virus after another. I still had to go to work, though, because how else would I pay the tuition fees? So, I ended up hyped up on cold and flu medications constantly. Had I known how badly all of the stress would start to damage my body, I might have taken it easy, but I’ve never been particularly good about knowing my limits. I’m stubborn, and in my mind, the sky is the limit. If no one steps in and pulls me back down to ground me in reality, my ambitions, passions, and to-do lists can quickly start to drown me and I don’t even really understand why it’s a problem. Unfortunately, by the time someone did this for me in high school, it was too late.

I already had fairly extreme depression and serious anxiety due to still having unresolved issues with my mom and the aftershocks of her surgery, but with all the added stress on top of it, I began to break down mentally, emotionally, and physically. I passed classes with flying colors and was one of the harder workers at work, but inside? Everything was crumbling to pieces, spiraling out of control, and heading toward a crash. But I kept going.

Maybe a semester into my first year of dual credit enrollment, I started experiencing terrible abdominal pain. Usually, it was just a sharp or dull pain in one side or another, and I’d ignore it because what else was I to do? I had work and school, and in my mind, I had no time to lie in bed. I did enough of that on the days when my depression was so bad that I did almost nothing productive unless it wasn’t optional. In my mind, the abdominal pain was probably just my body’s response to all the meds.

So, I stopped taking them for a while and suffered with the symptoms of the cold or whatever viral infections I’d caught during that year. I’d work anyway as long as I could still talk to the customers ordering food from me, and I tried to soldier on.

The pains got worse, and I started to have bad attacks where I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming and crying because the pain was so crippling. The first time it happened, my parents thought my appendix might be rupturing because of the severity and the location of the pain. It wasn’t, but so far as the doctors could tell, nothing was wrong with me. I went through xrays in those first two years when we went in, but they found nothing.

So, I went on with life. I sucked it up and learned to deal with the pain. There were days I was hurting so much I couldn’t go to school or work, and there were days where I would work anyway and people would worry because I looked so sick. But I pushed on, trying to ignore the questions that rose in my head. Questions like: why is God letting this happen? Am I being punished for something I did? What did I do to deserve this? Is this ever going to end, or am I stuck with it for the rest of my life?

I’m Sick? Like, Chronically Ill Sick?

The doctor we were seeing at the time diagnosed me with IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s a chronic condition that results in a lot of bloating, cramping, gas, and general abdominal discomfort. Most people end up having issues with having normal bowel movements too. I’ll leave it at that and spare you any graphic explanations. Needless to say, it isn’t life threatening, but they don’t know what causes it and have no cure. I was devastated. She gave me a laxative to help with my constipation and recommended I avoid foods that upset my stomach. She didn’t do any other tests to rule anything else out, and nothing she gave me actually worked.

That was toward the beginning of the ordeal. I refused to go see her after the second time of being given the same solutions that didn’t work. So, I suffered for the next two years while I finished my degree. The summer before I went off to Florida to start my bachelor’s degree, we switched doctors. My parents were worried, scared a bit, and couldn’t stand seeing me in such constant pain with no answers. So, they found a doctor who would do tests.

That whole summer, I went through test after test with every one of them coming back with no answers as to what was wrong with me. I got more and more angry, depressed, and confused with every negative test result they did. Did I want to have some debilitating illness? No. But I wanted answers, and to me, it seemed God was refusing them. How could He let this happen and then give me so little consolation? I couldn’t understand it.

During that summer, I spent whatever time I wasn’t working sleeping and trying to ignore the pain. I didn’t do much of anything, and I spent very little time with people. I was too short-tempered to handle anything, really, and my family wasn’t patient with it for the most part. My mom and dad were supportive, but my siblings either didn’t understand or didn’t care that the constant pain made me crankier than usual. I tried to put on a brave face and act like it was all okay, but I couldn’t.

Answers at last

Finally, after all the testing, the diagnosis was handed down. I did have IBS after all, and it wasn’t going to just disappear. I wasn’t going to die, but I was going to have to live with an illness that would cause my abdominal/intestinal muscles to spasm for no reason, resulting in sometimes crippling pain. I lost it.

When I heard that I really did have IBS and that there was no medication that could do anything to solve it, I shut down. I couldn’t process everything I was feeling, and I didn’t understand how God could allow it. I wanted to trust He had a good reason, but at that point in my life, my trust in Him was seriously failing. After everything with my mom, I was hurting, angry, and feeling betrayed even nearly seven years after it happened. I never would’ve admitted it, but I didn’t trust God at all. I didn’t know what He was doing, but it sure looked like He was trying to wreck my life, as awful as that sounded. I held on and stubbornly refused to admit that, instead choosing to make my head believe that He had a good reason even if it was painful then. My heart, however, knew that it wasn’t real faith, and it didn’t get on bored.

Walking through the storm with God

I’m so glad God didn’t leave me there. He could’ve, but He didn’t. The years that followed at Pensacola Christian College were hard. I had no choice but to attend class even when sick because of the attendance policies. Even though I needed more sick days to give my body the breaks it needed at times, I couldn’t take them unless I wanted to lose an entire letter grade or, if I had two weeks of absences in a class in a semester, fail the class entirely. It didn’t matter how well I did at teaching myself the subject or succeeding even if I missed class, I would fail if I let my health keep me from physically being there. Many classes and church services (or other required events), I barely knew what was going on because my mind was so clouded with pain and trying not to be a distraction to those around me that I didn’t really hear anything going on around me.

But despite all the dietary restrictions, hardships caused by the strict rules they set (which for any other student without a chronic illness would really not have been that bad, to be honest), and my own broken, battered heart, God did work. He taught me that even though life is pain, it can still be joyous anyway. He taught me that others could benefit from my suffering if I was willing to take a step of faith in Him and keep a positive attitude with a willingness to share. It was hard to do that. I’m not an optimist by nature. If anything, I’m a realist who borders on pessimism in some cases. But if I hadn’t chosen to desperately cling to the Scriptures that say He plans everything and works it all out to the good of those who love Him, I would’ve lost my mind, I think. The stress I endured and the guilt I felt on days where I couldn’t attend events and knew I’d get a mark on my record for it or would have to attend the recording later was nearly unbearable, and if I hadn’t chosen to believe, regardless of my emotional state, that God had a good purpose, I wouldn’t have made it.

Gradually, God brought people alongside who, though they could do nothing to solve my physical ailments, were a support system I desperately needed. He brought me healing emotionally and mentally in many, many ways through those people so that, even though He didn’t take away my physical thorn in the flesh, He did show His mercy, power, and love in my life. He grew my faith through the trial, and because of what I go through on a daily basis, He is able to reach people through me that He could never reach otherwise.

In the same way that He used what happened to my mother, and to me as a result, to help those suffering around me, He also used my illness to bring hope, encouragement, and joy to others in similar situations or to those who had family suffering the same way. My illness, as hard as it is to bear some days, is a living testimony to His goodness. I know. That sounds really weird. How can He be good if He lets me suffer?

I struggled with that question constantly at the beginning.

Until I realized, it isn’t about me. It’s about His glory and His honor. In His sovereign wisdom, He knew many things I didn’t about the results of this illness, and He knows there are many more things I will likely learn as the result of being sick. Could He miraculously heal me? Sure. Has He chosen to? In spite of my pleas at the beginning for that, no. And I’ve benefited more from seeing Him work in spite of my weakness than I ever would’ve if He’d healed me nearly six years ago so that I could go on to pursue everything I wanted to with no hindrances. My character has been forged in fire because of this illness. I’ve learned lessons I never would’ve without it. I’ve watched God humble me because of it, and I needed that. I needed to recognize my place and my purpose, and I couldn’t do that without this illness. My own pride would have prevented it.

So, God in His infinite wisdom gave me IBS. Do I still hope that someday it’ll go away? Yes. I worry sometimes about the future because I know an illness like mine will make being a mother and a good wife very difficult, and I hate that. I want a family, and I want to give them all of me and my attention. I can’t do that on days when my illness takes over and lays me out on the bed wishing I could just die in a hole somewhere because I’m in so much pain. My mind and my body aren’t capable of giving people around me my attention or my love in those instances, and I hate that. But I also know this. Someday, if God chooses to bless me with a husband and kids, He’s going to get me through it. He’s never, ever going to make me face a trial that He is not going to walk me through. Sure, He might give me a trial I can’t handle. But never one that He can’t handle or doesn’t intend to handle as long as I choose to give Him control and walk step-by-step with Him. It might be a rocky road sometimes, but what’s on the other side will be worth it in the end.

Sunday Stories: How Big is Your God?

Featured Ariel Paiement

This one is going to be a little bit longer this week, everyone. Please just bear with me. I promise there’s a point, but to get there, I have to share some background.

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If someone had told me back when I was ten years old that my mom would have a brain aneurysm and that I would never be the same, I probably would’ve stared at them blankly. I wouldn’t have known what an aneurysm was, and I would probably have laughed at the idea that I would go from a care-free, outgoing ten-year-old to an introverted, hurting, and depressed eleven-year-old in the span of just nine months. But that’s exactly what happened.

I was a week shy of my eleventh birthday when it all started. I can’t remember very much from before I was ten. Not sure why since those memories were most certainly far happier than the ones that came in the years to follow. But for whatever reason, my mind lost those childhood memories and lost more of them than most people would at my age. However, I remember the day my mom got sick vividly. I still remember the leather chairs in the lounge and the water fountains off to the side. I remember the gleaming but scratched gym floor we were roller blading on, and I remember what was said to me. I remember lots of things about that one day when everything turned upside down and I was set on the track I’m on today. It was one of those life changing moments, which I would later learn happen when you most need them but least expect them. Although I didn’t see it then or for many, many years later, God was working on me and working out His plans through me. But that perspective comes much, much later down the road.

When my mother had her aneurysm and ended up in the hospital on both her birthday and mine (Which was the week after hers), life went from unclouded to stormy all in one go. I don’t remember feeling much of anything when my father sat us down at the dining room table and explained that our mother needed surgery and that the doctors didn’t know if she’d make it or not. I remember what I was thinking though when he told us we had to grow up and be tiny adults now if everything was going to go smoothly. I was thinking that it was what it was and that I had no more time for being a child. As the oldest out of six, I viewed it as my responsibility to take care of everyone while Mom was out of commission. I even viewed it as my responsibility to take of my mother once she came home on bed rest until the neurosurgeon could operate in November, nearly five months after she had her first brain bleed.

It was a scary time of stepping into shoes I didn’t know how to fill, feeling abandoned and lost, and pushing aside those feelings every day until they became distant noise in the background that I didn’t notice. The fear was there though. At eleven, I understood more than at least the two or three youngest who ranged from six or seven down to two. I knew there was a chance my mom would die. I knew she shouldn’t have survived the first bleed and that, if she had another one, she would die even if the operation would’ve been successful. With one bleed already on her record, the likelihood of another was pretty high. To say I was terrified would be an understatement. But I didn’t have time to stop and think about it during the day because I was busy taking care of things, worrying about my education, and helping with my siblings. At night, at least up until her surgery got closer and we started figuring out where all of us would go while my dad stayed at the hospital with my mom an hour from home, I don’t really remember thinking about it much. I went to bed and went to sleep.

From end of April when she had her bleed to October or November of the same year when she finally had her surgery, I was, to all intents and purposes, a machine. I felt very little or allowed little of what I felt to touch me, and I moved on autopilot. I did what was logical, what needed to be done, and I cared for everyone else around me as best I could. But I didn’t take care of myself and no one knew I needed more than just the basic attention to my education and physical needs because I myself didn’t recognize a need. While I was needed, everything seemed fine. I’m the kind of person who, generally, in a crisis doesn’t shut down but instead thinks in a very logical fashion. I figure out what needs to be done and then do it with little thought to how scared I am or what’s going on emotionally. That’s all left behind until later. And later is when it really hits. Later was when it finally hit here too.

I was twelve by the time my mother was back on her feet. I’d just live through some of the most harrowing months of my life, and I didn’t even register that. I just knew my mom was back on her feet. I suppose I expected everything to go back to normal, and those expectations were cruelly dashed on the rocks of reality. Nothing went back to the normal I’d known, least of all me.

My mother struggled constantly with the fact that the surgery had left her partially blind in her peripheral vision on one side, with the slow return to her ability to speak, remember things, and do things, and with the inability to drive at first. She struggled with the recovery process and her natural inclination to think she was stupid was only compounded by her newfound lack of ability to do even some of the most basic things, like remembering her own children’s names. I often caught her crying when she thought we weren’t looking or couldn’t see her, and I always seemed to show up at all the awkward times when she stole off to take a moment to break down.

And I was breaking down too. She just didn’t know. Maybe if we’d both admitted it, we could’ve helped the other. We understood how the other felt more than we knew at the time. Instead, as my siblings returned to the normal they’d known before and went back to the happy, care-free kids they’d been, I became more and more depressed and retaliatory. I lashed out at them because they got mad when I wasn’t the same, and I lashed out at my mother because she wanted me to go back to someone I didn’t even know anymore.

The twelve-year-old girl she saw should’ve been the same ten-year-old girl she’d left behind in her mind. But she’d missed an entire year of my life, and I couldn’t forgive her for it. I knew logically that she didn’t choose to leave me alone without the one person I always talked to when I was struggling with emotions. But now that the crisis was over, every negative emotion I’d been feeling and shoved aside all that time came to the forefront in one enormous wave, knocking me down and drowning me in the pain. I couldn’t cope, and so I fought with everyone. I built walls. I shielded myself from any more pain, or I thought I did. Instead, I just refused to be vulnerable, and so, as a result, no one could help me.

The years following her surgery and recovery were some of the worst in my life. I spiraled out of control. Living in a Christian home and being a believer myself, I could never justify certain methods of dealing with the problem such as suicide. I was firmly convinced my life was God’s, and as such, no matter how miserable He allowed it to get, I wasn’t going to take what wasn’t mine to take.

But even as I cried out to Him begging for it to end, I became angry and bitter. I no longer trusted anyone. Not myself, not God, not my family or friends. But with everything spiraling so far out of control, from my perspective anyway, I needed to feel like things were somewhat controlled. No one stepped forward to comfort me and tell me it would be all right. No one took control for me like I so desperately wanted, though I would probably have said at the time that I didn’t want that at all due to the lack of trust in people. So, I took control. I found ways to cope. I wrote, I asked God a lot of questions I didn’t really expect answers for, and I turned to my own head for some sort of comfort.

By the time I was sixteen, no one who knew me when I was ten probably would’ve recognized me. I didn’t care about anyone or anything because my pain was so great that I was blinded to everything. You’re probably wondering now how anything could possibly get better when things were so sad. Well, fortunately for me and everyone else putting up with me at that point, God didn’t leave me there.

I hit rock bottom at fifteen or sixteen. By then, I was becoming or was already addicted to reading pornographic content in the form of romance novels (I really can’t remember exactly where I was at by then). I didn’t have the mental capacity or presence of mind to skip content that wasn’t appropriate, and I got sucked right in. It offered an escape, and at the time, it let me live for a bit in someone else’s skin without all my baggage and with someone who seemed to care. But in the end, it left me worse off because, afterwards, I knew I shouldn’t have been reading stuff like that and my guilt added to the depression.

I think things might have kept going like that if not for God. But isn’t that how it usually goes? I shared the things above so you can understand just where I was because if you don’t understand that, then you might have a pale view of just how powerful God is. I was a mess in every since of the word. Suicidal but not able to take that last step because of my beliefs, disconnected from everyone, and tormented in spirit and soul. I didn’t deserve God’s grace, and if I had been honest with myself, a large part of me felt betrayed if not a little angry because He hadn’t taken away the suffering when I’d asked. I had a wrong view of God and a wrong view of myself in so many ways, and I had to hit rock bottom before I was ready to admit that I couldn’t go on as I was, that I couldn’t take control or do it on my own because when I tried, I failed every time. I wasn’t ready to hand the reins over to God, but I wanted someone to bring some clarity and some control to a time in my life that was severely lacking in both of those and in the self-discipline necessary to pull me out of the mess I’d created.

That’s when God finally stepped in. It started when my parents pulled us out of the home-school group at the YMCA so that we could do riding lessons as a family on a horse rescue farm where we could work for lessons. At that point, I had no friends. I’d made one friend per year we’d been there (two for the first two years), and when the third year rolled around, the only two friends I’d made had moved on. I had no one, and I didn’t really care what we did. My best friend had moved away roughly two or three years before when I was thirteen or fourteen, and I had nothing left I really cared about. Horseback riding was, however, something I’d always been interested in, so I had something to be excited about for the first time in years.

Turns out that horseback riding was one of the pivotal pieces in His plan to bring me to where I am now. While I was there, I didn’t initially connect well. I liked riding, but it was mostly just something to do. I didn’t ride with anyone who wasn’t family, and besides my instructor and her kids, who were younger than me, I rarely interacted with anyone else. I acted like it didn’t bother me, but being away from my usual routine where I was used to the pain of being lonely actually made the loneliness more acute.

Then, on one of the days where I was working in the barn cleaning stalls with my instructor and helping to groom horses while everyone else gardened in the co-op garden she ran, I happened to spot a red-gold mustang in one of the stalls. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I was immediately drawn to the high-spirited horse, and my riding instructor shared the horse’s story with me. He’d been rescued from a paddock where he’d been left loose with one other mare, who had died while he was out there. The owners severely neglected him, so when he first came to my instructor’s farm, he was starved and could barely walk due to overgrown hooves. Immediately, I connected. Silly, I know. He was just a horse. He couldn’t understand, and he couldn’t talk to me like I talked to him. But I didn’t care. This horse had trust issues just like I did, and this horse was lonely like I was.

No one else would ride him besides the teacher because he was so uncooperative and stubborn. I didn’t care. I wanted to ride him, and I pushed to get to a level where I could. For the first time in years, I made a strong, real connection and I cared about something besides myself or the difficulties I was facing. I practically lived for the one day a week when I got to see that horse. And when we moved just half a year to a year after we’d started there, I was broken-hearted. I didn’t have anything left there that I cared about except that horse, and I spent a lot of nights crying myself to sleep because I missed working with him, grooming him, and just spending time with him.

But that connection, as much as losing it hurt, brought something in me back to life. And God began to slowly work on me as He brought new friends into my life and taught me more and more about how to live life again and how to do it while trusting Him. Now, I’m at a point where I don’t struggle with depression all the time. I still do, but not as often. My addiction is under control even though it too remains a struggle because of my sinful decisions in handling my depression as a child and a teen. And I now have a friend that has remained my closest friend for almost three years now, something I never thought I’d have again after my childhood best friend moved. I still struggle to trust people, and things I’ve been through since have made that even harder in a lot of ways. But you know what? God’s constantly using new things to teach me to trust Him, even if I don’t have the ability to trust others or even myself. He’s mended my relationship with both my parents as well and has helped me to mend relationships with my siblings, even if not all of them are great all the time.

If you’d told me back when I was ten that I’d live through all of that and come out of the darkness into the light on the other side, I would’ve laughed. My God back then was not big enough to do all that. My God now? Let’s just say He looks a lot more like the God of the Bible who could take on anything and win.

Featured Ariel Paiement

This is a new section on the blog that I wanted to start. Sometimes, I think the blog focuses a lot on the aspects of writing and editing or on what I’m working on, but there’s not a lot of personal stuff to it. Obviously, there’s a fine line between sharing and over-sharing, but I personally really like it when I see stories and personal notes from the authors of blogs I follow or books I like to read. It makes it feel like I know them just a bit better and have a more personal investment in their work. It also makes it easier to recommend them, at least for me, because I can tell friends or parents I talk to that the author’s philosophies, outlook on life, and personality are also commendable.

So, I’m going to start sharing things I’ve learned through life’s experiences so far and things that I’m learning now. For those who aren’t Christians, I’m not going to discourage you from reading, but you should know that this part of the blog will be much more obvious in its Christian roots because I am a Christian, and the lessons I have learned are ones learned through hardships God took me through to teach me things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. If that’s something that’s offensive and bothersome, just skip over these posts when you see them and keep reading what you already do. I won’t be offended by it. But if you do decide to join me, then welcome, and thank you for doing so!

Today’s Sunday Story comes from a lesson I learned about loneliness in my first semester of college at Pensacola Christian College in Florida.

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They say your college years are the best years of your life. Mine have been both the best and worst years so far. I know, a strange statement to make, but a true one for reasons that will, I think, become apparent as I share more of the things I learned during my college years.

I won’t deny that I have an overall negative opinion of my alma mater itself. At this point in my life, I still haven’t fully sorted through all of the emotions, positive or negative, that I went through while there. I’m a bit of a slow learner when it comes to emotional things, and my final year and a half at PCC was filled with many negative emotions, some directed at the school and some toward myself. But that’s a story for another Sunday and isn’t really the point of this post. My only reason for mentioning it is to be up front about the fact that I most definitely have a bias against the institution but that, because God richly blessed me with friends from the student body who could facilitate growth even when the school failed to do so, my view can’t be entirely negative of my time spent there, at the very least.

My first semester was mostly bleak, especially in the beginning. I had no friends, and those I tried to make would agree to plans enthusiastically only to leave me alone when the time for our plans rolled around. This meant many meals spent eating alone, but it also created a fair share of problems since the school had a “no-going-off-campus-alone” rule at the beginning of my time there.

The rule itself wasn’t bad since our area was more than a little dangerous and had gangs who operated near the school and targeted our female students. The school tried to make it easy to find people to go with for the weekends since they ran buses that went to Walmart, the mall, and one other local shopping destination. Unfortunately, the rule regarding going off alone also applied to the weekend shopping trips and the bus, which I initially didn’t even realize. (The rules regarding bus use were more than a little vague in that area.)

Furthermore, I could only go with girls, so my pool of people to choose from was relatively limited. I tended to have very little luck connecting with girls my age despite repeated attempts. This was by no means the school’s fault, but it did make things difficult for me. As a result, when people cancelled plans every time we had them (and that semester, there wasn’t a single weekend that the people I made plans with didn’t cancel on me last minute), I was forced to either cancel plans to avoid breaking the rules or go alone even if it broke rules.

For most students, this wasn’t an issue. They could either not go that week or had no problem finding friends to go whether it was last minute or not. In my case, I couldn’t choose not to go because I had to buy food I could actually eat regularly without making myself sick and needed to buy my own toiletries. One of my roommates had a car, but neither of them liked me or was keen on lending me anything if I wasn’t able to get to the store, so I relied heavily on making time on a weekend to go. So, I spent much of that semester discouraged and struggling because I couldn’t manage to find anyone to go anywhere with me or do anything, even on campus.

It took me a long while to give up on it. I admit that I gave up in despair and for all the wrong reasons, but once I gave up, God finally got through to me, and I began to learn one of the first lessons the people there taught me, though I’m sure it wasn’t their intention to teach me this lesson. Loneliness, as uncomfortable as it is, is not the end of the world and is often a tool God uses to draw us to Himself. In this case, it did just that.

Later on, I did make friends, and some of them are ones I’m still in touch with, my best friend included. I made them at the very end of that first semester, but not until I learned to do two things. First, to accept the hollowness a lack of human companionship left in me. Second, to bring it to and give it over to God so that He could fill it with a thankfulness for the One who never leaves and for the person of God Himself.

I still struggle in this area sometimes, but this lesson had to be learned and has stuck with me. It is one of the few things the school itself ended up having a big part in teaching me, on a spiritual level at least, because in some ways, their rules made my lack of friendship more apparent every time I had no choice but to go on the bus alone to get things that couldn’t hold off for an uncertain “I’d love to go with you next week” from those I thought were friends.

I had many nerve-wracking, guilt-ridden trips to Walmart then with plenty of time to consider the fact that, unless I wanted to go without toilet paper or food I could eat safely for another week or more, I had to break the rules. I spent those rides terrified I’d get in trouble for being on my own, ashamed because I knew I was breaking rules, angry because I wanted to follow the rules (even if I hadn’t known about some of them until I got on campus) but couldn’t because others didn’t follow through week after week, and lonely because everyone else had a group while I was alone. Not a “good” experience, certainly. By the end of that semester, I had come to dread Walmart trips and hate the health issues that made trips necessary every other week, even if I had to break rules to go. But the acute emotional distress did force me to choose how to respond and to find a solution.

So, I eventually chose to stop looking for friends. A strange decision, I know, but it was the only one that seemed remotely reasonable at that point. I told God that, as sad as I felt about the prospect of being friendless for three years in a place I was already beginning to feel alone and out-of-place in, I was going to accept it if He didn’t choose to give me any friends.

After all, I’d already chosen to obey His leading in coming to a school that I never would have attended on my own because of the rules they did make clear, and that hadn’t even covered the ones that were tacked on or made themselves manifest after I first arrived that weren’t even in the student handbook or the differing applications of the student leaders in charge of enforcing them. But I was living with all of it, even if I wasn’t thrilled about it, and I was doing it because I strongly believed it was where I belonged even if I never fit in with more than a handful of people there.

So, if I could do that, then I could surely survive three years with no friends if it was what God called me to. To me, at that point, I was mostly just resigned and a little relieved I could stop putting all my efforts into developing friendships that never went anywhere. There was, at that time, no excitement about trusting God with the situation, but only a hopeless prayer of unhappy resignation to the loneliness if that was what had to be for His plans to be worked out in my life. (Had I known back then what I would find by doing this, I might have had more enthusiasm and less of a depressed, if I have to attitude, but hindsight is 20-20, as they say.)

Over the next month, bus rides got easier. Oh, the guilt and frustration over the fact that I had to break rules to get what I needed was still there. I couldn’t get around that without just eating foods that made me sick until I could buy non-perishables and whatever I could store out of the fridge for a week or so until I could shop again. But those trips never allowed me to buy enough to tide me over until the next trip, and I didn’t have a way to extend shelf-life on the fresh foods or fruits I needed to eat more of. I made it through, though, and I dealt with the consequences of my choice with a good attitude. I knew I was breaking policies, and while I felt bad about doing it, I knew I was still responsible for it if I got caught. I accepted that risk and the guilt that was a consequence of breaking rules I felt should be followed.

Some would have told me at the time (and later a few guy friends did tell me this) that I should have kept the rules even if it meant suffering health-wise because it was wrong to break a rule you knew about. That’s one of those things I still don’t know how to feel about.

I’m not a rule breaker, and breaking rules is something I hate doing. But there were many times where I didn’t know how rules should be interpreted or what they applied to because every resident assistant did things differently. I often felt guilty for breaking rules, even if I didn’t know about them beforehand because they weren’t in the version of the Pathway I’d been given prior to updates. I learned to accept and expect the guilt. As I said, my head got tangled up and confused on the issue, and in the end, whether it was right or wrong, I chose to do what was best for my health so I could focus on classes, even if it meant breaking a rule.

When it came to the bus situation, however guilty I may have felt, the loneliness itself eased up as a week or so passed in this state of isolation and prayer. I wasn’t angry at people for ditching me because I expected them not to show and leave me in a bind, and I didn’t care if we were able to hang out or not, so I wasn’t disappointed when it didn’t happen. Maybe that’s pessimistic of me, but I felt no real antipathy toward anyone for it. I just saw things for what they were and didn’t expect things to change.

Eventually, though, things did change. I didn’t expect them to, and I didn’t notice right away that, while no one else around me was changing, I was changing. It took time, but I grew to find walking, eating, studying, and living life with just me and God to be a joy instead of a burden. My problems weren’t solved, and I had a lot of growing ahead, but I was at peace about the journey ahead and the steps behind.

In the end, the lesson I learned from the struggle wasn’t an easy one, and I didn’t like the experience that had to happen for me to learn it. I wouldn’t tell you the experience was positive because that would be a categorical lie. But what I could tell you is this. The experience was painful and what was going on was negative, yes. But the results and the growth that came out of the experience were positive. Those were good and necessary.

It’s easy for me to forget, often, that even if what happened to me was undoubtedly negative, the results were not if I grew and came closer to God because of my suffering. The suffering and other people’s lack of integrity or good decisions (in this case, their poor planning and lack of following through) wasn’t good. Should those things have happened? No, probably not like they did. But if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have learned to embrace loneliness instead of fighting it, and I would be a lesser person today. The experience was bad, but the outgrowth from my response to it and what God did through it was something way more positive than I ever could’ve dreamed.