A few years ago I was speaking in a small town high school. In the middle of my talk a girl from the balcony shouted something out to me. I was not sure what she said, so right there on stage I asked her to repeat herself, but she ducked down and there was no reply.
After I finished my talk, the Principal pulled me aside and apologized for the girl’s actions. He began to tell me that this girl had a lot of problems at home and she was not doing very well in school. He asked if I would be willing to talk with her, and right as he asked, she came walking around the corner to where we were. The only reason that I knew it was her was because of the shocked look on the Principal’s face, and his silence as she walked by.
Taking the Principal’s flustered cue, I stopped her and asked if she would mind talking with me for a few minutes. She agreed. The Principal insisted that we use his office. We walked in and sat down, and only seconds after the door closed she began to cry. I had not said anything but “hi,” and asked the simple question, “how are you?” Through her tears she told me exactly how she was.
The pain that she described was so deep I could feel it. She told me of the way she would sit down at a table with other people at school only to have them all get up and walk away. Or the way that her stepmom abused her and her dad rejected her. She told me that so many times she just wanted to run away or burn the house down, or hurt someone at school. When she had reached the climax of her story, she began to pull up her sleeves and as she did she said, “but I would never hurt anyone else, so I just hurt myself.”
She showed me her arms that she had purposely burnt with a lighter up and down from shoulder to wrist. Along with the burn marks there were deep slashes that she had made along her veins. There were also deep holes she had poked in her skin with a sharp object. She told me that she just sits in her room and hurts herself. She sits there and cries. All she wants is love. She just wants someone to love her, and according to her no one ever has.
I looked at her, and now through my tears I told her that I loved her and that she was special. I told her that I would not sit in that room and care about her if I did not love her and my loves stemmed from the love her Creator had for her. I told her that God loved her and He always has loved her and that He is waiting for her to run to Him with His arms wide open. I told her how special she was in God’s eyes. I said, “every time you look into the mirror remember that” and she looked at me and said, “I don’t think that I will ever forget that.”
Too many times we seem to walk away from the edge of the ocean of God’s love to try to find our soul’s spiritual hydration elsewhere.
For her to hear that she was loved and that she was special was the very thing that she had longed to hear. No one had said that to her, at least not that she could remember. I continued to tell her of God’s undeniable love. I shared the truth of Christ’s coming, dying and rising again in hopes that the life-giving message of the gospel would breathe the love she’d always longed for into her life.
I led her to the edge of the deep ocean of God’s love. But she had to choose to dive in. That is the funny thing about God’s love; while there is a calling to grasp the depths of it (Ephesians 3:18), there is a choice on our behalf to do so (John 3:36). Yet too many times we seem to walk away from the edge of the ocean of God’s love to try to find our soul’s spiritual hydration elsewhere.
