words are going to fail me horribly, but they are all i have. still, i'd love for you to walk a few miles in my shoes and meet my God along the way. obviously, i believe in a God that is pretty personally involved in my life. i could throw around bible verses and theological quotes, but i'd heard all that stuff myself over and over, a long time before i actually started knowing the truth of it all. instead of theology, i offer you a story.


I have a great mom and dad and a younger brother and sister, and up until my senior year of high school I had no legitimate complaints. I’d started dating an older guy junior year, and my senior year was going to be fabulous, I was sure. It’s funny, because looking back I don’t really remember how it all started. my brother just started acting really…strange, annoying, depressed…I don’t know, but home started being really stressful. I started spending every waking minute at my boyfriend's house. His dad was VP of a company, his mom wore an apron and made pies from scratch. They had a maid. Everything was peaceful and clean and quiet there.


Senior year was the first time my brother was violent. I suppose there was a build up to it, because I don’t remember being shocked…but I was upstairs in my room and I my mom screamed my name from the kitchen, and I knew something was wrong. I came downstairs and david had my mom cornered, and he was kicking her, hitting her. I put him on the floor. It was the first time I’d ever been in anything close to a physical fight, the first time I’d drawn someone else’s blood. And I held him there on the floor till he calmed down and started sobbing. This was the pattern that had been going on; he would get angry and scared and then violent, and when it was all over he would cry and cry and say he was so sorry and that he didn’t know what was happening. I suppose I was terrified on one level, but mainly I just got out of the house a lot. Mental illness isn’t something that my family knew a lot about, but by the end of my last summer before college, he’d been hospitalized twice. They were saying he was bipolar, but it was so much more than that.



I went away to college and tried not to think about it. but things were bad…I’d go home and find holes in the wall that didn’t used to be there. I heard about a few calls to 911, my brother had started seeing a psychiatrist and my dad started talking huge amounts of time off of work because my mom was afraid to be in the house alone with him. there’s a whole lot more to tell, but I think you get the idea. It continued throughout my sophomore year of college, but almost worse was that my boyfriend had decided he wanted to be a pastor, and that I, as a pre-med molec bio major, did not share his calling. I guess the story’s a pretty classic one; we were going to get married, we loved each other, I staked all of my bets on him. And not long after home falling apart, I compromised every standard i'd set for myself in a relationship. It was a long year full of tears, and a week after I got home from college and 3 ½ years since we’d started dating, we broke up.



That summer was the hardest time I’ve ever been through. It was the first time I’d spent any amount of time at all at home, and things were different. My mom was depressed, crying a lot and asking me if everything would be ok. David had been diagnosed slightly mentally retarded, somewhat autistic, and schizoaffective. I no longer really wanted to be a doctor anymore, since it had cost me “my one true love”, but I was scheduled to take 2 semesters of organic chem over a pretty intense summer session, as well as my MCATs for med school. I needed to be strong, but I really just wanted to die. all my fairy-tales had died. I was a dreamer as a little kid, and this went contrary to all I’d ever believed. The good guy is supposed to win, love is supposed to conquer all, and sicknesses are supposed to be curable. It was a really dark summer for me.



my story definitely doesn’t end there. My junior year of college was hard academically, but I decided I DID want medical school after all. my ex-boyfriend met another girl when he got back to school and started dating her. I finally understood that we were NOT going to get back together, and eventually, I was ok with that. My brother was hospitalized again and again until he was finally transferred to a tertiary hospital and kept there for a month. They finally found a combination of antipsychotics that worked for him, and though his personality has really deteriorated, he’s stable again. So life is not bad, all is not lost.


But the experience left an indelible mark on me. I’d gone to church, believed in god, etc, but that time in my life really hurt, and even more, it pissed me off. If there was a God, and I believed that there was, then why was this happening? I’d never smoked a thing, never had a drink, went to church a lot. I was a damn good person from a damn good family, and if that didn’t count for anything, what was the point of being alive? every night that summer, I sat in my room alone and asked that question to God, over and over. Yeah, in every life a little rain must fall…but I’d never realized then that there was NO LIMIT to how much rain. For the first time, I realized that things don’t necessarily turn out ok. Nobody had promised me that they would. I was living a life without any guarantees, and there was nothing I could do to ensure that things wouldn’t get worse.


There’s not enough alcohol in the world to drown some sorrows, and making light of it would have been impossible, like making fun of war or abuse or famine. Bad things happen that you can’t stop, and while you can try to deny the pain, the feelings do not go away… and ignoring them just makes them come out sideways, looking like depression or an addiction. I wasn’t going to play those games. God’s answer was to admit what I’d already found to be true – things are not ok. Sometimes terribly not ok. And if there is nothing beyond this 70 year experience we call life, why even try to live through it? but there is so much more, and that’s what I believe. Our lives have meaning beyond just trying to get through them.

you can tell me that God is a crutch for the weak. i'll tell you that the only reason you don't realize how weak you are is because life hasn't hit you hard enough yet. you are not invincible, not matter how lucky you've been up to this point. i'm not forecasting doom for your future, but i do know that the first time pain infringes on your dreams, things go a little haywire and you start looking for answers. drink it away. party it away. find some other way to numb it all away. but there will always be those 3am sleepless moments when you have to wonder what the point is. and maybe i don't have much to say to you until, on some level, you reach that point where you really wonder. i guess if you're not wondering, maybe i'll see you later on.