Pulled back from the edge

I’d been smoking pot and having wild sex for the past ten years without an iota of remorse and it was all fine by me until I ran smack into T-boy. Now, he wasn’t what you would call good looking but he had that appeal that made you want to get close enough to find out what was on his mind all the time. He had that gentleness that made you want to prove that he was nothing but a fraud. He had that patience that made you want to test it until the monster you were so sure was inside him came out raging and looking for blood.


He made me want to be good when all I had ever been was bad and that infuriated me. I pushed him away from me with a violence that was nearly as breathtaking as it was brutal. But he kept on coming right back. I had my male friends give him a beating that put him in a hospital. I had my female friends throw themselves over him in a shameless display of wanton lust...I screamed at him in public and slapped him more times than I care to remember...but he didn’t budge. He kept coming back, brown eyes filled with a love and understanding that made me want to run out of my own skin. ‘I believe in you and I can’t give up on you because God hasn’t given up on you’, he would murmur, even after I once emptied the plate of okra over his head. I believe in you.

When I couldn’t take it anymore I finally asked the one question that had been nagging me all along. The one question I had refused to ask out of sheer stubbornness. Why? Why do you believe in me so much when I hardly believe in myself?

My father didn’t believe in me, why should you? My mother didn’t believe in me, why should you? Why would a total stranger believe in me when my family thought I was born to be a slut?

And with the question came the memories I had buried. The pain I had shelved. The rejection I had hidden under the layer of artfully applied make up and a well toned body. Like a broken dam, I stood with everything gushing out of me. And like a sea he took it all in.

That’s how I got saved. That’s how I discovered who I really was and what I was made for; T-boy didn’t wave a huge bible in my face the way some people did to me sometimes. He didn’t tell me I would burn in hell if I didn’t repent like the choir mistress once told me when I wore my favourite tight miniskirt to church. He didn’t spit at me when I walked past and he didn’t snicker at me when I put my hand up in church to ask a question. I wanted what he had simply because he lived it.

Too many people spend their time judging people and making them feel worse than they already feel; all that only drives them further away. When you have Christ, you love more and judge less. The world has a lot of hatred and judgement already and they are looking for something different. Love is different and it makes you stand out.

That’s why Jesus said you are the light of the word. In a world where the hate has cast clouds so dark and thick, love is the only sun that can pierce through the darkness.

What are you doing today? Loving? Or condemning?