Different by Sally Clarkson & Nathan Clarkson

Author:Sally Clarkson & Nathan Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Family, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Motherhood
ISBN: 9781496420145
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2017-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

Sally

Dangling my legs over the concrete edge of the unfinished ten-story hotel room, I looked out on a dazzling sunset and let the beauty of it slowly seep into my bruised soul. I had sneaked up to the site of the hotel being constructed down the street from my home after the construction crew was gone. As a teen, I often needed to walk miles and miles to work off the adrenaline that days of disillusionment had built up in me. Growing up in a high school where there were drugs, lots of alcohol, and a “fast” popular crowd meant that I didn’t always fit in.

That’s not to say I didn’t have friends. I ran around with ten girls who regularly spent the night at each other’s house. In a way, I was the ringleader who tied them all together—I ran our calendar and arranged places for us to go and houses where we would meet. But oddly enough, even though several of these girls regularly told me, “You are my best friend,” I almost always felt alone.

My heart was restless, longing for more, looking for purpose. I often wished someone would take the time to know me—the real me—and then still love me just as I was. Coming from a high-performance family, I did not always feel that kind of unconditional love. My parents loved me a lot, but there was always an emphasis on grades, weight, and looks, and I never felt I measured up. Nothing I did seemed to be enough. Or at least the things I did were not what my mama would have chosen.

I had learned to perform well and to play the part I was taught to play. I’d learned the right “look,” the acceptable behavior. But inside I felt a deep hole of emptiness. Despair and longing swept over me every day, and often I felt that no one really saw or cared to pursue the person inside of me.

Those feelings were what brought me to that hotel construction site at sunset.

My parents would have had cardiac arrest if they’d known I had slipped past the Danger—Do Not Enter signs and climbed up ten stories to sit on the edge of the unfinished rooms, feet hanging over the ledge a couple of hundred feet in the air. But this place, where just God and I met alone, was where I could pour out my doubts, my loneliness, my questions, and my pain. This was where I found small bits of reprieve.

Up here, somehow, I could speak out my deepest thoughts. I could be myself with no pretension and no performance. With just God and me watching the pinks, purples, oranges wash across the horizon in the silence of an abandoned building, somehow I found comfort.

Brushstrokes of dark doubt and shadows of existential anxiety painted the landscape of my mind every day. If anyone could have looked into my soul, that person would have been concerned about my well-being.

Outside, I was a busy teen

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