The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living by Sturm Lacey

Author:Sturm, Lacey [Sturm, Lacey]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: REL062000, BIO026000
ISBN: 9781441246523
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-29T18:30:00+00:00

God Speaks

My mother always taught me to be suspicious of strange men. She warned me that most of them were perverts and I couldn’t trust any of them. It was a sad prejudice my mother taught me, one I continued to learn through my own life. I had my own experiences and things I had witnessed that made me hate men, and I didn’t really need my mom’s warning. I had seen men sexually and physically abuse people I loved, steal from their struggling families to feed drug and alcohol addictions, break promises to me and my siblings and my mother, and I’d seen seemingly nice, intelligent men turn into drunk, greedy, perverted monsters. A man had assaulted every woman I knew.

So when I looked into this man’s face I saw something I’d never seen from a strange older man like him. I saw pure love. It was just like how I would picture Jesus looking at someone. He looked at me like he knew me. Like he saw my heart and all its pain. The compassion in his eyes was arresting.

This strange man held me in place with a look that conveyed his genuine, humble, selfless love for me. And I couldn’t go anywhere because I didn’t know this man and was completely perplexed by why and how he could love me. I waited for him to speak. He’d been crying, so he paused and steadied his voice.

“The Lord wants me to speak to you,” he said. “He wants you to know that even though you have never known an earthly father, he will be a better father to you than any earthly father could ever be.”

How could he know? How could he know my feeling of being orphaned? I fought to rationalize his mystical ability of knowing I’d never had a father.

Well, look at yourself, Lacey, I thought to myself. You have a Metallica shirt on and raggedy, chopped-off purple hair. You don’t look like you fit in here and most misfits have daddy issues. He just guessed right is all.

“God has a great plan for your life,” he continued. “You have been questioning your sexuality as well, and the further you go down that road the further you will go from the plan God has for you. This road brings so much pain with it.”

Wait, what? Is he talking about my girlfriend? There is no way he could know about that. He kept going.

“God has seen you cry yourself to sleep at night. He has seen you rehearsing the pain you have gone through since you were a little child. You saw too much too soon and it has caused so much pain in your heart. Jesus died to take that pain away. There is pain in your heart from your own sin, and from other people’s sins that have affected you. Jesus died on a cross to suffer the consequences of sin forever. That way we don’t have to carry that pain around with us. Do

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