Glorious Weakness by Alia Joy

Author:Alia Joy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Living/Women;Failure (Psychology)—Religious aspects—Christianity;REL012130;REL012120;REL012040
ISBN: 9781493416257
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2019-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

When the Flood Comes

We still had no furniture and couldn’t afford to get any now that we had to pay rent. We had two lawn chairs in the living room and a futon pad on the ground.

I remember hitchhiking for the first time as a teen not because I was rebellious or wanted to take rides from strangers but because our family car had broken down and there was no other way for us to get home. Again.

Reconciling my years with a loving and merciful God seemed impossible. I could not believe in a God who continually abandoned us. I hurt everywhere. I fit nowhere. Home wasn’t a place I could feel. And I met God there. Or God met me. In our home that wasn’t a home.

It rained those forty-two days straight, and I considered taking my own life right there on the chipped and cracking bathroom linoleum. But I didn’t want to break my mom’s heart. I had seen the devastation a suicide attempt can leave. I had seen it in her eyes years ago when her gaze nervously traced the raised red scar that had turned into a grotesque palette of purples, yellows, and browns on my brother’s neck. She’d meet his gaze and see the whites of his eyes clouded with blood where all the capillaries had burst from lack of oxygen. I couldn’t forget that haunted look she carried whenever she looked at him.

But I was as sober as I’d ever been, and it was its own reckoning. I had no transportation, no license, and no hopes of getting one anytime soon with the impending charges for my car crash. I was miles away from any sort of civilization and it was still raining! Our house was its own haphazard rehab. Only now, the torment I had propped up and pushed away came crashing in and I had nothing to hold it back.

My brain abuzz with thoughts, wild and tangled, I felt frenzied and agitated and in so much anguish I just wanted to make it stop. In Albuquerque I had learned all the ways to silence the torment. I was the girl who ran too loud to keep from having to sit with the questions. I turned up the volume and lived a blaring existence. I didn’t know I had bipolar disorder. I just knew there were times my skin tingled with restlessness, my limbs possessed, my feet tapping out a Morse code. I felt invincible, immortal, immune to hunger and thirst and the incessant demands to slow down, to sleep, to recharge. My mind was a colony of secrets, schemes, and shenanigans. I palmed the key to the mysteries and the world unlocked before me, right before it unhinged completely and came crashing in on me. It’s an unfortunate law of the universe: what goes up must come down.

I’d roll the car window down all the way and let it blow my hair wild like the mania I felt inside. My fist thumped

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