Month: April 2017

Stardust

Ami Beth CrossLeave a comment

 

 

Recall your darkest moment. One of the bleakest periods in your life that you feel define the brokenness inside you that is really hard to heal.

Those moments may come in flashes like a cool April thunderstorm. Wakes you up in the middle of the night like a boom of reality when you least expect it. Brilliant light against the wall, a commanding crescendo fighting the perfections of everything that tells you “all is well.”   You fall awake to realize that, “all that is well isn’t so well…”
When we keep it all together due to a fight inside of us to prove to the world that we are in fact “okay” despite the sorrow and hurt that has fought so hard to break us, there are going to be those times. The essence of darkness where bolts of light will make us shudder at the fact that we are not okay. People that who shouldn’t have failed us.

Sickness has come overtaken our bodies.

Hands have been put on us that should have never been there.

Words have fallen on our ears that should only exist in the pit of fire and brimstone.

Yet, somehow we have borne it all, we’ve taken it in and become the best part of us that we could have become.  Come what may…and we have risen above!  We’ve gone through the fire and materialized into something deeper than the hurt…past the agony and into what wasn’t able to be done right by us.

Life wasn’t good enough for us, as we bleed a broken heart in front of God.  He didn’t take it away because He needed us to be able and ready to be here in this moment. To answer the call…

A woman cries with a moaning sound that only a woman who has lost can understand. You are able to comfort her because you’ve buried a baby.

A young man in anger lashes out because his father has left not only him but his mother and younger brother. His fist becomes his only redemption leaving blood at every turn. Yet, you see it and know his pain because your dad wasn’t enough either, and after the lashing, he has on your face your cry with his tears he hasn’t been able to release.  After that he see’s the love of God and enters into a union with you that will continue into eternity.

Dark circles fill her crystal blue eyes as she puts on a pretty face, yet you can see through it.  Prisms of light shine in you that she is drawn to even though she has no idea why.  In that, she lets you in one dark night where she has a gun by her bedside that was her last call. But you were there because you have had hands on you too, that should have never been there. What was supposed to be enough wasn’t, but because of that you were able to hold her still and share the healing hands of Jesus that save her that night from the shame, disparage, and the fate she had proclaimed on her life.  

God can move any mountain in front of us. He really can.

But sometimes He doesn’t for a reason, and I can resonate with that throughout the decade plus three I’ve been on this earth… (you do the math…)  I have experienced…

Parents divorced

Sexually abused

Beaten

Left alone

Accused

Emotionally allocated for things I didn’t do

Depression

Anxiety

Anorexia

OCD

Fear

Failure

Success

Divorce of my own

Faith

Turned my back on God

A sick child I almost lost

Buried two infant babies

Anger

Substance Abuse

Anger

Fear

Failure

Success

….

Tonight I found myself on my knees. Not like the usual, “God. Help me I’m struggling….”. No, it was different. It was a bleeding of my soul…a reckoning of why? And He told me,
I am able, I was able.

But I needed you. To go through this.

Life couldn’t be what you needed.

So you could be enough for Me to use you.

Colors flooded my tears in the form of a rainbow and I saw my children. They haven’t felt the sorrow and hurt that I have because I did.

I held a child on Wednesday night who has been abandoned by her father. Words were able to flood from me like a tsunami because I knew her hurt.

A girl I know admited recently, she throws up after she eats, I listen, hug her, then tell her she is good enough. The food she is purging from her body has nothing to do with being “thin”. It’s about control. We talk, she opens up, and the dialogue leads us to a place of neglect. I hold her as her tears flood with absence of her mother.

I know He is able.

I know He is strong.

Yet, it doesn’t always work that way. Our darkness isn’t always healed so that the residue can drift off of us into a beautiful array of stardust to bless the next.

The Difference Maker

Ami Beth CrossLeave a comment

So, I am going to be completely transparent and honest with you, because that’s how I roll.

Being me, “Ami Beth Cross” at times totally sucks. Think of a perfect pristine piece of glass. You see right through it, not hiding anything it lets you see the other side of whatever it may block. Yup, that’s me. I wear my heart on my sleeve, another thing that completely is a buzz kill about being me. You know how I feel when I’m in the trenches. Also when I’m filled with more joy than I can handle. I’m real. I’m here. And I don’t care what the world thinks….
Okay, not so quick….
Of course, I care what the world thinks. I may be this big ball of exploding life in front of your face, sometimes so exuberant you pray to God you don’t see me again, but yes I have feelings. Deep, deep feelings. I, in fact, want people to like me, accept me, laugh when I joke and cry when I cry.

You see, I have been deeply rejected in my life. As a child and an adult by my very own parents, the people who made me held me as a baby, and I’m sure had hopes and dreams for me. But “I” wasn’t enough, my smile didn’t do it, my cries for unconditional love wasn’t enough. When I hear that the world rejects me it hurts on a deeper level than, “people are mean and immature.” It resonates in my spirit where I was formed as a child and felt rejection at a very young age.

Recently I’ve gone through something that both gives me confirmation that I’m doing the right thing, and an aching in my heart that tells me I’m worthless, unlovable, and expendable. Unfortunately, the dark emotions usually win the battle in my mind confirming the reason my dad could reject me. If your parents can’t love you, then who can’t?
I’ve been told that I am a show boat, a facade, a joke, someone who everyone around them finds completely obnoxious and annoying. As much as these words cut right through my heart, I wiped the tears off of the sleeve where my emotions stay and thought, “how awful it must have been for Jesus to be convicted of a crime He didn’t commit?”

As I complain about typical drama and gossip of this world that is never truly truthful, my mind fluctuates to my Lord who not only endured a false accusation but a death that is unimaginable. All I have to do is suck it up and know in my heart that my true friends love me, see me, and take in my intentions. I make mistakes. I hurt the people I love, I am in fact, unlike Jesus, flawed. The world that hates me for my joy is the same place that nailed Him to a cross, the land that beats me down despite me begging for forgiveness for my transgressions, is the same soil that flogged our King and nailed Him to a cross.

Revelations such as this make my situation seem small and also propelling. If people of this world despise my joy, I am doing what I’m called to do. The enemy attracts to what he knows we fear the most. For me it is acceptance.  When I face ridicule I navigate back to a place where I was a child begging for love and willing to do anything to confirm such. God tells me that I am in the Light, and He is my acceptance and Love.

If Jesus could die on a cross for who He was and what He had to do for all of us, I can suck it up and move forward despite a few people who want to tear me down. I can rise above and become the Difference Maker that makes the masses uncomfortable, yet what was predestined to be my gift to make others embrace a failing emotion of our times, JOY!