Finding Light in the Darkness

First off, thanks for inquiring about the mystery that is my messed up self! Second, you'll have to bare with me these first few entries as I have no idea what to write about, what I really want to make of this blog, or if it'll be any good. I'm used to writing poetry, and this is my first attempt at writing like this. So, here we go!

How do you, a follower of Jesus, a child of The Promise, a beloved child of God, overcome darkness in a world so accepting of it? How do you conquer depression when society's made it into a fad? When it's completely fine to live in the darkness that Christ died to eradicate? How do you hold on to Truth, when lies are constantly spoken into you? How do you find The Light in the midst of an all consuming Darkness?

 Almost four years ago, my life was ripped apart (or, I let my life be ripped apart). I was sexually assaulted a little less than a month before my fourteenth birthday. It took two and a half years for me to start breaking down the walls I'd built around myself. Last year, at church camp, God so tenderly broke the rest of me that I was unsuccessfully trying to hold together. Incoherently, I revealed what I had been hiding for so long to my entire youth group. The amount of Love I was met with is the opposite of what I was expecting.

I guess it's not unheard of, as a victim of sexual assault, to escape into yourself and never really come back out again. You lose bits and pieces of yourself as your attempts at putting yourself back together, behind closed doors, fail. That's what happened to me. I locked the old Ashleigh up, took her out of the light, and gave myself a new face. Created a new Ashleigh. I was living in the darkness that devoured me more and more every day that I hid myself from the world. I was believing the lies that Satan had so expertly whispered into my ear. He convinced me that I was disgusting, undesirable, and impure. And with every lie that I believed, the darkness crept its' way in and sunk its' hooks into me even further. And through all of this, (though I didn't know it then) the Lord was screaming at me to just draw near to Him, to let Him handle it. And I wish I would've listened.

I'll be the first person to tell you, trying to overcome Darkness is the hardest thing you will ever have to do. Especially if you're trying to do it on your own. It got to a point where I gave up on trying, instead of continuing to run from it, I stopped dead in my tracks and let it devour me, or try to. And that is why I've dealt with over 6 attempted suicides and have countless white lines running over my skin. But I won't get into that, the telling of my story is for another time. It wasn't until I completely hit rock bottom, no longer able to try and control any part of what was going on, that I really started looking for a way out of the pit I had let myself be thrown in. It was January of this year that my depression completely took over, and I physically shut myself off from the world. I locked myself in my room for three weeks, shut off my phone, shut out everyone who tried to help, and watched every episode of Doctor Who on Netflix. All the while, unbeknownst to me, my Lover was preparing to pour light into every cracked and broken surface of myself.

During the past six months, my beautiful savior has been reintroducing me to the warmth and amazing joy of His love and Light. Every slander that the Father of Lies speaks over me, my Amazing Father overwhelmingly delivers pure Truth into my heart in many ways. I find myself overwhelmed and amazed by the amount of Love and Truth my God has surrounded me with, whether that be friends, or family or songs or books. He's given me so much more than I deserve and I am astounded by that.

Don't get me wrong, I still struggle with this ever creeping darkness. Every morning when I wake up I have to choose to either listen to the lies being screamed at me, or the Truth being poured into my heart. Sometimes even several times a day. You have to choose what you live in. Being chased by Darkness isn't a choice, but living in it is. Running from Darkness does you no good when you have nothing to run to. There's this quote, I don't know who it's by but it says something like: "We spend all our time running from lions when we could run to the lion slayer." You have to find The Light, and run to that. Run to the lion slayer.

I praise God for everything He's done to protect me, even when I was cursing Him for even creating the worthless shell of a person I thought I was. And I praise God for continuing to protect me, and for rending my stubborn heart so that I could finally find the path to healing, and start walking down the long, winding road. And reader, I pray that whatever you're dealing with, in whatever form your darkness takes, that in the midst of you battling it, you will find The Light of our Beautiful Creator, and cling to that much sooner in your walk than I have.