I remember hearing about it when I was in Mr. Bodenburg's literature class. Row nearest the windows. Third seat from the front.
Over the last year of my life, I had fallen hard for a God I did not know loved me. A personal God who met me in Toronto in a cold auditorium. A God whose name I had heard infinite times in my life but had never before said with such conviction and awe.
A spark was lit inside me, the girl with the shoulder length hair dyed black. The girl without make up on and who wavered between the weight of a depression to difficult for a child to carry and a yearning for life: more and better.
Somewhere between the lines of fear and and unfamiliarity, I was that girl who did not have sex before she was married and did not get high or drunk, ever.
I wanted to.
I wanted to be accepted and fun, to be seen as beautiful and daring. Free.
Kirsten Dunst in Crazy/Beautiful. Drew Barrymore in Mad Love.
And it discussed me.
The wild-child within me was shackled with the weight of pure terror and yet the girl I was becoming was good but unhappy. Nice but insecure. I was stuck in a limbo where both endings seemed unappealing.
While all around me parties were being thrown and evidence in waves of music and smells of marijuana wafted past my window, I was alone in my room hating myself. Friends given into drunkenness were living their lives. Boys, attracted to the girls wearing the tight Jets football shirts and skater pants, became boyfriends and the girls, a clique of girlfriends sharing peach scented perfume and cherry lip gloss. And I watched from the outside, wondering if I had what it took to be cool like them, and knowing in the pit of my stomach that I did not.
I wasn't them. I didn't even like most of them. They scared me with their rebellion to life. The way they slept around and mocked authority. I didn't want to be one of them, but I didn't know how else to be. So I waited, longingly, to find out who I was to become and absolutely loathing the process of being who I knew I was in that moment.
That girl.
That boring, plain, good girl.
The one with no life.
The one with no boy begging her for affection.
That one who didn't have what it took to fit in.
No party on Friday night.
No preference to a particular beer.
No body to be idolized.
Many nights I would cry to myself because I just knew that I was not worthy of much. God loves me, so I had been told, but His love wasn't enough.
Tangible, touchable love.
Attention.
Interest.
I craved something personal and mine.
Something for me and about me.
I desired acceptance and not that of pity. I desired to be special.
But I wasn't.
.....When Columbine happened I was 16 years old. Many of the students within the walls of Columbine were 16 as well. Although I had never met the students at that Colorado school, I felt like we were friends. I wondered if I would have befriended Eric and Dylan, the two who attacked the school. I was a nice person, perhaps we would have been friends. Certainly I would have said hello in the hallways, because I said hello to most everyone- except those who intimidated me. Like the popular kids. The cheerleaders. I could not say hello to them. We were not friends, not one of them to me. They were better than me and I knew it. I accepted it because it was just the way it was.
But, although it felt and looked that way, I didn't harbor the same resentment Dylan and Eric did.
I was not popular, no, but my meek voice found itself from time to time when it came to sticking up for the underdog- a strength I did not feel on my own and which was completely beyond me.
And I certainly would not have picked on them, or anyone, because that has never been me.
I was good, and kind, and I have no reason to think I would not have been good and kind to these boys.
These boys my age equal.
These boys who would do such horrific damage.
I wondered if Cassie Bernall and Rachel Scott would have been friends of mine. We were all Christians and somehow I just knew we would have bonded over youth group or the latest Plankeye song. Rachel, like me, had a love of theater, and Cassie had a sketchy past, as did I, so this further confirmed that we would have all been friends.
Both Rachel and Cassie we killed in the Columbine massacre.
Before too long I would read about these girls, peers of mine. An excitement came over me. These girls who lived thousands of miles and six states away. Girls I had never before met. Somehow we all shared this same, familiar love. This love of Christ. Somehow we each shared a bond, and I never once spoke to either of them.
Because of their testimonies, I was no longer embarrassed to be boring, good, meek, little me.
The self dislike was still there, but it was fading. It would take over a decade to breath it's final, deadly breath over me.
I was almost 30 before I liked myself. Really, sincerely, liked myself.
14 years longer than these peers ever got to live.
As a 16 year old reading these books, She Said Yes, and Rachel's Tears, it was Cassie I thought to have had the better, more impacting testimony. She, after all, was the bad girl turned good. The girl I thought I was also meant to be.
If I could have somehow got past the fear of what might happen...I could have been alongside her- rebellious, exciting, longing for something but not even knowing I longed. Someday I would find something, and that something would be God, Himself, and He would change me! Everyone would see the difference -the stark contrast of who I was and who I had become- and many would come to love and follow hard after God because of the real life work He had done through me.
I thought that was how it was all suppose to happen.
How God would use me.
But it wasn't.
As I aged and continued with my struggle of "good girl seeking desperately to be a 'free spirit' but holding on tightly to the God who saved her" I beat myself up with not understanding who I was and how I was suppose to be. Shouldn't I simply be happy to be saved? A Christian who loves God, who professes this love, should look different, right? Should be full of joy.
But I wasn't.
Now, at times I was. Times, sometimes lasting years and months on end. But through almost all of it, and may times since, that struggle.
The conflict of being enough.
Enough for myself.
Enough for God.
Enough for the world.
As though God could not use a good girl like me because my testimony was weak in comparison to those who first rebelled.
And then I realized that Rachel Scott's story was similar to my own. Neither one of us was a "bad girl", neither one of us thought we were anything special. Each of us came, simply ourselves, to the Lord and loved Him. Rachel's story, I realized, became a greater testimony to me than Cassie's.
Rachel was good. Timid at times. Kind.
It is too easy to dismiss her testimony as nothing of great importance.
Until you realize that she lived sold out for Jesus. She had given Him her everything, her life for Him. And He used her.
I used to think I was a girl without a testimony.
Boring and quite. Too simple for most people.
But not for God.
Not for this time and this platform and this audience.
Ester 4:14 -
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