I. Childhood in the Hood
II. Hell Hath No Fury Like High School
III. From West Coast to East Coast
IV. Fighting with the God I Love
While each chapter contains mazes of emotion and confusion, it is the most recent that is so far the most epic of my time.
After 23 years of the world revolving around Jamie, the spotlight is finally and rightfully focused on God.
This is no easy feat; switching from one view to another is complicated and unnerving. As much as I would like to claim Christianity is a suit well-fit for me, the transition is proving more difficult than I could have ever fathomed.
Sure, God’s love sounds amazing, and it is amazing, but it is also completely overwhelming. I am struggling, almost drowning in God’s overwhelming love. There is a spirit of hesitance, dismissal, and refusal in me.
Knowing me, it is clear why. After 23 years of pain, loneliness, and control, how would I ever know how to accept love – much less the greatest of all love? Love is unfamiliar, but pain – oh, pain, you are intimately known by me, familiar and therefore comfortable.
It is because my past is so comfortable and familiar that I’m struggling to let it go. Of course it angers me now to realize how little I let God be in my life then, but I also had fun living solely for me, trying to feed myself by my own means. Despite how self-destructive it may have been, it supplied an illusion of security and independence. Reconciling my two lives – pre-God versus post-God – is proving impossible. I feel like I’m giving myself up, losing myself.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I am torn between God and myself. There is no in-between. There can’t be, can there? I have to let one go for the other to grow.
In changing, I feel as though as if I have betrayed myself. I am scared to walk with God, and scared to let go of myself – the only Jamie I have ever known. I have traded self-gratification for God’s everlasting love, and I am so insolent as to wonder if I’m making the right choice.
Is it natural to feel this betrayal? Must I lose the old Jamie – every piece of her – to collect my gifts as a follower of Christ?
