Life and Death… and Life Again

Life, a four letter word that holds the entirety of creation and carries the weight and complexity of human existence. Of course the plants and animals of the earth are all held together in this seemingly small word. By definition life means: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

How is it possible that such a simple concept to define with words & grasp with logic can feel so complicated, confusing, unfathomable and so utterly incomprehensible to live? We come into this life as tiny humans, yet we contain the entirety of all information that will teach us how to grow, how to multiply our cells in the womb, develop our organs, give us all the ways to be formed from the micro to the macro. What I find even more fascinating is that this doesn’t stop at birth, it proceeds through the course of our lives and I believe, even into death. Where our lowly bodies are transformed to be like His glorious body.

Yes, I’m talking about our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ who was resurrected from death. As his body was transformed from death to life, so too, will we rise from the dead & have life again. In a new way, in a way that our small human minds will never be able to understand. Because it’s far to grand, even to the fantasy of our imagination, to fully embrace. I’m not here to say that I know for sure what happens after death. But I am here, to share with you my story from Life and Death to Life Again.

They say that we can’t possibly remember our day of birth, that we are too little to hold such a traumatic beginning. Birth is beautiful, I agree, but biblically it’s meant to be painful, because of our disobedience and fall from the Garden of Eden, we as women, biological women, were cursed with the pain of childbearing. {Genesis 3:16} I agree that we can’t possibly remember the day of our birth cognitively. Our brains were created with perfect design to protect us from experiencing traumatic occurrences. Think about that for a minute; that our very first traumatic experience is birth. We all have to face it. We cannot enter this world without it. Trauma lives in our body. We don’t store it cognitively, as a visual memory. Can you image, being able to remember being pushed through the vaginal canal? What a gift that we can’t remember it with our minds. But we can remember it emotively, we store emotional memories in the body. I believe we can recall these emotions throughout the entirety of our life, when we do experience them, we don’t know where they stem from, but I do believe they go all the way back to that day of birth. Where we left the warmth and safety of our first home, where we multiplied our cells and learned how to hear and see and feel. To come into the world, that is big and bright and fallen. A place that is, at best, an uncertain in-between.

This is where my story begins, just like everyone else’s. I’m not any different than anyone else, not anymore special then anyone of you. But at the same time, yes I am, and so are you. That’s how we were created to be, the same, one human race, but all uniquely individual, down to the design of our DNA. Here to leave an imprint on the world and in our lives. I remember, emotively, the moment of imprint, when my father, 21 years young, a child himself, looked me in the eyes, they locked and the rhythm of our hearts beat in unison to one another. I remember the familiarity of hearing his voice, from when I was in the womb. He held me snug in his arms, cradling me like I was his most prized possession. I felt safe and loved and relaxed in his presence.

With each day that passed as I continued to develop and grow, not only physically, but emotionally. I was holding bigger and bigger emotions all being housed in my tiny form. I didn’t know what these feelings were, but they were always there, a constant, something I could start to recall when I would see my dads face when he got home from work. I would feel that overwhelming love and joy that he felt when he was near me. I didn’t understand, but on some level I knew that I made him happy, I brought him a joy and love that he had never known before. We became each others source of happiness and love. For me it wasn’t just a source, but a lifeline, the very thing giving me life.

Days turned to weeks and weeks into months and months multiplied in years. My body still giving me all the information I need to develop and grow into the young girl I was becoming. A girl who’s heart held hope that couldn’t even be contained by the oceans combined. There was a bigness in me that I didn’t even know how to explain or how to fill it full. I felt all this space inside me just yearning to be filled. Filled with love and laughter and joy and attention. I craved attention. I wanted to be fully seen and fully heard and understood. Like most humans desire. I had this welling inside that longed to be released, I couldn’t always put my finger on it and I couldn’t logically understand where it came from, but I desired to give life.

When I look back at my childhood, I see with so much clarity that I was designed to give life, not only as a biological woman, with reproductive wisdom given to me genetically by God. But that God was using me to give life to my family. And I did, I gave them my life. I put it all in their hands and let them have it. I was theirs. I was his, my fathers. His prized possession. This is how I began to see myself, as a possession to be owned. A transactional figure. I behave this way to get that and I act this way to get the other thing. I exchanged my emotions for basic needs like love and affection, even if that meant misbehaving then at least I’d be seen and touched, although not with a loving, gentle gesture, but with a spank or a slap on the mouth, at least that way I was feeling something, even if it was pain, it was better than not feeling anything at all. I became a glutton for punishment. Literally eating my feelings so they wouldn't consume me. I started to slowly understand what emotions got me the attention I so desperately craved, especially from him. The one who made my world go round, the one that gave me life. I did everything in my tiny toddler power, to stay close to him, to be seen by him. As years passed by I felt the distance growing further and further. He once used to look at me and see me, now it’s like I’m a stranger living in his home. I think to myself inside my 6 year old mind and ask, is it me, is it something I did? Why doesn’t he love me like he used to? How do I get that life back? That one that made me feel safe and loved?

The outward love that had once been my lifeline, my foothold, keeping me upright, was slowly starting to fade. The remembrance of those feelings that once overwhelmed me, became an underwhelming desolation and inward isolation. I remember the days when loneliness crept in like a thief breaking into my mind and taking me captive. I know now, that this was the enemy. Coming to steal, kill and destroy. He came in and robbed me of my joy that used to make me feel light as air. He took me prisoner to my own memories, dangling them like visions on Polaroids taken inside my mind. Capturing moments of abandonment and controlling me emotionally like a master puppeteer. He bound my hearts in knots, tied me up in chains of depression that filled my mind with a dense fog of fear that would hover over my life for years to come. Following me around like a rain cloud that never ceased to pour down on my life. I was waterlogged on the inside. Yoked to the deceitfulness of my heart. Carrying the weight of the world like a necklace bridled by guilt and lead by shame. I felt like a puddle filled with mud that others found joy in stomping on just to see the reaction of the emotional splatter that gushed out of me with every blow to my fragile psyche. The darkness multiplied and anxiety buzzed around in my mind, driving me insane. I couldn’t focus, it was like I was on a marry-go-round that never stopped spinning. Round and round it would go in my mind all day. Faster and faster, until I couldn’t see straight. Life became a blur of emotions too strong for me to fight. A life that once felt hopeful became endless days of hopelessness. Time was slipping through my hands like sand, all the while it was moving in slow motion. I was stuck in between life and death, with no end insight.

My adolescence became the age I like to refer to as my disassociation era. The phase of life where pain piled on like pounds and the only way I could escape the sting of venom was by filling that bigness inside that had become empty. There was a barren well within that was bone-dry. That life giving spirit had been replace with a life-sucking one instead. A vacant space where the enemy had taken up residence and stole every ounce of love I had stored up since birth. He drained my accounts and left me with nothing but a aching bottomless hole that no-thing could fill, that no-thing could satisfy. I tried to fight him, I tried to go to war, but he would defeat me every time, wear me down until I was weak and exhausted. Then he would take over and become like a ravenous wolf clawing at my insides. Barking commands at me and holding me hostage to my own desires. He would starve me then feed on my flesh. I couldn’t control the urges to indulge his torment. His voice became so loud that I couldn’t hear myself think anymore. I couldn’t hear my hopes and dreams any longer. They faded into an abyss of abuse and addiction that ruled my life.

I had become a slave to the enemy, to my flesh. I couldn’t fight the temptations because I didn’t know how. The days of my young adulthood blended together like a montage that I was watching from above. I didn’t know the beginning from the end. I didn’t know where I began. I was lost in sea storm of emotions constantly whirling within. I still didn’t understand from where they came. They were living within me, but I felt estranged to them. Like they were strangers I was living with. They were animating my life, controlling my thought & dictating my behaviors on a subconscious level. It’s like I was living on autopilot. Driving blindly. I was a reckless drunk driver behind the wheel of my life, slowly killing myself and endangering the lives of others on the road with me.

There’s a Bible verse that says life and death is in the power of the tongue. {Proverbs 18:22} I was on a rollercoaster of emotions, on highs and crashing into subzero lows where my body was chilled, frozen in time, stuck in the past. My life was moving forward, I was growing older physically, but emotionally and psychologically I was in a hyper arousal state of the freeze response to the trauma of my childhood. I was paralyzed by the fear of my father and his tongue, that he often used as a weapon against me. Striking me with his words that were like flaming darts shot right at my heart, the fire still blazing in my belly like a roaring lion wanting to fight back. But I couldn’t, I was the child being put in danger, in the place that was meant to be my safe space and refuge. I was under attack by the man who gave me life. His love became like a double-edged sword that tore me apart and split me wide open. Then I was left alone to bleed out in tears of confusion. Did he love me or hate me? How could he treat me one way today and another, the next, I’d ask inside my own mind as I tossed and turned trying to fall asleep next the demons that became like friendly ghosts that found delight in torturing me mentally and emotionally. I was up all night with worries keeping score and insecurities waging war. They never hesitated to threaten to take my life. That’s what they wanted — the army of demons working for the enemy of my soul — they wanted to take my life by getting me to take my own life.

I’d have daydreams, or maybe a better word for them would be daymares, where I would have thoughts of taking my own life. But they weren’t thoughts of actively hurting myself. They were thoughts like, I wonder who would miss me if I’d die? Or who would come to my funeral? Or, I wonder if I died would they (anyone who had hurt me) feel regret or remorse for how they treated me? Would I be remembered? They were more fantasy thoughts, almost romanticizing my death. Hoping that if I couldn’t be loved while alive, then maybe I could be if I was dead. I hoped in a cynical way that maybe someone would realize that they love me if I was gone, but then I’d be dead, so what would be the point? These escapism thoughts would happen frequently. Especially as I continued to live my early adulthood years in a state if dissociation, completely removed from my body and life. It was the only way I could function. I had to pretend to know how to be an adult because I had no idea how to actually live in the real world. I had never been taught how to manage my emotions or how to deal with difficulties without completely checking out emotionally and mentally. By my early twenties I was just going through the motions. Living how I thought I was supposed to live based on my upbringing a societal expectations. On the outside I looked fine, except for my excessive weight gain. I seemed to be a happy, fun-loving young adult, going out with friends, partying and working and barely paying my bills, but I was making it by. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was what was expected of me, so I did it. I lived the life I thought I was supposed to live.

Behind the closed doors of my own heart and mind there’s a whole other narrative playing out, a whole different plan being put into place and at this time, where I seem to be okay, I’m not fine at all. I’m suffocating internally, drowning in my emotions, unable to keep my head afloat, I’m sinking further and further into no-mans-land. I’m a sinking ship in the sea of unknown sorrow that has built up for 20 years without an outlet, without a channel for it to flow with the least amount of resistance. To feel and express my emotions as a child was met with severe resistance. It simply wasn’t accepted or allowed, so I built an internal dam to keep it from spilling out of my lips in laughter or out my eyes in tears. It was bound up tightly inside the walls of my heart that I built up like a fortress to protect my vulnerability that often was exposed and laid bare. An open wound for others to sprinkle salt into until my pain was coated by the preservation. I would try licking my wounds to heal them. But that requires me to look at them and at the time I couldn’t face them. Seeing them at there most infested state made me sick to my stomach. Touching them hurt with the pain doubled from the first cut. I knew that I couldn’t ignore them anymore and I knew that stitching myself up was going to be just as painful, but it was the only way I was going to be able to heal and recover and move forward with my life, at a time when it was stopped on dime.

I stood there like a deer in the headlights before running away from the grief the gripped me like a hand squeezing the life out of my heart. My dad was dying of stage four lung cancer and my life was spiraling out of control right before my eyes. I was staring death in the face. The face that once gave me joy and life. I should’ve known sooner, I could see it being sucked out of him, but I was so blinded by my own suffering that I couldn’t see his. Not even now, in this moment of utter devastation, but all those years ago, even when he looked at me with love and joy I could see death living inside of him, stealing his life as he lived. When I look back in hindsight, that hand that felt like it was squeezing the life out of my heart, maybe it was actually shocking it back to life. Like a defibrillator to a lifeless heart, it jolted me awake from my emotional numbness. It’s as if death smacked me in the face and actually revived me. I had no choice in that moment to feel it all, and I mean all of it. From that very first moment of imprint when our eyes locked and our hearts synched, to the heartache and abandonment and rejection, all of it shot out from the depth of my being, exploding like I had just stepped on a landmine. After being neatly packed away where I could forget it, it all flooded me at once and what felt like complete destruction and death, was actually the very beginning of life again.

Years of repressed memories would start to float to the surface of my conscious awareness like debris from my ships wreckage in the ocean of emotion that was still heaving inside of me. Some days the tides would rise and the waves of grief would suck me out into the depths without a warning and I would be fighting against the crashing of loss and love colliding into each other. On those days it became hard to discern what was love from what was loss. Then the tides would recede and I would be laid shoreside on the emptiness of my soul. It felt as though a piece of me was missing, that when I was out at sea I had lost part of me, a part of me that I would never get back. The salt water tears eroded the rough edges of the walls inside my heart. The grief would barrel into them with full force and little by little my daggers I used to sharpen with fear were softened by the gentleness of faith that eased in with prayer after prayer to something out there, something that I knew was bigger than me, but I didn’t know what and I don’t know who, but part of my knew without knowing or needing to understand. I called out with an SOS like a stranded and lone survivor who had been able to withstand the hurricane of heartache and needed rescued.

I had a realization that my dad wasn’t the only one dying, I was too. Because my entire identity had been formed around my Love for him. I lived to please him and in the process I had come to realize that I also died in order to live. In order for me to live a life that pleased my father I had to die spiritually. I had to abandon my hopes and dreams and forsake my identity to be his daughter. While I was alive and breathing physically, I was dead spiritually. I knew I had to begin again, start from the beginning and learn how to walk on my own, how to live without my father who was my life.

With death looming over me like a familiar rain cloud I sought to fix my eyes on hope once more. I felt it under the layers that were being softened by my willingness to sit with the sting of my wounds and clean them up. When one wound would bind up, a new layer of cells would form and reveal the depth of life in death. I could feel the well that had sat empty for years begin to fill up. Very slowly. Barely any water at all and then an inch or two as time progressed and I made an active effort to deal with the pain instead of abandon it or run away from it. Time was my friend again, it was no longer slipping through my hands like quicksand. For the first time it felt like time was on my side and I was going to use it to my advantage. There was a power that had come over me that amidst death, gave me a will to live and not just to please my father, but to live life to its fullest, to not take a single moment for granted, because time was short and I knew that I would never get it back. With the urgency of death knocking on my door I felt a still small voice asking me to let life in. To open the door to life again.

I opened that door with reservation and hesitation, only peaking through a small crack. From the dark side I saw a stream of light flooding in and I touched it with curiosity and felt it rain down on me with a golden warmth of love I had never known before. It lifted me out of fear and into a faith beyond words. I didn’t know what had happened to me on the April night in 2016 as I stood in the shower bawling my eyes out with punch of grief to my freshly wounded heart. It’s as if I would take 1 step forward and then I would take 3 steps back. Falling backward blindly into wounds like traps laid in the wilderness. Taking me captive and holding me in the familiarity of fear that had become my safe place. Jesus was there, but so was the enemy. Jesus was so foreign, but I wanted to give him a shot, so I tried to read his word and I tried to go to church and I tried to pray, but I didn’t know if I was doing it right and I was being met with opposition by people I loved, that I wanted so desperately to please and be accepted by, that I kept Jesus close to my heart, but was far from him in practice. I exchanged the truth for a lie and decided to do it on my own. Doing it alone was all I had ever known, so it seemed right at the time, still waist deep in unresolved trauma, but making headway and feeling optimistic about where life was headed on my own terms, by my own rules. I see that disobedience to my Father in heaven was a reflection of the disobedient and rebellious relationship I had with my dad.

Life was still uncertain at the time. It was as if I was in limbo, stuck in a dance of life and death and I wanted answers that I wasn’t getting from Jesus, from prayer or the Bible or church. I began asking questions out loud in the privacy of my own space and I started to receive answers in ways that appealed more to what I wanted to hear and I was being given practical tools, or so I though at the time, to bring me closer to what I thought I wanted. The enemy no longer taunting me, with anxiety, but is now dressed up as light, to rescue me from darkness and lead me to what looked like solutions to my depression, to my grief and heartache. Of course I’m unaware that it’s Satan masquerading as Lucifer, I’m just grateful for someone or something answering my questions and telling me what to do to ease my uncertainty and pain. Everything seemed to be looking up and I was feeling a sense of hope for my future again, but with this new chance at life I was going to do something different, be someone different. I wasn’t going to waste this opportunity to live life again and live it to the fullest.

I went all in, dove head first into self-help, self-healing, self-love, self-care, self-pleasure. No one else was going to do it for me so I had to do it myself. I’ve always been independent, but tended to be codependent emotionally and I knew the only way to get the results I wanted, physically, mentally and emotionally was going to require me to be different, to live different. So that’s what I did, slowly overtime I made new decisions, decisions for myself. Soon enough that’s what I was doing. Living for my self. To please myself. I had to overcompensate for living my entire life to please my dad, that I had to live fully for me. It felt so good, so liberating to live for myself, to do whatever I wanted. I thought to myself, this is it, I’ve done it. I’ve overcome obesity and crippling anxiety and I’ve fought depression and came out on top. I’ve gone from self-harming insecurity to self affirming my own healing. I was my own savior and I had come and rescued myself from that wreckage and it was all me who had put myself back together again. I was my own worst enemy and had become my own savior. I felt on top of the world, superior to all those around me who were still unconscious to their traumas, who just needed to do the work and heal themselves like I had, then they would learn to love themselves like I had and that no amount of love I had to give would ever be enough for them, so I didn’t need to give it. I just needed to receive it. Because I deserved it. I had become so full of myself that I became blind to others. Whereas when I was child I had become so full of others that I couldn’t see myself. I went from one end of the spectrum to the other. From living for others, to living for myself. I learned great tools while in this “self help-movement” that’s ever so momentous at this time in our culture. Important, practical tools like how to set boundaries, how to manage my anxiety and depression, what my attachment styles are and how to regulate my nervous system and emotions. But I was coupling these holistic health practices with eastern religions. God had become my self. I believed that I was God experiencing myself, that I was an ancient starseeded soul here to save humanity by expanding my energy field and ascending to higher states of consciousness and that Jesus was just one of my many teachers and ascended masters showing me the way. I didn’t believe or know that He was the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Until autumn of 2021, nearly six years after my dads cancer diagnosis and the moment my life began to crumble to pieces. My dad passed in June of 2020, just 3 days after my 29th birthday, while I was deep into the new age movement and so obsessed with myself that I never shared the gospel with him. That still haunts me to this day, that I had the chance to lead him to salvation, but instead I was too focused on being the savior myself. Last year in November I finally gave my life to Christ, fully and wholeheartedly. I cried out to Him while being thwarted by the familiarity of loneliness. All I had at this point in my life was my self and it wasn’t enough, I still felt isolated, alone and crippled by anxiety and depression. As I turned to Christ, the enemy turned against me and he no longer presented as Lucifer the Angel of Light, but Jesus had unmasked him, removed the cataracts from my eyes, that were keeping my spiritually blinded by the philosophy “do what though wilt”. I saw the Truth and I saw that Jesus was the Way forward when I was debilitated by the fear of my life.

I proclaimed Jesus as my Lord and Savior nearly one year ago and began to study His Word and as I’ve committed and submitted to His way, He has given me life again. He’s made me a new creation in His Image and has delivered me from the oppression of the enemy. Jesus Christ has redeemed me, he’s called me by name and has slowly restored my life, rebuilding me from ashes to my feet firmly rooted on solid ground. It’s impossible to describe to you with words what he’s done for me. He has given me the peace I sought since that moment of imprint the day of my birth in my dads arms. He has given me that joy and love I used to receive when I looked at the face of my dad as an infant, the pure excitement I would feel when he would pick me up and set me in his lap. The Lord has taken those memories and used them to alter my genes. He hasn’t just restored my life physically, it’s deeper than that, he’s restored my life on a cellular level. He’s taken what the enemy used as a weapon against me, and has made it my greatest defense, as my victory over life and death. He used the life altering loss of my dad to usher in love multiplied by His grace from my Father in heaven. He upholds the very fiber of my being, fills that bigness inside of me that used to be a void far as east is to the west. To this day I still don’t know what my future holds and yes that can still be terrifying, even paralyzing sometimes, but now I know and am known by the one who holds my future. The forerunner of my faith, that goes before me and leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake. That’s the redeeming power of His Love, that in Him I am complete, who is the head of all principality and power. And I will love him with an everlasting love for the rest of my life, the one who gave me life and death and life again.

“Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

‭‭John‬ ‭3‬:‭3‬ ‭NKJV‬

Thank you for reading, Ashley <3