Brave Surrender Page 5

  His eyes bugged out as his jaw dropped open in horror. I could practically see the steam coming out of his flaming ears. “Why did you do that?” he practically shouted. With that, he abruptly turned on one foot and stormed offstage. I shrugged my shoulders, wondering why he was so upset. My mom thought it was best that I back out of the event, and I ended up not singing.

  The following Monday at school, he kept me after class and chewed me out. “You tried to change years of tradition!” he yelled.

  Little did I know that this would go on to be something true of my life in general. My song change decision was apparently offensive enough for him to kick me out of choir and forbid me from ever joining again.

  Other than the choir teacher, however, I charmed my other teachers, and they all loved me. I played basketball, ran track, was a cheerleader, joined student council, and poured out a vast amount of passion and excitement in the Thespians Society. And even though I had been banned from choir, I still found a way to keep singing. I performed at pep rallies and sang the national anthem for various sporting events.

  I also decided that even though I still didn’t know how to resolve the pain of my past, my mom’s happiness was extremely important to me. Because of my anger and pain, it was hard for me to go to church. I felt confused. I believed in God and loved God, but I felt angry with Him and struggled to articulate those heavy emotions. But going to church was something very clearly important to my mom, and it made her happy to be involved there. So I wanted to do it. She was on the worship team, and she brought me on to sing with her for various things.

  Sometimes I felt flashes of the little girl who met Holy Spirit at a church camp and discovered she loved to worship, but I refused to open my heart to that desire again. I knew how to go through the motions and appear very involved while never fully surrendering to Jesus. My love and care for my mom and for the people at the church were real and genuine, but my relationship with Jesus was not.

  Another Crash

  My sister and I saw our biological father every other weekend and for a few weeks in the summertime. He often made the long drive down to southern Oregon where we lived to see us or pick us up. Our relationship with him was somewhat fragile. He had never been the same after his motorcycle wreck, and the distance between us made the relationship strained and difficult. But we did love him, and we knew that even when he wasn’t good at showing it, he really loved us.

  During the summer between my sophomore and junior year, we took a trip to northern Oregon so my sister and I could see our dad, and my mom, George, and my brother could visit my grandparents. When we pulled up to Grandma and Papa’s house, they met us outside and pulled my mom aside. I could tell by the look on their faces that something was wrong. My mom walked back over to us and told my sister and me to get back in the car.

  My dad had been in another bad motorcycle wreck. It was about a thirty-minute drive to the hospital, and I remember feeling terrified and having so many questions that no one could answer. I cried the whole way as my mom prayed out loud.

  When we arrived at the hospital, we were told that he was in the ICU and was somewhat stable but was in a coma and on a breathing machine. We asked if we could see him, and the doctor obliged but warned us that he looked really bad. It was a serious wreck. I followed the doctor down the hallway, and as we drew close to a dimly lit room, I could hear all sorts of machines buzzing, beeping, and pumping. I came around the doorway and there was my dad, surrounded by machines, his body swollen, bruised, and slightly bloody, and his face almost unrecognizable.

  I started trembling. I walked slowly toward the bed and reached out a shaking finger to touch his bloody knuckles. Something in the pit of my stomach was churning, trying to erupt out of me. It was a cry—the cry of a little girl, a cry that had been stuffed down for many years. More than fear over the current circumstances, it emerged from years of pain, anguish, and confusion. Unable to hold it in any longer, I let loose with a scream.

  “DADDY! DADDY! DADDY!”

  The moment these words burst from my mouth, his body started to convulse and move. Alarms and machines started going off, and within seconds, a team of nurses and doctors came running in. They pried my hand from him and pulled me out of the room. I didn’t want to stop screaming. I wanted him to wake up. I felt like he was responding to the sound of my voice, just as he had done the first time he was in a coma.

  After they ushered me out to the hallway, I was suddenly overwhelmed with dizziness and couldn’t see straight. I fell to the floor in a heap of sobs. Someone picked me up and helped me back to the waiting room, my sister and my mom close behind.

  We found out later that a car driver had not seen him and turned into him. He was wearing a helmet this time, but unfortunately, it was just not quite enough to limit the damage. The doctor explained that there was a lot of scar tissue and deterioration in his brain from the first accident and that his chances of survival and coming out of the coma were very low. People rarely survived two head injuries with that kind of severity. If he did wake up, the doctor thought there was little likelihood of him functioning normally.

  My sister and I visited him every day. We talked and sang to him. During each visit, I asked him to squeeze my hand if he could hear me, and I swore he did every time, though the other adults in the room looked at me with pitying smiles of disbelief.

  To the shock and amazement of all the doctors, one day my dad woke up. Not only did he wake up, but he slowly began to regain his faculties and functions. Like the first time, it required a very long, difficult journey with countless hospital visits and rehab, but he again regained the ability to walk and talk. It was tough for us as teens to fully understand everything we saw during the healing process. Once again, he was not quite the same person. As his brain was trying to heal, he said funny things, claimed he remembered things that didn’t actually happen, and had wild fits of rage and unresponsiveness. Those were very scary moments. But little by little, he continued to improve and function somewhat normally again.

  Fear versus Faith

  Then, while my dad was still rehabilitating, another blow fell. I walked through the door after school one day and instantly knew something was wrong. There were about four other people at our house, all of them sitting in the living room, and I could see that everyone was teary-eyed but kind of trying to hide it. My mom was sitting on the couch close to George, holding his hand.

  “Kim, I need to talk to you,” my mom said. “Can we go to your room?”

  “Okay,” I said. My voice sounded soft and squeaky, like I had forgotten how to talk.

  We walked to my room and sat down on my bed. My mom took a breath and said, “I have breast cancer. I’m going to have a big surgery, and I’ll need to have chemotherapy after that. But I’m going to fight this, and I know that God will heal me,” she said, squeezing my hand.

  I could barely hear anything she said after her first sentence: “I have breast cancer.” I was stunned. Was my mom going to die? How long do we have? What is chemotherapy? My mind was running wild, and I was so scared and in shock. I didn’t know what to do or say, and nothing made sense.

  I wanted to be the only kind of Kim I knew how to be—the Kim who takes care of her mom. I wanted to find a way to fix this or at least make it better. But as this situation unfolded, it was abundantly clear, again and again, that it was completely out of my control. I watched as my mom underwent a huge surgery that left her with scars and tubes hanging out of her body. I helped her change out the tubes, cleaned her wounds, and hugged her while she cried as she looked at herself in the mirror. I watched as all her hair fell out during chemotherapy, which made her terribly sick. There were times she’d lie in bed, too weary and sick to move. A few of those times, I opened her door to check on her and was struck with terror at the sight of her lying there, motionless. It took all my courage to walk over to the bed and reach out a shaking hand to see if she was still breathing.

  George showed incredi
ble strength and love for my mom during this ordeal. He was attentive to her, carrying her, encouraging her, making her laugh, and helping her in any way he could. He stayed positive and confident and spoke with a lot of faith whenever we discussed how Mom was doing. But I also saw him in tender moments when he prayed for her or cried with her.

  Both George and my mom seemed to have a level of confidence that their prayers would be answered and that she would survive this ordeal, but I struggled to share this feeling with them. I remember one week when George was away on a business trip, my brother, who was only seven at the time, had the flu. My mom couldn’t take care of him, not only because of how sick she was, but because she couldn’t afford to be exposed to a virus with an immune system compromised from the chemotherapy.

  I stayed home from school to take care of my brother and my mom. I remember part of me feeling glad to have the chance to do what I had always done and take care of everyone, while another part of me was terrified and worried every day about whether my mom would survive, and yet another part was angry, tired, and completely ticked off at this God who had seemingly abandoned me as a child and just wouldn’t let up with the suffering. It was like we couldn’t catch a break. Where is He?—the question of my freaking life.

  From the moment Mom told us her diagnosis, she had repeatedly stated that she believed God would heal her and she would be okay. She showed incredible strength as she continued to work through the whole ordeal and attend school functions. At the time, I couldn’t tell if she really believed that or if she was just trying to appear strong and full of faith for us, her kids. But one day, some people from our church came to our house to pray for my mom and anoint her with oil. She also had us, her children, pray for her. Afterward, she told us that during that prayer time, she’d had a moment of breakthrough where she felt like God healed her. At the time, I only thought, I’ll believe it when I see it.

  Yet as the days and weeks unfolded, she proceeded to recover, defying all the odds and astounding the doctors. Her strength returned more and more every day, and she began to look and sound more like herself. She had periodic blood tests to see if she still had cancer inside her, and every time she got her results back, there was no sign of cancer. The doctor told her that the cancer was in “remission” and would most likely show back up, but my mom absolutely refused to believe that. Test after test came back cancer-free.

  My mom had her last surgery when I was in my first year of college. She came down to California to visit me, and I threw her a “Happy No More Surgeries” party. I decorated her hotel room, bought her gifts, and even made two cakes that were shaped and frosted to look like breasts! To this day she has been cancer-free, proving all the doctor’s predictions false and confirming that God had indeed healed her.

  A Long Slide Down a Dark Hole

  Enduring these life-threatening crises in my parents’ lives intensified the primary areas of pain, fear, and confusion in my life. On the one hand, I was, in a way, strangely comfortable in the face of trauma, because that was what I had lived throughout my life. It was refreshing and familiar to have moments and opportunities to step back into my old role of taking care of my family members. Yet on the other hand, the fact remained that I was reliving the horror that had turned my world upside down as a child—nearly losing my father, watching his tortured recovery, and then facing the possibility of losing my mother as well.

  At the center of this was my wrestling match with God. He was the only one we could turn to in these terrifying circumstances, yet He was also the one who had let these things happen throughout my life. So even when both of my parents survived and the stories had a good ending, this did little to bring healing to my heart. Instead, my pain, my struggle with my identity, and my sense of loneliness and being abandoned by God intensified.

  It was in this season that I began to live a double life. At home, I stayed busy taking care of everyone and trying to keep them in good spirits. At school and in the community, I was the happy girl who participated in everything and was an overachiever; I competed in pageants and won, gaining recognition in our small town. Many parents knew me as the reliable babysitter they could count on to take care of and love their children. And I continued to attend and be active at church with my family.

  At the same time, I was locking my bedroom door at night, cranking up the volume on my TV or CD player, and climbing out of my window to sneak out with friends. I dated boys and tried to feel some sense of love and significance. I secretly went to parties and drank, trying to numb my pain. Somehow my mom usually found out about these parties and asked me if I had been there, but every time I lied and denied it.

  When I was alone in my room, the same lies that had taunted me throughout my life returned, only now they were louder and more convincing than ever: You are alone. Your life is not worth living. You should end it. These made sense to me. These were the messages that seemed to echo through everything that had happened to me since I was a child. I heard them in my loneliness as a little girl crying in bed at night, wishing her parents had never divorced. I felt them in the way my former stepdads had made me feel worthless. They spoke in my shame when I had apparently selfishly wanted attention as a little girl dancing and worshiping at church.

  I couldn’t see any value for myself or a place for me in this world. I didn’t know how to be a kid. I had been robbed of my childhood and told it was no longer my job to take care of my family. Despite all the roles I was playing at school, church, and in the community, I had zero sense of identity. The thought of trying to grow up was absolutely terrifying, because I thought I would just relive what I had already gone through, except as an adult. I couldn’t see any hope of a different outcome in my life.

  Eventually the lies, hopelessness, pain, and rage began to reach unbearable levels of torment inside me, and death increasingly seemed like the only way out.

  One day at church, I was sitting alone during the ministry time while everyone around me was praying or wrapped up in a moment with Jesus. A friend of my mom came over to me, gave me a big hug, and asked if she could pray for me. I agreed, and she began to pray. Then suddenly she stopped, looked up at me with tears in her eyes, grabbed my face, and asked, “Have you been thinking about suicide?”

  I immediately turned red, fought to hold in my tears, and slightly nodded my head. The woman practically started shouting in tongues. She too was a mama, and I knew she loved me. In that moment, she was praying for me, fighting for me, and strongly coming against the lies I was believing. She urged me not to listen to the voice of the enemy speaking lies over me. She told me how special I was and how much I mattered. But for a girl living with years of lies and pain, it was very hard to believe.

  A few months after this encounter, early in my senior year, I was home alone and feeling overwhelmed by it all. I literally could not take another moment of my life, and I saw no way out but one. I went to the medicine cabinet and began grabbing a bunch of different pills. I didn’t know what every item was—everything from Tylenol to my mom’s cancer drugs was in there. When I had a huge handful, I swallowed them and burst into tears, sobbing in desperation. Eventually I blacked out.

  Some time later, I woke up. I was surprised to see that I was still in my house and lying on the floor. I glanced at the clock. Only two hours had passed. I looked around me and saw no vomit or any sign that I had been sick. I felt nothing in my body—not a stomachache, a headache, nothing. Then a thought suddenly floated into my mind.

  There must be a God, and He must really love me.

  I didn’t know why—I couldn’t fathom why—but I knew He had saved me from death. Not because I had done anything to earn being saved. I could only imagine grace that we do not always understand. And in that moment, I felt His love burst through my pain. I hadn’t felt His love so powerfully since I was eleven years old at church camp, but in that encounter, His love had been an awakening. This time it was like a wrecking ball.

  I could hear Him sho
uting His love over me. In a moment, the lies of shame and worthlessness that had bound me like heavy chains seemed to fall away. I felt light as a feather. I knew I was loved. I knew my life had value to Him. I knew I was here for a purpose. I knew I was wanted. These waves of truth flooded my parched soul, and I drank them in like my life depended on it. My shoulders were heaving as I wailed and shouted to Him, “I surrender!”*

  Right there on the floor, I committed my life to Him. Now that I saw the lies for what they were, I felt stirred by a righteous anger to fight for my life and my heart. From that moment on, I was moving forward into a new life of freedom with Jesus—no going back. I had no clear memory as a child asking Jesus into my heart—this was definitely the moment I fully committed my heart to Him and vowed to spend my life pursuing Him.

  Every senior at my high school was required to complete a big project, and I chose to record an album. I chose this project because of how much I loved singing and because I wanted others to hear how much Jesus loves them and come to know the freedom that Christ offered them. I sat in my bedroom alone for hours, writing and rewriting lyrics that attempted to communicate what God had done in me. I used an old recorder that had belonged to my mom to record the melodies I composed for the lyrics.

  I didn’t play an instrument, but I had a producer who listened to the recording and built the music around them. As was the case with most professional songwriters, I don’t think my early songs were very good, but they were so genuine and pure in their expression. I just wanted to create something that expressed my love for Jesus and what He had done for me, and these songs did that with a high level of vulnerability—something that is still characteristic of my writing and singing today. Just as I had done all those years ago at church camp, my response to encountering Jesus was to pour out worship and adoration toward Him. It was the beginning of the pattern that would unfold throughout my life.