An eight year old girl sits at her grandmother’s house and peers from across the room at the casket where her father lies. She wonders why her dad chose to put a gun to his head, leaving her alone and unloved.Four years later she lies sleeping ... Read more

An eight year old girl sits at her grandmother’s house and peers from across the room at the casket where her father lies. She wonders why her dad chose to put a gun to his head, leaving her alone and unloved.Four years later she lies sleeping in her bed. She awakens, alarmed, to see her step-dad standing over her with a grin on his face and his hands under her covers.A month later her mother rejects her cry that she’s not safe, and chooses to defend and stay with the drunk who sneaks into her daughter’s room at night.Three years later she is in a park with her only friend who convinced her to leave the house in the middle of the night to chase after drink and adventure, only to be abandoned over and over again.Two years after that she runs off with a man seven years older than her to escape the rejection she has felt by everyone important to her in her seventeen years of life.During her first year of marriage, she sits frozen in a car outside a boat marina where her husband has left her to wait while he goes inside to have sex with another woman.She would spend the next 25 years paralyzed in fear and anger…unable to see, unable to feel, unable to love or to be loved, her dreams dashed; her hopes faded. This broken piece of china has been tossed aside like an old used paper plate. Over decades of darkness, lost in a world of hardened people and broken promises, sin and evil take hold; no light is getting through…and no one cares, including her.I spent most of my life waiting for apologies that never came, hoping those who had wronged and hurt me would tell me how sorry they were for what they had done to me. Better yet, I felt justified in wanting them to suffer horrible deaths or meet with awful tragedy in their own lives as God’s revenge on my behalf. I needed them to pay the price for their evil deeds, even if they were drunk at the time and did not know what they had done. Once I had my apologies and they suffered I would be able to live a life of purpose and meaning.They needed to apologize. Only then would I be capable of loving and being loved, and finally find peace and joy in my world. Then I could forget: Forget I never got to know my father; forget my step-dad thought I was his property rather than his daughter; forget my mother chose not to protect me; forget that I am a bitter, broken person because no one, not one single person in the world, ever cared for me one little bit. The apologies would fix everything. Or so I thought.Then one day, I looked up with squinted, tear-stained eyes, and saw a faint distant light. I would soon see the tiny glimmer as a miracle in the making, and everything began to change. Less