Several years ago, I entered into the worst season of my life. It was as if the sun and the moon flickered out and left me groping in the dark. All of my normal and taken-for-granted reference points vanished.

I wept face to the floor on that inaugural day of The Unfixable Life. I wept out of pain. I wept out of loss. I wept out of anger. I wept over uncertainty. I wept over the sin of this fallen world. I wept over utter helplessness. I wept out of fear.

I remember weeping bitterly again about ten days later. And then my tears dried up for a very long time and I numbly went through the motions of picking up the shards of my shattered life.  I went into survival mode, as is our human instinct when we’re living new days in a barren land and nothing is familiar or comfortable anymore.

Care and counseling ensued. And for months on end, I felt like a bulimic as I emotionally vomited over and over again, thereby reliving the heartache that I never expected to be part of my story.

It’s not like I’d never walked through unthinkable {to me} circumstances. I definitely had. And as we’re prone to assume, one hard road certainly means we won’t have to walk another one, a worse one. But I was wrong. As broken people living in a broken world, our lives break too. Our bodies break. Our circumstances break. Our relationships break. Our “security” and expectations break. Sometimes they bruise. Sometimes they crack. And sometimes they just bust wide open.

The road to recovery has been anything but linear and steady. On the contrary, the road has been unpredictable and scary, filled with potholes, debris, and detours. Recovery can feel like one part progress, three parts relapse.

My long-term counselor said to expect a three to five year recovery process.

At the time, that was not exactly the truth I wanted to swallow. Three to five years seemed like a lifetime. He said people always overestimate the progress they can make short-term but underestimate the progress they can make long-term. When you’re in pain and utter chaos, you just want a fix-it pill, a speedy counseling session, a quick clean-up of the mess, a shot of magical perspective so you can get on with life, upside-down though it feels.

But as I type this, several years now into “recovery,” I get it. I’m not the same. I am both healed and still healing. And I can say with utter certainty, peace, and acceptance that my counselor was exactly right and I’m so glad he was.

Because this long and unexpected journey through The Unfixable Life took me to a destination I never expected. It took me to the foot of the cross where I encountered the Real Jesus, the Healer I’d never really known.

And though I thought the journey was only about one thing, it’s actually changed everything.

Jesus has a way of doing that, of seeping into all sorts of unexpected spaces and turning them upside down in the most needful ways.

Not the flannel-graph Jesus of Sunday School days. Not the doctrinal Jesus constructed and deconstructed by scholars and professional theologians. Not the untouchable and unrelatable Jesus that lived in my own finite understanding and incomplete Christian experience. Not the good example Jesus that I could never come close to imitating. Not the first-century Jesus whose life and culture seemed too removed from my own.

I found the real-to-me Jesus, the touchable Jesus.

The One with scars. The One who came to save me in both the eternal and everyday sense. The One who pursues me with an everlasting love. The One whose radical love compelled him to die for me. The One who journeys beside me every day and is with me in every situation. The One who points me to Truth and who is Truth. The One who grants understanding. The One who is Grace to me and in me and through me. The One who shines the light of his presence into my darkest days and ugliest thoughts. The One who loves me just as I am and not as I think I should be. The One who lovingly shows me my ignorance, error, and sin and simultaneously points me to the cross that paid for all of it so that I can live repentant, forgiven, free, and healed.

In the coming week, I want to tell you about Him, the Jesus who gradually and unmistakably unfolded himself into my story when I began praying a simple and desperate prayer three years ago in the darkest season of my life:

Jesus, make yourself real to me.

He has. And He is.

 ……………………..

A few words as I begin. {Because I have a terrible habit of over-thinking and over-explaining.}

The tagline of my blog is Writing the Real. Usually that takes the form of true confessions about everything from motherhood and mess to everyday grace and practical hacks. I share openly about my faith here and there but hopefully not in a way that’s preachy or esoteric. I certainly try not to. I want the themes of hope and redemption that spring from my faith to be more of an undercurrent rather than a tsunami.

While many of my readers are people of faith, specifically Christian, I hope that all sorts of people feel like they are able to draw some everyday inspiration and encouragement from this space. It’s my sincere desire that they do.

Whoever you are and whatever you believe, I’m glad you’re here.

This week is the week that precedes Easter. Christians all over the world refer to it as “Holy Week.” I hadn’t planned to write specifically about faith or Jesus as we move into this week. Quite frankly, I’m more than a bit uncomfortable with the very idea of it.

But several weeks ago a strange thing happened. I was scrawling a few post ideas in my journal. As I scribbled some supporting notes under one of the headings, my pencil kept writing and writing…and writing. Nine pages, cramping fingers, and many tears and Kleenex later, I finally stopped.

Don’t misunderstand. This wasn’t “magic,” like something out of Harry Potter. It wasn’t involuntary. It was simply an unexpected and uninterrupted flood of words in a way I’ve never experienced. I closed the journal and never even read what I’d written until many days later.

I didn’t know what it was or what it wasn’t, where it would go or not go, who it was for or not for. And I didn’t have to. It was a gift to me and I am deeply grateful. All I know is that a deluge of words about Jesus showed up that day in graphite and on paper, scrawling out my journey to Him and alongside Him these last three years. After much doubting and running the other way, I decided to translate that stream-of-consciousness scrawl into three posts and to offer them up this week, Holy Week.

It’s a story about how The Real Jesus met me and continues to meet me in my Unfixable Life, a story about gaping wounds stitched up, a story about the redemptive beauty of hard stories and the scars they leave, a story about what He’s done for me and what He’s still doing. It’s a story about the cross and about new life. It’s not a story with specific details about my personal hard road; it’s simply a story of how He’s journeyed beside me as I’ve walked it.

But more than anything, it’s a story about the Realness of Jesus and about the invitation extended to all of us to know Him for ourselves.

I hope you’ll join me this week for a series of posts as I share my story, a story that would be terribly incomplete if I didn’t mention Jesus. You should know that I’m way out of my comfort zone talking so much about Jesus. I’m far more relaxed writing about grocery hacks and unfinished laundry. Thank you for prayer and for grace.

The Real Jesus: Part 2. When Wounds Take You So Low, You Can Only Look Up

The Real Jesus: Part 3. Why We Keep Our Scars

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