Of course, having been raised by an alcoholic father, I felt powerless most of my childhood. However, my powerlessness was also the driving power behind my reason to study in my younger days. I wanted to leave my home life. I wanted to escape the darkness associated with my father’s alcoholism. In order to do that, I had to study. Having been born into a family with no financial promise, I knew it was up to me, up to what kind of school I get into in order for my life to have some sense of control. So to have that control and power to remove myself from the chaos and destruction, I studied.

My first leaving came when I finally moved away from my hometown to go to college in a big city. There, I would meet my first husband who would move me from my home country to a foreign place half way around the world. Every time I hit a dead-end with my struggles with bipolar episodes, I would conjure up a plan to leave. I was just simply incapable of staying in one place. When my long marriage ended, of course, I have fled, once again. I moved eight times in just six years. I changed jobs even more frequently.

As I look at my honest résumé on my desk that I have been working on for the last two weeks, I see my chaotic pattern in just one page. I have been literally all over the place. My frequent moves and job changes so clearly reflect my ever-changing moods and bipolar episodes. I don’t need to refer to my therapist’s psychotherapy notes to pinpoint the past episodes that I suffered and endured. They are written right here, on the résumé that I created myself. It says loud and clear: I was a very confused person.

It’s a miracle that I lived in my current state for the last four years. Four consecutive years  in one U.S. state and four years in a stable mental state? This is huge for me. It shows that God’s miraculous healing of my mental illness really took place. It shows a different side of me that is new even to myself. Every morning I wake up with a sense of new revival. Just like my fast growing baby, I, too, am growing, into some being, a potential that only God has the knowledge of.

I am not fond of analyzing my past anymore. Whatever moves I have made in the past, the inevitable fact is this: It was because of all those moves that made my arrival here possible. As I have stated tonight at my Al-Anon meeting, I don’t know where I am going, but I am glad to be here today. What I have wrote in my post Lilyboat almost four years ago still rings true today: I don’t know where I’m going, but I am going.

Today, I have nothing to fear anymore. I may not know where I am going here on this earth, but I do know one thing: I am ultimately going to the place where I belong. Casting all else aside, for the joy of my Christ, my heart is filled with His fire, only His fire. All else pales in the light of my eternal destination. Nothing else matters. Only Christ.

 

“We run to Your throne

Where we belong

Every heart will sing

That Jesus is Lord

Casting all else aside

For the joy of our Christ

Let Your glory fall

Our hearts are filled with Your fire”

-Where we belong by Hillsong

 

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

– Ephesians 4:14-16