The Distant Shore

For most of my life, I have heard that doing things for Jesus would get you rewards or treasures in heaven, or how the treasures in heaven are far more pure than anything you can find on earth, or sowing on the earth would add tot he stores of treasures for you in heaven. Whether this is true or not, whether this is accurate or not is not what I am after.

After living a life of abandonment and rejection ( and NO, my mother did not abandon me), I have learned to accept that isolation throughout the majority of my life. My biological father left my mother and I so that he could live his life freely as a gay man. Christian beliefs aside, that bothered me the least. What bothered me the most was the fact that he was willing to just walk away, as if I never existed, almost as if he regretted that he now had offspring as proof that he had sexual relations with a woman. I don’t know exactly what he felt, I only know how it felt to me.

As a child with a disability (60% deaf), I would be rejected by other kids. Relentlessly made fun of, tormented, and even assaulted. At first, it would be the kids who could hear that would harass me because I couldn’t hear like them, but then kids with other disabilities would reject me as well. I would eventually go to a school for the dead, thinking that I would find acceptance there, only to face the same ridicule from the deaf, because I wasn’t fully deaf.

I would later be jumped and thrown into a rock drainage that emptied into the Mississippi River, breaking my shoulder. I had to climb out and up the embankment with one arm.

At one point, I grew close to a few people, one of whom was a girl that I was in a hearing-impaired program with. She and I had a mutual friend who was also in the program, and we would spend much of our time together in school and out. But that friendship would eventually end with her being murdered by that very person we thought was our friend.

It would be at that point that my life would nose-dive into the blackness that can envelop the human heart like a diseased veil, suffocating and life and joy. I turned to drudge, violence, and the occult. I wandered the roads across the U.S., trying to run away from the failure that I was, looking for something that wouldn’t remind me of my darkness.

I could tell of more, and maybe I will as time goes on. But I need to tell this part, and this may the most important part, at least it is for me.

In my walk in this life, I chose to turn to Jesus. I was broken, dead inside, and empty. In some ways, I still am. And even to this day I still hear about the treasures in heaven, the mansions, the streets of gold, and all the finer things that people dream would be in heaven. But after the life I have lived, I would GLADLY give it all up, if I could have even just a brief moment on a distant shore. It would be worth giving up to stand on a shoreline and have Jesus put his arms around me and tell me “It’s over. You are here now with me. No more pain, no more sorrow, no more rejection. You will never suffer like that again.”