La Limpieza

The God that I know is loving, gracious and forgiving. But the God I have always felt? He’s Old Testament: wrathful, disciplinary and jealous. This view entirely ignores the redemption parts of the Old Testament and basically the whole character of Jesus, but no matter what I read or what I knew as head-knowledge, I was never able to shake the feeling that God was always ready to smite me back into place anytime I disobeyed.

So when I became a victim of sexual battery a month ago, I registered it as God finally punishing me for turning my back on Him earlier this year. I had chosen obsession with losing weight and working out over God, so how could I complain when someone finally found me physically attractive. Even if he proved it through sexual assault. After all, this was what I had wanted, and this was what I deserved.

It would take me by surprise just how not okay I would be after the incident. After all, I was the mighty Josephine Liu, who was unfazed by the thought of running through fire or electrical shocks. I liked danger, and MMA, and driving ridiculously, illegally fast. I was tough. I was supposed to be so much tougher than this. But yet, no matter how many times I told myself to just suck it up and deal with it, or that girls in third-world countries go through worse and live with it, I couldn’t move on.

Someone had entered my life, violated not just my body, but also my dignity, and walked away scotch-free. I didn’t go to the police after the incident, afraid that people would blame me for wearing yoga pants, and think that I had been asking for it since yoga pants can be considered immodest. So by the time I came to my senses the next morning and filed a police report, it was too late. He was long gone, leaving me behind to drown in my shame and taking with him any hope I would have for closure.

I would spend endless nights reliving the incident, succumbing to feelings of dirtiness that couldn’t be rubbed or washed off, and then to nightmares of snakes crawling beneath my skin and writhing up and down my legs. As a way to fight back against my own subconscious, I would begin reimagining how I should have responded. Instead of walking away without saying a word like I did in real life, in my mind, I had the liberty of doing all the violent, violent things to him I wish I had done. My love for Bruce Lee movies and Castle reruns suddenly paid off. Not only did I have the technical prowess to kill him, I had creative ways of getting rid of the body too.

My reaction could have been worse. One of my initial thoughts was to get the snakebite piercings I always wanted, thinking that if I had them, maybe I wouldn’t have looked like such an easy victim. But even the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was victimized, and we all know what she looked like, so I couldn’t justify becoming Girl with the Cross Tattoo to myself. But killing the guy over and over again in my mind? That was so much healthier. Especially when I didn’t tell anyone what was going on. I was too embarrassed by how a stranger could break down in minutes the walls I had built up over years and so easily taint my purity and my self-respect. So I turned my shame into rage against God.

It was God who had allowed this guy to treat me like trash, and it was God who allowed him to get away it. It was God who didn’t protect me, and it was God who used this to try to teach me a lesson. So it would not be God that I turned to in the midst of my pain. No, I would swallow a bitter pill, hold it inside me during the day and let it devour me whole at night.

I began the Honduras Medical Missions Trip with this burden still on my shoulders. It had been two weeks since the incident. The nightmares were less frequent and the rage would now only spring up at night. Few people had known to begin with, and even fewer came with me to Honduras. I had hid it for so long, I figured it was just one more week to get over with. But when we finally arrived on Saturday, I knew that I could either hold God at arm’s length and waste the week not pouring my heart into my service, or I could give him the reins to use me and to break me as I needed to be.

What would begin as a missions trip to serve the people of Honduras with physical and spiritual aid would end up physically and spiritually healing me. But it wouldn’t be an easy victory. After praying Sunday morning for God to show me what He needed to show me, we went to the local church where we would be serving the next few days. After we were introduced to the congregation as the medical missions team from the United States, people from the church flocked to where we were to shower us with hugs and kisses and their thanks. But when the men of the church began to pull me close to hug me, a fit of rage rose inside me as their faces started to fade out and all I could see was his, and him touching me and violating me all over again. Though I kept a smile on my face, inside I wanted to kill them all. I had no peace that night, lying awake after a nightmare of being overtaken by a crowd, and allowed my anger at my vulnerability to shift into imaginary violence against my attacker once again.

And though my rage threatened to overtake my desire to overcome my bitterness towards God, I knew He had allowed it to happen for a reason, if only to show me how much the incident still controlled me and twisted me into the monster that I had become. But God surrounded me with wise and patient Christian brothers and sisters to speak truth to me as I finally opened up about what had been going on, and I began to meditate on my favorite Psalm each morning to give me strength to face the day:

“When my soul was embittered,

when I was pricked in heart,

I was brutish and ignorant;

I was like a beast toward you.

Nevertheless, I am continually with you;

you hold my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel,

and afterward you will receive me to glory.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

-Psalm 73:21-26

My flesh, my arms, my legs, my mouth, everything I had ever relied on had failed to protect me when I needed them the most. My heart was not strong enough to overcome the feelings of shame that followed, and I turned to sin instead to subdue it. But God promised to be my strength and my portion forever, so I began to trust that He would carry me through the week, and that He would wash me clean of what had happened.

Thursday afternoon, my translator and I shared the Gospel with a woman who had suffered through atrocious things done to her by other people. Her husband used to tie her hands and feet together and beat her, and his second wife had suffocated her son. My translator told her that she needed to forgive, as Christ had forgiven her. I was taken back when I heard this, thinking that what her husband and his second wife had done to her were unforgivable, but as she began to nod her head and open up to the idea of forgiveness, I knew that God was showing me that I too needed to forgive my attacker if I was to ever have peace.

The next day was our last day working at the brigade sites, and we ended the week by honoring the ordinance of communion and the tradition of foot washing. But before we started, our host at the mission house showed us a video depicting the crucifixion, when Christ was beaten, whipped and humiliated before dying on the cross, bearing the shame that I so deserved. How many times had I shared the Gospel the day before? How many times had I shared the Gospel in college? Every time repeating the same lines of how He had died for our sins, but numb to the weight of what He put Himself through to show me that He loved me. Me, who shook my fist at Him when someone else sinned against me. Me, who thought He had given me up to the world when He had conquered it so that I may have peace (John 16:33).

Josh would drive the point home as we started Communion by leading worship:

“The nails in Your hands

The nails in Your feet

Tell me how much You love me.

The thorns on Your brow

They tell me how

You bore so much shame to love me.

And when the Heavens pass away

All Your scars will still remain

And forever they will say

Just how much You love me.”

Before entering the room for the foot washing, I grabbed my gray UCLA hoodie last minute from my bed. After the incident, I never wore yoga pants in public again, but wore them that night because I had bug bites on my calves and wanted pants I could roll up around my knees. And as Amos and Enrique began to go around the room, it dawned on me that I was wearing the exact same thing I had worn the night of the incident, completely unplanned (by me, at least). So when Amos began washing my feet, symbolizing Christ washing the feet of His disciples in John 13, I realized God had literally answered my prayer to be washed clean, literally; not just my feet, but the dirtiest parts of me, my sins of the past and of the future, my attacker’s sin against me, the parts of my body where he had touched me, all of me. God had brought me in a full circle so that I could stand before Him unashamed. As I stepped onto the second-floor patio that I loved to do devos on, it was raining, and between the foot washing, the rain and my tears, I could feel God say, “It is finished.” I had found my closure with God.

Now I was ready to find closure with my attacker. I prayed that night for God to give me the strength to forgive, but I didn’t know what that meant or what that would look like. I would probably never see him again. I would never be able to be nice to him or to tell him that I forgave him to show my heart. So what would it take? I asked Emily the next morning how I would know when I’ve forgiven him. Wasn’t it enough that I stopped killing him in my mind? I asked. Emily replied that I would know I have fully forgiven him when I could say I want to see him in heaven, when I could pray for his soul to be saved, which was coincidentally the last thing in the world I wanted to do at that moment.

I realized then what God might have wanted to show me all along, just how much love it took for Him to forgive me, to not only give me mercy, but to also give me grace. In my mind, I thought it was enough that I had stopped imagining doing violent things to my attacker, withholding from him what I thought he so deserved (to die a new, creative death every night). Mercy, just like when Christ died on the cross to take away my punishment of Hell, which I so deserved. But Christ didn’t just stop there. He gave me what I didn’t deserve. He gave me grace by granting me eternal life in Heaven with Him, something I could have never imagined granting my attacker. After all, he had sinned against me when I had done nothing to deserve it. Just like how I sinned against a perfect, holy and just God, and didn’t, and still don’t, and never will deserve heaven. That is love that I will never be able to comprehend, least of all give.

I opened my mouth and prayed for my attacker three days after arriving back home from Honduras. I’ll admit I cringed when I said it. It literally caused me pain to envision him in heaven, so suffice it to say I’m not sure just how much of the prayer I meant. Somewhere over 0 but less than 2.5%. But I’ll get there, someday. It’s true what they say, “To err is human. To forgive is divine.” Thankfully, God promises to give me the strength to forgive where I cannot. 2 Corinthians 12:9, “But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

The God that I know is the God that I feel: loving, gracious and forgiving, perfect, holy and just. He is more than I could ever sum up in words or explain to someone or even feel through experience. He is the God of the Old and the New Testament, and the Living Word. He is the Messiah, my Redeemer, and my Prince of Peace.

The God that I know is my God who loves me, and nothing in this life or the next can ever separate me from His love. (Romans 8:31-39)

Noise

I'm used to laughing, screaming, shouting. Not me of course. I never laugh or shout. I merely form disgruntled noises that my family has learned to ignore. But the laughing, screaming and shouting of my younger sisters and brother who possess the excellent sense of humor that must have mutated in my genes. I'm used to my dogs barking, at me (the worst owner of them all), at my parents (still mediocre at best), at every single thing that moves and sometimes even the things that don't. My cat barfing, sometimes purring, sometimes both simultaneously in some wicked way to tell me that watching me later clean up his barf will undoubtedly bring him pleasure. My baby sister slamming on the piano keys in some failed attempt to make something that could have been music but stopped far and long and away from it. The dishwasher churning from the hundreds of cups we use and forget about and leave in all random corners of the house. The dryer beeping its heated exhaustion from doing the 10th load of laundry of the day (Zoey having colored herself with food for the 20th time of the day). The sizzling of hot greasy Chinese food as my mom prepares for dinner. The constant creaking of the floor above, from my brother doing pushups in his room or my father restlessly pacing. I'm used to constant, incessant noise that I can't get away from. I'm used to lying awake at night, trying to ignore the sounds of my little sister texting or my little brother playing video games downstairs. I'm used to leaving home just to find some peace and quiet at the library or to study at Starbucks because it's easier to drown out the superficial conversations of strangers than to drown out my big, lovable mess of a family that I can never fully ignore.

So my family leaving me home alone to study for my DATs should have been some dream come true. But this, this silence is more deafening than Zoey's most horrid screams. Too much silence is suspicious. I endlessly pace the house built for more than just me, looking for and almost expecting someone else to have moved in. The only noise I make is microwaving the endless frozen TV dinners my mom bought for me before leaving, as my cooking skills are worse than nonexistent. They exist in negative form.

I lie awake at night, listening for the rustling of the trees, the snoring of my dogs, the creaking of the old floor panels as my cat finds a comfortable place to sleep, as the demons of too many detective TV shows keep me from ever closing my eyes and the demons of my past failures haunt me from ever wanting to dream. And I listen, for the laughter, screaming, shouting, churning, slamming, chatting, clanging. The attempt to make something that stopped short of being music, but now stops far and long and away from being noise.

Enough is Enough

I was a freshman in high school the first time I tried making myself throw up. I was determined to be the next Carrie Bradshaw, and convinced myself that I needed to be 20 pounds skinner in order to even scratch the surface of being fabulous. So I spent a whole Saturday afternoon leaned over the toilet, sticking all sorts of objects down my throat in a desperate attempt to become bulimic until my eyes watered from the hard chokes of the mere acid that I purged. When I realized God must have built in some supercharged anti-gag reflex that resisted the powers of fingers, chopsticks, and pens, I Googled guides on how to throw up, trying to figure out if it was worth it to drink ipecac, since I didn't want to kill myself, but only give myself an eating disorder. After three more weeks of trying, I gave up, resigned to the fact that some angel from Heaven must have had his hands placed down my stomach to save me from myself.

Six years later, I'm 14 again. After a close guy friend implied that I needed to lose weight winter quarter, I saw clearly what I had been denying the past year by avoiding mirrors, and spiraled out of control. How could either of us have known what would follow: that what had sprung from good intentions would lead me back to square one. I started counting calories like an obsession, looking up and logging every single thing I ate, and then forcing myself to go to sleep starving so that I wouldn't go over my daily limit. When that stopped working, I started going to the gym three times a day, in the morning right when I woke up, in between classes so that I wouldn't eat lunch, and then again at 11pm, to make sure I zeroed out my calories before I went to bed. At night, I would lie awake, grabbing the fat around my stomach wishing I could somehow claw it away with my nails so that I could stop needing to cover it with big sweaters. When I would finally fall asleep, I would be haunted by nightmares of running away and trying to hide my body from people I used to know when I was skinnier, or hearing people I didn't even recognize call me a "fat-ass." I would wake up with that word pounding in my head, reminding myself that I was a failure and shaming me from even talking to people. The few times I would actually let myself go out to meet new people, I would subconsciously grab my throat, hoping they wouldn't notice the layers of fat that would form around my chin whenever I laughed. 

And this is how sin entangles you. It doesn't even look like sin from the outside. It looks like something permissible, beneficial even. You're convinced it's containable, that you have it under control, until you don't. It looks like a little girl screaming and laughing as she runs in and out of the ocean. She starts at the edge, where the tide first hits the sand, where the water tickles her feet and it feels cool. She hesitantly walks in a little deeper and runs back out giggling when the water hits her knees. Then she's hiking up her dress, afraid to get it wet, and walks to where the water will now cover her bare legs. It's harder to run out now, but she can still do it, and challenges herself to go in once more, this time the last time, this time just a little deeper than before, and the water hits her faster than she predicted, the water is higher than she remembered, and it overtakes her until she's drowning, gasping for air, her soaking dress pulling her down while the waves crash over her. 

In the same way, my sin never looked like sin from the beginning. It looked health, it looked like fitness, it looked like being a good steward of my body. But when counting calories wasn't enough, I went in deeper. When working out wasn't enough, I went in even deeper, still convinced I was so close to dry land. And when that wasn't enough, I was back to 14 years old, leaning over a toilet, trying desperately to make myself throw up after each meal, drowning in my own fear of being a failure while failing at even throwing up.

I grew bitter at God, bitter that He had designed me to look the way I did and designed me so that I couldn't just go to bulimia as a quick-fix for my problem. I stopped going to church and large group regularly, and stopped praying entirely. So I closed my eyes and let myself drown, falling deeper and deeper into unknown territory, until I couldn't even remember what it was like to not wake up in the morning looking up pictures of models and then mentally go through what I was allowed to eat that day and what I would have to do at the gym by the end of the night. 

I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until my old small group leader Renee visited one day, and handed us back letters we had written to ourselves a year ago. I suddenly remembered every single thing I had written without even opening the letter, all the hopes and dreams I had as a freshman who had experienced firsthand the transforming power of Christ's love and was now ready to take on the world, or at least my piece of it, for Christ. I remembered looking forward to passionately sharing the gospel and growing in my relationship with God my sophomore year, and even small group leading my junior year. But at that moment, at the end of what I had imagined would be a fruitful sophomore year, I was just as pathetic as I was when I was a freshman in high school, worshipping Seventeen magazine and Jessica Alba's body and thinking that was life. I could now do 50 push-ups and run 10Ks, but I was miserable, lonely, ashamed, worn out, and so, so far from God. I truly had nothing to show for. 

I gave myself the deadline of May 3^rd on my 20^th birthday to humble myself, repent, and come back to God. Two days after my birthday, I prayed honestly for the first time in months and admitted to God I couldn’t make it in this world without Him. I felt stupid, not knowing how to say how alone I felt, and then just saying aloud “I feel alone.” I felt like I was talking to a wall, probably because I was literally facing a wall when I was praying, but it felt stupid. And I think I imagined that God would send down some fiery thunderbolt and zap my heart and I would feel this electric shock throughout my body and feel instantly holy and loved and at peace, and never ever ever again want to count calories or go to the gym ever again. But it didn’t work like that. Monday morning came, I got dressed to go to the gym, worked out, showered and changed into a new set of gym clothes, and prepared to go the gym again later that night. I ate lunch, and counted my calories, and went on the Women’s Health Magazine website to look up new workouts, like I always did on Mondays. By the time I got to dinner, I realized my day had looked exactly like it did the Monday, Wednesday and Friday the week before, and that nothing had changed. But I hadn’t wanted it to. I wanted to be on good terms with God but still hold on to my lifestyle and my attitude and my habits. So a very wise discipler held me accountable against my will so that I wouldn’t go to the gym again at night.

          

The next day I repented again, and waited for the thunderbolt of self-acceptance to zap me and make me never ever ever want to count calories or go to the gym again. When that didn’t happen, I repented again the next day and the day after that, until I realized I had probably mixed up the God of Greek mythology, Josephine’s imagination, and the Bible somewhere up in my mind. So I patiently waited on the Lord, not exactly knowing what to expect.

The change wasn’t overnight, but slowly and surely, my heart changed. I stopped weighing myself every morning, and stopped going to the gym three times a day, until it was done to two, and then down to one, until two Wednesdays ago, the first weekday all quarter, I didn’t go to the gym at all. I started allowing myself to have dessert every once in a while without beating myself up about it later, and to actually laugh without holding my throat. I started to enjoy the fellowship that God had graced me with, and realized how much I had missed being a part of the body of Christ. I started to view my inability to be bulimic as a blessing rather than a curse, and the Christians who had held my hand every step of the way as the true angels that had saved me from myself. Most importantly, I enjoyed His presence and Him alone.

Chris Gee asked this morning at Crossroads, “How much more do you need to be 100% satisfied?” Someone had asked me this same question a few months ago about how much more weight I needed to lose before I was satisfied. I said just a little more. But we both knew I was lying. I would not have been satisfied if I had lost five pounds more, ten pounds more, or even twenty pounds more. Even when I was twenty pounds lighter two years ago coming in as a freshman, I remember eating raw broccoli for dinner, even when I was already a size 0, but striving to be still skinnier.

I tried walking away from Christ because I was convinced I had found something better but couldn’t. I invested my time in something else and wasted it. I poured my heart in the things of this world and broke it. I wanted more, just a little more, but it wasn’t enough, and could never have been enough. I know now that only Christ will be enough, so enough is enough.

           

I don’t know if I’ll ever be at a point where I can stop mentally counting calories before I eat, or if I’ll ever completely accept what I see in the mirror, but one thing I do know, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13-14)

            

My end was destruction, my god was my body, and my glory in my shame, with my mind set on earthly things. “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables even to subject all things to himself.” (Philippians 3:19-21)

                      

So I end with this, I cry with the same cry for God that David prayed in the desert:

"O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;

my soul thirsts for you;

my flesh faints for you,

as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,

beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life,

my lips will praise you.

So I will bless you as long as I live;

in your name I will lift up my hands.

My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,

and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips,

when I remember you upon my bed,

and meditate on you in the watches of the night;

for you have been my help,

and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.

My soul clings to you;

your right hand upholds me."

          

-Psalm 63: 1-8