#Legacy

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For those of you who don’t know me personally, I grew up in a really small town in North Idaho.  The kind of town where you don’t want to blink or sneeze while driving through or you just might miss it altogether.  The kind of town where everybody knows everyone and everybody thinks they know, or thinks they should know, everything about everyone they know, if you know what I mean?  We moved to this small town when I was four and a half – the “half” being very important here because this meant that I was going to get to start kindergarten that coming fall, and I was very excited about this fact to say the least!  Unfortunately, when that first day of school finally came, my mom ended up with a very disappointed little girl on her hands because apparently Idaho’s deadline for turning five differed from that of California – the state in which we’d moved from.  As a result, I had to wait a whole other year to attend.  Oh the horror!  You’d think the world was coming to an end.  I was crushed.  Little did I know then that just one year later my excitement would begin to give way to dread.

When kindergarten finally came that next year, it caught me completely off guard to learn how little school really had to do with the act of learning.  Remember how I said we’d moved to a town where everybody knew everyone?  Well, my family didn’t really know anyone, and so I quickly discovered that I wasn’t a part of this “everyone” that everybody wanted to know because, not only did I seem to not know the right people, but I also didn’t seem to have the right clothes or the right last name – all of which seemed to add up to me being a nobody, or at least that’s how it felt to me.  And so I responded in a way that all too many young kids who don’t know that they’re a uniquely special creation of God, do – I started chasing after what my world was telling me to be and do, in order to be socially accepted.   As a result of this decision, my grade school years were filled with poor choices and plagued by hurtful memories.

By the time I’d reached the sixth grade, I had shoplifted clothes and had already tried smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol.  I was also affluent in bad language and in the art of kissing boys.  Not to mention all the horrible things I’d participated in doing and saying to other kids, and all this in an effort to be included in the “everyone.”  Despite the fact that I was able to work my way into that group that everybody saw as the “everyone,” I didn’t like or feel good about the person I was now seeing in the mirror – the person that I’d become in order to gain that “status.”  In fact, I even began to loathe the things I’d done and the things I felt I had to continue to do in order to keep said “status.”  Eventually, it got to the point where I was fed up with it all and wanted nothing more than to just be me again – the me who felt free from the pressures of seeking popularity, and no matter what the cost. 

The fed up attitude all ended up coming to a head at my six grade birthday party, where I quickly learned what the true cost would be for standing out against the crowd.  That it meant being an outcast of sorts – a target for relentless teasing and bullying.  And it meant that a large majority of the people I’d worked so hard to be able to call my friends, were in fact not my friends at all because, not only were they not willing to stand up for me, but they actually even turned against me.  In this I was shocked, but in this I did also learn the meaning of a true friend and to treasure those rare gems when found.

The treasure that I found that day was a girl by the name of Becky Gerow.  She was the only one who stood up for me on that birthday, and she was one of only two who remained my friend for the remainder of that difficult year.  Though neither of us had any idea of it at the time, in doing so, Becky had planted a seed that would later grow into a lasting legacy of God’s eternal love through a saving relationship with my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ…but that was still a ways off.