“For with God nothing will be impossible.” – Luke 1:37
It has been over two months since I posted my first blog. Unfortunately, shortly after that, I suffered a severe back injury. Instead of delving into why I have always hesitated to talk about God, this experience has unexpectedly become a journey towards finding God at the core of my being.
Before this incident, I was under a lot of stress about how to generate income from doing what I love. I lacked support from both my immediate and extended family, and our bills and rent were piling up. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t find a job that brought me even an ounce of joy. On top of all this, my partner and I were managing a community garden called Soul Garden, which we started with the intention of learning about gardening.
DAY ONE: THE DAY I INJURED MY BACK
On the day of the gardening event, we had a lot of preparations to get ready for. My back and legs were already bothering me with pain, which had become a regular occurrence lately. However, I ignored the signals my body was sending and pushed through, determined to get everything done. To add to the chaos, I had lost a receipt that I needed to provide for reimbursement of the garden items. I kept replaying in my mind how I would explain to the lady that I had accidentally thrown it away with another receipt (which was unusual for me, as I usually hesitated to throw receipts away, but that week I hadn’t paid much attention and just discarded them). This situation only amplified my fear of making mistakes.
In the midst of the stress and self-criticism, while I was cleaning out the pots with water, my back suddenly gave out.
Initially, I was determined to heal myself. I had my partner help me back to the apartment, thinking it would just be me and God. However, after 24 hours of crying and pouring my emotions out to God, particularly about my dad and the promise I made to him, I realized that it wasn’t improving my pain. In fact, the pain was unbearable. It’s ironic how we tend to turn to God in moments of great pain, and I found myself doing the same.
THE NEXT MORNING:
After hours of trying everything, I could find the source of the excruciating pain that seemed to be tearing my body apart. It became too much to bear, and I turned to my partner and confessed that I couldn’t handle it anymore. I needed to go to the hospital. It was at that moment that I truly realized how self-dependent I was. The rest of my time in the hospital was spent praying and hoping that they would fix me enough for me to take my relationship with God seriously. I thought, “Just fix me, and then I’ll focus on this.”
To my disappointment, the hospital did nothing. They simply gave me Nurofen and Panadol and sent me back home. At that point, I couldn’t even walk or use the bathroom without help. It was then that I realized this was an opportunity from God for me to address my deep-seated belief that no one can help me except myself, and that I can’t rely on anyone else to fix things.
Over the next few days, I had more sincere conversations with God. I even yelled at Him, and for the first time, I admitted out loud, “I don’t trust you, God.”
This quickly escalated into deep pain from my childhood, where my dad would make promises, he never kept. He would tell me anything I wanted to hear if I did what he said, but they would never come true because my dad is a habitual liar and manipulator. Throughout my entire life, I gave him everything, even every cent I received from my birthdays, name days, Christmases, Easters – everything. I never spent a single cent on myself; instead, I handed it all over to my dad in exchange for his approval and ‘love’. He would always say he would save it for my university fees and future. And of course, I believed him. Even after university came and went, my fees have quadrupled since I finished twelve years ago. Even when I started working, a portion of my earnings would go to my dad. That’s just how our family functioned, and it still does for my siblings, except for me. I am trying to grow in self-love and self-responsibility, rather than remaining under the control of a father who loves money more than his own children. My dad is not someone I can trust, and with my siblings and mother fully supporting him in everything, I learned that I couldn’t trust anyone, not even my own family or the world. In fact, my father once told me, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
As employers emotionally abused me, manipulated me, and took advantage of me, I learned to rely only on myself to achieve and accomplish things. So, his words have stayed with me.
Being injured made me reexamine these past events and grieve over them, recognising there is a great deal more to mourn regarding being seen as a child whose primary duty is to please her father, obey without question, and earning his love and approval through financial means.
However, it also brought back memories of how, despite having money, my father refused to buy me a laptop for academic use and discouraged me from working to support myself during my time in high school. As a result, I had to work even harder and use our outdated computer—which was over eight years old—or visit the library to complete any research for assignments or write assignments.
But, thanks to my hard work, resilience, and good grades, I unexpectedly received a $2000 scholarship only a short time after expressing this desire and need. But it wasn’t until this moment that I realised this was God’s whisper to me. God was telling me he has always been there even when I never saw him. See, at the time I had no family (including extended family) support to get the things I desired, no friends, absolutely no one, but my hard work, and I never applied for this scholarship; I just got it! That’s the thing, I tied this to my hard work, and I always imagined that if you work hard, you’ll go anywhere, but that’s not true; it was God’s work, showing me that if I work sincerely and passionately and trust in God, that everything will come. That’s when it hit me: “God’s got my back!”
I realised right then and there that my back injury was about letting go of my self-reliance and dependence on a future through dad’s support. My journey of relearning to walk again, was really about relearning how to walk with the foundation that God’s got my back. In just one night, my back improved by more than 50%. Sure, I had to keep uncovering and grieving my issues, and many more came up, but I realised that my foundation had broken, and I needed to rebuild it around God and trusting him.
Thus, even though I’m still recovering and learning how to strengthen my core. I discovered how little I trusted God and how much I blamed him for all the abuse and manipulation I had experienced at the hands of my family and the outside world. This realisation marked the beginning of my true journey of trusting God again.
