God's Huntress

Yesterday I sat listening to my firstborn learn a song on the guitar.

And I had one of those strange moments where the past and present seemed to fold over each other.

I first heard this song when I was seventeen years old. I was addicted to heroin then.

That song belonged to a world I can barely recognize now. A world of addiction and chaos and choices I wish I could erase. It became tangled up with a particular kind of agony, the kind you don’t understand while you’re living inside it because you are too busy surviving it.

For years, when I heard that song, I didn’t simply hear music. I heard her. The seventeen-year-old girl. I heard that life. I heard everything that came with it.

And then yesterday, my firstborn was sitting in front of me with a guitar, trying to learn the very same song.

And suddenly it meant something completely different.

I watched his fingers stumble over the chords and thought about the distance between that girl and this mother.

The strange thing about time is that it doesn’t always erase things. Sometimes it redeems their meaning.

The song itself hadn’t changed. The notes were the same. The melody was the same.

But I had changed.

Seventeen-year-old me could never have imagined this room. She couldn’t have imagined motherhood. Four children. A home. A guitar in the hands of her firstborn. A life ordered around things she didn’t yet know how to name.

She couldn’t have imagined God.

And she certainly couldn’t have imagined that one day the song that belonged to one of the darkest chapters of her life would be playing in her house as her son learned it.

There was something almost holy about it.

Because I realized that the song doesn’t belong to that old life anymore.

It belongs here now.

It belongs to my son.

It belongs to this house.

It belongs to the woman I became.

And maybe that is one of the things I have learned about God.

He doesn’t always erase the past. Sometimes He changes what it means.

We are so often told that healing means forgetting. That we must somehow become untouched by what happened to us.

But I don’t think that’s true.

There are things I remember. There are things I will probably always remember.

The difference is that they don’t mean what they once meant.

The same song that once sounded like captivity can now sound like my son’s fingers finding their way across a guitar.

The same girl who once thought her life was disappearing has become a mother sitting in a quiet room listening to her firstborn make music.

That is not erasure.

That is redemption.

And this is where I have come to believe in Capital-T Truth.

Not the little truths we construct around ourselves to make our lives easier. Not whatever happens to feel true today.

Truth that exists outside of us.

Truth that was true when I was seventeen.

Truth that was true when I was lost.

Truth that was true when I didn’t believe it.

Truth that remained true while I was making a mess of my life.

God was there even when I didn’t know Him.

That is the part that humbles me.

I thought I was living a story about myself.

I didn’t know I was living inside a story God was still writing.

Yesterday I listened to my son play that song and, for a moment, I could almost see both lives at once.

The girl who heard it first.

The mother who heard it again.

The same song.

The same notes.

A completely different world.

And I thought:

Look what God has done.

He didn’t have to take the song away from me.

He gave it back.

B🤍