The Dithering of a District Diva

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” Zora Neale Hurston famously wrote. Twenty-ten fits neatly into neither category, but it was a year I needed.

I rang in 2010 cursing out a racist cab driver who refused to take my cousin and me the four blocks to my District abode after an epic night of New Year’s clubbing. This encounter was proof that the cares I thought I’d danced out that night, had only been coaxed into napping a few hours, only to come back alive, renewed, and leaking from the hole in my heart.

The hole in my heart was very small when I was born. From childhood into adolescence, every doctor I visited for my school check-ups would say, “Hmm…you have a heart murmur. But, don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it.” I never did.

And I don’t exactly recall the first time I could actually feel that hole in my heart. Maybe it came and went throughout the years, each in spurts so far apart in time that each felt like the first time. I can’t be sure. But I know it was there at the end of 2009 when I started this blog and wrote a post called “The Missing Peace.” And I know I don’t feel it anymore.

While Googling something else, I stumbled across a year-old post of mine. Intrigued, I read another, and another, and another from last year, as if some other woman had written those words so long ago, and not me. And with each of those posts, I could see that hole that started out so small when I was newborn. I could remember where I was when I wrote them, physically and metaphysically. I could see all the things I was throwing into that hole in a desperate attempt to fill it: music, dancing, books, people…Black. But it refused to be satisfied. I quoted Eat Pray Love as if it was a Biblical text, and though it did help me feel less alone and more understood, though it was a tremendous comfort to me, Elizabeth Gilbert’s words could not fill that hole.

It wasn’t until February when my darling friend Henny sent me a sermon that would change my life. It has to be the most basic sermon there is, with the most basic of Christian concepts for those like me who grew up in the Church. Perhaps it was the way in which those basic concepts collided, or the way in which the pastor phrased them, or perhaps I just had to go through something for those concepts to come alive and mean something to me.  Maybe it was the intersection of all of those things. But whatever it was, that word crashed down upon me like waves on a rock, smacking me awake, forcing awareness of myself upon me: that hole in my heart was my glory-deficiency.

I was born needing glory, commendation, and acceptance because the first thing God said when He created our first parents was “this is good.” I am yearning for this highest praise that I am “good,” “worthy,” “worthwhile.”  Yet, because of Adam and Eve’s original sin, their glory was stripped from them, and as their offspring born into sin, we are separated from the glory of God. That separation is the hole in my heart, and no new-age philosophy, no love of a broken man, no music, no dancing could fill it.  The culmination of my sins meant a death sentence for me, not just in this world, but in the next.  I was the living dead. I had forgotten that Christ took upon Himself the sins of the whole world, those that came before He walked the earth, and those that would come after. I forgot that He died in my place, and by His death and His resurrection, He stands in the gap between me and God, filling that void, bridging that lonely space. I’d forgotten that when God looks at me, He no longer sees my sins, but He sees only His perfect Son who stands in my place, without sin. Because of that, He looks upon me and says “This is my daughter, whom I love and with whom I am well-pleased,” just as He said to Christ.

2010 answered the question of where that missing peace went and how I could get it back. It confirmed that broken people cannot fix broken people, let alone themselves. It reaffirmed my faith and love and understanding for what exactly Christ’s sacrifice means and the kind of life I am free to live because of Him. I can be free of the incessant need to be glorified, honored, loved, validated by people and things. I can live with a new consuming desire to see God loved and honored. And I can live with a heart made whole by Christ.

I closed out 2010 with quiet worship of the almighty God. There was peace, and joy, and contentment. And though the year didn’t sneak away without leaving me full to the brim with more questions, I received the one answer I needed, the one that will sustain me through every other question, heartbreak, downfall, and rising up: the true and living God, Jesus Christ.

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