You need to meet someone with a challenging, delightful story of hope and redemption. Her name is Edie Wadsworth. She blogs at lifeingraceblog.com.
Her spiritual memoir, All the Pretty Things, releases this week. And I feel like you need a sneak peek… of Edie’s writing, story, and inspiration.
She tells a hard fought story of fatherlessness…
of being untethered and unspoken for…
the story of how her life burned down around her in a million little ways…
and how she sometimes set fire to it…
and the story of how she finally found redemption among life’s ruins in the love of a Father who never lets go.
Now from Edie:
I couldn’t have been more than six years old the first time I had the haunting thought that it would have been better if I had been born to a different family.
The clothesline on the edge of the property where Mamaw’s trailer sat marked an imaginary barrier between us and the kudzu-covered cliff that dropped a hundred feet straight down just to the right of the driveway. The clothes hung off that line in defeat as if they themselves had lost the will to live.
More than once, I lay on my belly to rescue pairs of my uncle’s white Fruit of the Looms that had blown off the line and were teetering on the edge of the cliff. I wonder what it would be like to be blown off the cliff, to drift in the wind like a parachute, to keep going until I was somewhere too far away to be found. To be born to a different family.
To have a normal daddy, to have plenty of food.
Wiping the sweat that was beading around my hairline, I walked behind the doghouse at Mamaw’s trailer and sat under a row of shade trees, a respite from the unforgiving summer heat.
Even at my tender age, I was well aware that there was always too little of everything.
The money pooled from the government checks meant that once a month for a span of a whole weekend there was ample food at Mamaw’s if we were lucky.
But most of the time there was a palpable scarcity that covered the place like the kudzu slowly obliterating the mountainside.
The afternoon fell into a dark Appalachian night—the kind of night that carried with it a strange sort of loneliness that mountain people knew all too well. Alone with the night. Alone with the poverty. Alone with a low-grade hunger that was impossible to fill.
It would be years before I could see the miracle—all the gifts in my life that came disguised as heartache and suffering. All the ways He was loving me enough to show me that nothing would ever fill me but His love.
And I bet you’ve been guilty of the same thing—wishing things were different, thinking surely God made a mistake when He gave you this life or this spouse or this illness or this set of awful circumstances.
He could have chosen anyone, but he didn’t.
He chose you, for this time, for this difficult path—to live what feels like an impossible story.
You.
And me, too.
He chose us, for such a time as this.
And He so loves us so much that He’s not willing to leave us as we are. So, He’s lined up a lifetime of perfect people and circumstances to get us there. And when I say perfect, I mean terrible and heart wrenching and life-changing.
NONE of it will look like how you would done it. It’ll be way messier and way scarier and way more ridiculous than seems necessary but you’ll never be the same. And neither will your neighbor. Or you husband, or you children, or your coworker.
We were put here FOR EACH OTHER and the sooner we let God have His way with us, the sooner we’ll begin to see the miracle.
And maybe the miracle is the one He’ll work in our own stony hearts.
Thank you to Tyndale House who graciously sponsored this post.
We’re giving away THREE COPIES of Edie’s book, All The Pretty Things. Leave a comment below to be entered to win! Winners will be announced next week.
