Alysia Oldacre
I didn’t grow up knowing Jesus. If anything, it was hard to believe that there was any God out there that would allow my family to suffer as we did. I have had severe eczema almost my entire life. My dad had it and then it got passed down to me and one of my siblings. Life was hard. I was constantly covered in cuts and rashes because of the endless irritation and scratching. My skin got so bad to where taking a bath was unbearable or I’d miss school because I couldn’t even walk. My cuts left scars, scars so visible that it was the main source of my insecurities for most of my life. When I was younger, a lot of kids didn’t want to be my friend because I looked different. Yes, kids will be kids, but the constant stares from classmates or even strangers were enough to make a six year old girl insecure. I was known then as the “Eczema Girl,” and for a long time that’s all I felt people saw me as. I blamed my eczema for a lot of things in my life. I hated how playing a sport was hard because of how my own sweat would irritate my skin. I believed my eczema was the sole reason that boys didn’t like me and that left a scar far deeper than ones you see. But of course, I grew up. I made lifelong friends that didn’t care how I looked, I grew a backbone, and I learned to not care what other people thought of me. And while I had this mask of a strong teenage girl; on the inside, I was still as lonely and broken as can be.
As I grew older, I started to care too much how I looked. Weightlifting and CrossFit took over my life and I became obsessed with being fit. My grandmother is the epitome of a “strong independent Black woman,” and that greatly affected how I was. I was always taught to act like a lady and to dress like one too. I love fashion, but the need to look put together all the time weighed heavily on me. I believed in the ‘fake it till you make it’ mentality and I figured if I was a mess on the inside, at least I looked like I had it all together on the outside and that was enough for me. I felt like I could only earn my family’s love through things I did and by being the obedient daughter, but I was everything but that. I was smart, but I was outspoken and opinionated (still am). My family wanted a daughter that did what she was told and kept her opinions to herself. They always wanted me to be like my brother and because I couldn’t be that, it caused a rift between us and I felt hard to love.
Nothing was able to heal the brokenness I felt inside. Nothing made loneliness go away, and nothing was going to give me the love and attention that every little girl should have gotten from her father. Both sides of my grandparents were divorced and my parents’ marriage had been rocky from the start; I had never known what love looked like. I was lonely and I was bitter. I was so mad at God for putting me in such a dysfunctional family, I was mad at my dad for always choosing work first, and I was mad at God for cursing me and my baby brother with an awful skin condition. I felt like God had heard my cries, shrugged and walked away.
And when I had reached the end of myself, Jesus met me. He met me when I moved from New York to Texas by myself, without my family, as a sixteen year old girl. He met me in my bedroom when I called my parents crying that I wanted to come home. He met me when I felt forgotten and alone, when I felt like life was on permanent pause. It was when the sunlight pierced through my window and in the deafening silence of my bedroom thinking nobody cared about my existence that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, met me there and whispered, “I do”. I fell at the feet of Jesus and He heard me, He heard my cries, He heard my tears, and He heard my heart. He had given me hope when I had none, He had filled the empty void of my life called loneliness and replaced it with all that He is. He loved me wholeheartedly and with reckless abandon. He loved me in my sin, He loved me in my brokenness. I chose Jesus because loved me so much to not leave me that way. That was the first time in six months I hadn’t felt alone. It was the first time in a long time that I had felt enough, that I didn’t need to have it all together for Him. Jesus had set me free and that was enough for me to choose Him.
