STORYTELLING: Favor's Story

Once upon a time there lived a young girl with a sensitive heart who felt deeply and noticed much. She dwelt, however, with parents whose hearts had become first broken, then seared and blackened, by despair.

Eventually sinister darkness overshadowed this girl, whose name was Favor, and she became disillusioned. “What’s the point?” she thought. “I’m trapped and alone, and there’s no way out.” In order to survive, she retreated to an internal place of refuge and snuffed out any remaining childhood hope of discovering and participating in the beautiful.

Life became defined by the dutiful performance of a to-do list. While others’ hands extended to touch her, they reached only skin-deep – not to her heart. No one recognized her true state of apathy, or the monumental effort it took just to survive. In time Favor’s inner tension screamed for release. She longed for genuine relationship, but it seemed no one connected with her fine-tuned perceptions.

One day she turned against her own innate sensitivity to initiate something evil: something that might express this growing, consuming, overwhelming anguish. In a subliminally inspired attempt to hurt the presumed perpetuators of her gruesome inner solitary confinement, she chose (against her own conscience) to disfigure her face outwardly and thus match her heart’s brokenness. With intentional precision, she stood before a mirror, held a sharp paring knife to first one cheek and then the other, and scored them each with tiny slits until tears trickled to form bloody rivulets that ran to her chin.

Later the wounds appeared as scratches; no one asked what had happened or seemed to notice or care. Their indifference seemed to seal her fate. She was indeed alone in a vast sea of isolation, a numb waif left to find her own way.

Eventually Favor learned to cope within the narrow parameters of her life in a frozen, unfeeling sort of way. Although her stinging scars faded externally, arrows of abandonment remained - impaling her soul like ice shards that refused to budge. In time she grew to became a self-marked woman, stained by her own hand, branded by disdain and self-imposed violation, unable to recover the hope of her youth.

Her perfect Lover watched all of this with the discerning eye of an eagle. At just the right moment, long before it was “too late,” He intervened – calling so softly and yet powerfully, suggesting He would come and indwell that dark inner place and never forsake her if only she would have Him. In a moment of imputed grace Favor replied, “Yes, Lord.”

With the precision of a surgeon, He meticulously began removing thousands of icy splinters one by one by one - those that had held her heart captive for so long - with His gracious tweezers of mercy. He taught her to love and be loved; to hope with a hope founded in promises rather than disappointments; to flourish within confining situations rather than clawing for escape as a victim.

Favor’s heart quickened and she began to taste freedom and restoration while soaring above circumstantial pain - migrating ever further from it, fleeing frigid limitation for hopeful expansion and warmth. She embraced the One who understood who she was and how she should live; the One who could prepare her to receive and share abounding compassions. Not surprisingly, she discovered He was also the Source of the Beauty that had stalked her from birth.

In time Favor realized her sensitive nature to be a gift rather than a curse – a blessing to be fulfilled rather than a liability to be squelched. May her story be heard, and may her memory - one of acceptance, rescue, and victory - be venerated.