Dear Constance…

Nights are not good.

Almost every night of my life since I was around 4 I wake up in the night, and I am petrified.  Skert stiff, and I mean that literally.  I don’t know why.  And inner voices that say horrible things that crush…flat, inflectionless, as if I am so worthless that those voices will not even waste their powers on one as meritless as I.  No need to tell you what they say.

In 1966 I was exposed to a horror movie that really hooked into my dysphoria and an extremely traumatic event that had taken place a few months earlier, and since then, I have bad dreams, too.

That’s a lot of years.
That’s a lot of fears.
That’s a lot of tears.

As I grew, I discovered that talking with God helped…some.  And after I had grown some more, I learned to recognize Their voice back to me…each one distinct and each one full of Love.

Well, if you have been reading here lately you know that I have been in a rough patch.  A bit challenging in fact.  And those voices?  The ones that say crushing and horrible things?  They have utilized the raw materials in my life of trial, betrayal, abandonment, loss, and sorrow, and added that weight and depth and breadth to their curses…and I could not escape their toxin.  I had to just listen…and endure.

Until last night…after waking, freezing, cramping, clenching, crying…and ripping apart again…

I heard my Mama’s voice quiet and sure, certain underneath the Mordor doom-drums and orc snarls…and we talked.  A long time.

At the end, She exhorted me to write some of what She told me…here on Grace Notes…as a faith step and an exercise…an attempt to call myself into fullness and being, because I have languished for so many years encased in roles, expectations and binary bondages.  I have even torn myself in two in my desperate attempt to perform and thus be worthy of love and acceptance…and so all those voices whispering all those years are like a gravitational pull to be overcome.

So here is a bit of what Mama told me…translated from spirit/soul/heart talk to written words:

I am Charissa Grace, and I am not the person everyone thought me to be (including myself).  

I am made sensitive and tender…so I feel the pains and sorrows and hurts and worries of everything and everyone around me…in the same way that a tuning fork hit with vibrations will itself vibrate in frequency, or a crystal goblet will sound when it is circled with a finger.

It is not a function of something wrong in me when I feel all of that…it is a function of how my Mama created me, and so I am to stop calling myself names and blaming myself for things that are not my fault…they are simply the things that I feel because of how I am made by Her.

I am made to drink cups and drain dregs…many of them bitter and some sweet.

I am made to transform things…to catalyze their becoming into who and what they are destined to be, but I myself am not made a part of that…rather I remain apart…alone, and in my Mama’s Hands.

I am precious to Her, and She watches over me in such Joyous Jealousy, having purposed to allow me to experience pain in order for Her good riches to be birthed into this world.

I am Mama’s womb of Life…having no womb of my own and born so barren and lonely.  She intentionally formed me intricate, delicate and robust, so easily woken but desperately determined to hang on…hang on…hang on.

I am Her Instrument and She delights in my unique and utterly singular voice, and so She tunes me…constantly…to be sure I am in tune to Her song, Her heart…She tightens me, She loosens me.

Above all…I am not evil.  I am not “wrong” or “null” or “nothing” or a “monster” or a “freak”.  What I endure is a function of Her goodness and intention and not a function of my flawed-ness and failures, and there are many of those by the way…flaws and failures.  But to Her they are akin to the chiseled away wood or stone…they are like the clay She pushes away as She makes me into Her Own.

I am the daughter of Holy Spirit, Great Lady Grace…my Big Mama…and I am good.  She has said it and my Precious Merciful Jesus has made it true in His own Love dripped completely over me and washing totally thru me cleansing me and making me Their Righteousness.

I will live, and still pine and long…grieve and mourn…but I will also see the Dawn morning by morning and I will keen under Her loving caresses to my hair and cheeks as She wipes away travail and gives…

…gives me Beauty for ashes…and the Oil of Joy for mourning…and She clothes me in Songs of Praise glorious and radiant and She disappears the spirits of heaviness…as She plants me in Her Own Orchards of Righteousness and calls me Her Very Own…and I will indeed day by day glorify Her Name and call Her good and only good as She brings me to the Father of Lights from Whom every good and perfect gift comes.

I am a prophetic declaration to a world that is spiritually cross-borned, just as I am physically thus.  Yes, each and everyone of us is “transgender”…walking around with this knowing inside us that we were not destined for death and dissolution and destruction, knowing that we are victims of time, knowing that who we are in our hearts is somehow choked down and held down and thrown down by something that ought not be…

…and so as I live and love, as I trust and talk, as I weep and write, I am becoming a living word of love to whoever will listen, and let their own hearts awaken the dawn.

These things I say in faith…believe me, they are not said in boast, or even really anything that I think about myself.  But I do know that I have heard from my Mama…and these sorts of things, the things I have written here?  They aren’t even remotely like anything the voices have ever cursed at me, and like nothing I tell myself…wait, correction:  told myself…so I know that they must be Her.

Mama said She was so thrilled when I picked out the name double-grace…She promises She will make good on it.

I am Charissa Grace, and I am in my Mama’s Hands.  May my song ever be sweet and my tune ever triumphal, even in tears.