The Other Side of Darkness by Melody Carlson Read Free Book Online

into the next, until it feels like they are wrapping themselves like a noose around my neck.
    Finally I literally smack my hand against my forehead as I attempt to mentally wipe away my nonsensical prayer by saying “amen”
seven
times. There has always been something magical about the number seven. I can’t really explain it and wouldn’t want to, but I know that if I say “amen” seven times it will end this nonsense.
    Even so, my mother’s worn-out words about how Rick and I got married too young, started our family too soon begin to taunt me. Good grief, how many times have I heard those words over the past nineteen years? Can’t she get over it? But something about thosewords feels different today … something in me is worried that perhaps my mother was right. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe my marriage, my whole life, has been just one great big mistake. Maybe the Lord is punishing me. Why else would I be so miserable?
    I can recall only about three or four years in my life—between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one—when I felt like I was really doing okay, like my life was on track and I was somewhat content with who I was and what I was doing. Oh, things weren’t perfect, but it was okay. The rest of the time, both before and after, I have felt sadly and increasingly insufficient. Always falling short of everyone’s expectations, including my own. Never good enough. Never fitting in. Never really happy. Never enough. Never enough.
    But I allow myself to go back. Back to when I was eighteen, shortly after graduation. The happiest day of my life was when I moved out of my parents’ house. Sharing an inexpensive apartment with my best friend, Colleen, who amazingly had settled down thanks to her newfound religion, I started going to community college part-time and working in a little deli the rest of the time. And although I was struggling to make good grades as well as ends meet, I had never been more fulfilled in my life. Or more free. Finally it seemed like I was living like Mary Tyler Moore, and Colleen was my Rhoda. Or maybe it was the other way around.
    Colleen tried to get me to come to her new church, Valley Bridge Fellowship, but I regularly blew her off. “I was raised in church,” I told her. “And I’ve had more than enough of that to last a lifetime.”
    Ironically, this religious experience was all fresh and new to Colleen, and after a while I could see that she was actually changing. And the changes were pretty impressive. So finally, partly from curiosity and partly from being worn down by her constant pleading, I gavein and went to church with her. And Valley Bridge Fellowship was refreshingly different from the church of my childhood. So I continued to go with Colleen. But I was mostly a spectator in those days. I held myself back, refusing to take the big plunge and commit my heart to the Lord. I guess I was waiting.
    I had just turned twenty when a cute guy began handling the route that made deliveries to the deli where I worked. I started flirting with him right off, and it wasn’t long before he “accidentally” dropped off the wrong package at my apartment. I invited him in for a Coke and learned his name was Rick Jackson. Shortly after that we started dating, and it quickly turned serious. I wasn’t even twenty-one when I married him, quit school, and quit my job, and our first child, Matthew, was born the following year.
    While I was pregnant with Matthew, I started taking church and God more seriously. Rick claimed to be a Christian but was never too interested in going to church with me. Sunday was his only day to sleep in, and nothing would make him give that up. So Colleen, still single, continued to pick me up every Sunday morning while my husband snoozed. I finally committed my life to the Lord just a few months before Matthew was born. It seemed the right thing to do, and for a while I rode this kind of spiritual high, and it seemed that things were really changing