You Are Worth Saving
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About this ebook
Do you have a struggle that hurts you and your journey in this life? Fighting this...can feel hopeless and paralyzing if you are choosing to face it on your own. But I have good news for you! No matter what your struggle may be, and regardless of the nature of your battle, there is shameless hope to be found in the only one who truly knows how hard you strive to get a handle on what is relentless in trying to drowned you...His name is Jesus and he is into restoring you and me. He is the healer of our hurts and the lifter of our heads. I struggle with the mental illness of depression and the sickness of anorexia nervosa. I have been through the darkness of self-harm and at the door of having to choose the complications of life rather than leaving a legacy of suicide. I get so tired, but with the support of the encouragers in my life, who have been chosen by God, I see hope and some day...some day, victory. The contents of this book are letters from my heart to yours. We don't have to be undergoing the same struggles, my friend, in order to travel down this road of life together. Fighting can be so very lonely. We were created to live and heal in community without harsh judgment of one another. I am absolutely no better than you and because we are acknowledging that we need Jesus's help and hope, we can get through our trials one step at a time, one day at a time. Enclosed are thirty raw and honest writings that express where I am in my journey. My heart's desire and prayer, is that you will find camaraderie and hope. Let's get better together!
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You Are Worth Saving - Stacee Goetzinger
Introduction
I am imbalanced! Or at least that’s what they say. I don’t produce serotonin without the assistance of medication, and when I don’t take my medicine, I go to a very dark place. This doesn’t change until I re-medicate. I, with doctor’s assistance, have tried numerous times to go off of my daily regimen of medication, but it doesn’t work. I have chosen to use depression as my friend because it draws me closer to God. I’ll explain later. I have anorexia nervosa and need God for every bite. I have had issues with self-harm and most specifically cutting. I have guilt. Because of how I was created and as a result of having these challenges, I can get lost mentally in what I am intended to hear. There is, I suppose, a glitch in the process. The words and my response sometimes just don’t match up and I need help with what’s going on or I become lost in the translations that I need to understand.
My ever so qualified helpers through this process? God, my patient husband, doctors, close family members, and my closest of friends. They are better known as my translators.
Tireless encouragers in their help as my conversation partners.
Twenty-four hours was the magic number I was posed with. Was I going to stay with my mom and move to Dallas, Texas, or stay with my dad in Apple Valley, California? I was a senior in high school who had moved two times already and I felt apathetic. Extroverted, childlike, chatty, became silenced, overwhelmed, sad. I have loved both of my parents relentlessly, but I knew my mom needed me and I went. I went to Texas and was the new girl once again. I went from average student trying to keep up when getting to a new school, to struggling to care if I even graduated. Competitive tennis player, to after-school career girl at odd jobs and missing my dad and sister and worried sick about my mom even though our rooms in the tiny apartment shared a wall.
I did…I felt older than seventeen. My family of four had made it through thirteen moves, two dogs, numerous churches, leaving friends, making new ones, laughs, tears, anger, hunkering down together, and then occasionally there were explosions. My parents’ marriage ended and had taken its toll on all of us in very different ways. I’m the pleaser and peacemaker, the optimist… and was tired of life as it had been the last few years especially, although still in the prime of my teenage years. I concluded that I was not successful in using my role in my family and I was upset at the possibilities of what life was about to look like. Like your family, sometimes we were a complete puzzle together, the four of us, with God as the centerpiece, but often there were missing pieces so the picture just wasn’t clear and we all went our separate ways emotionally.
We were all split up and I wanted my family back but it was too late.
I’m very sensitive. Always have been. I’ve been a Christian since I was just a little girl and I came from a Christian home, but being a Christian doesn’t mean that all is well, and you know this. It means that we have free choice and it is wise to choose Jesus because whether things in your life and my life stay together, or burst into a million tiny pieces, we need help. I’ve always been very perceptive and I have longed to help others whether I knew them or not. I’m not fearful, so I have to rely on God and the instincts he has given to me to stay out of trouble. I have a lead foot when I drive and God has to slow me down in the car and in life. I’ve felt like a grown-up most of my life so I can feel like a kid or a teen these days but since I’m the mom of teens, it’s important for me to be careful!
I Am a Perfect Storm…maybe to those who have read this introduction thus far. I know! Looks bleak! Doesn’t it? In the conversation of life, I am a walking and breathing mess without God in the math problem called my life. This is one equation I actually know the answer to, however! The answer in my life is Jesus. He is why I write. He is the introduction and the conclusion to this book of my sharing in a raw yet hopeful way of me making it through each meal, and each emotion, each day.
I hope the description of me makes you feel better about you! Don’t worry, it gets better! But whether it does or not, I want you to know something: we were meant to go through things at times with God alone, but often we are meant to go through things in life with others. We were created to live in community and draw one another back to the only one who can fix us. My life, you will see, is full of God’s grace, and you are not alone when you let others in. I’ve found that people that God puts in our lives are a lot less shocked about my issues, and that their responses are a lot less often nothing like I expected because they have issues too!
Let’s try something opposite of what we are accustomed to perhaps. Let’s put our guard down just a touch and look at hope in the midst of whatever is going on in our lives. We all have struggles and secrets that can make us sick when the door is shut on them, and locked, and the key is somewhere on a counter under papers that we have no desire to go through. Buried hurts are like a paralysis that we get used to and spend a great deal of time compensating for! What if together, one moment at a time, we give God our hurts and struggles and begin to learn a new way to live.
Following this page, are thirty letters that may find you tired beyond your years and apathetic at least. Here, I have shared about the reality of and hope in my days and how I don’t even get up until I’ve confessed that I cannot make even a successful decision without Jesus. The alternative is more times than not, a fail. I’ve tried to do life alone and it doesn’t work for me. God has brought restoration to my family and joy in the good and not-so-good days. Please join me and read the following pages whether it be all the way through or one per day. I pray with all that I am that you are encouraged by how God shows me hope in the midst of a yelling mind. I will not die but live and will proclaim what the lord has done.
(Ps. 118:17). Let’s commit to life one day at a time…together, whether we share the same hurts and challenges, or not. Wow! It’s a privilege to have you join me in the journey God has me on and what an honor to be invited to be a part of yours! Let’s get better together!
Speak Out Loud
Dear Friend,
Some time ago, a friend showed me this verse: I will not die but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done
(Ps. 118:17). I have loved these words for several years now, but only recently have they been a source of courage to speak out loud about God’s relentless grace and mercy in my life. For years I have let an eating disorder speak for me, so you can only imagine how communicating in writing sort of feels like I am yelling!
I already know it is worth it because of the hope I have: that you too can fight to live the life God has for you. Not too long ago, I reached a point of absolute exhaustion, as if I was climbing a wall that was only getting higher. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I sat down on the floor of my bedroom and just cried out to Jesus. I physically opened my hands, asking Him to take it all—all my pride in the eating disorder, all the fear of not punishing myself anymore for being a poor example…just everything. I am so glad I was sitting on the floor, because I was so humbled by our communication and the peace He gave me. Jesus never ever responds to us as we deserve.
I choose to speak out loud—to address my fight against the mental torture I have let the enemy inflict on me for more years than I can recall. God has given me the desire not only to live, but to thrive—and the tactics needed to do so. As I speak out loud, I recognize the power our words carry. They are not the words I am used to, but I am adjusting! The desire to truly live is relatively new for me, but God’s words to me are life-giving. I’ve been merely existing
exceptionally well, and these days of reading may begin with the temptation for you to merely exist, but I pray that you will not close this book feeling that way. These pages are about possibly thriving for the first time in my life, and in yours.
I am not writing these words as someone who is a counselor or authority on depression and medication, eating disorders or self-abuse. I am a wife and mom, a daughter and friend, a sister and a child of God who has lived with these issues, and who gets up every single day refusing to let any of these weaknesses make me want to die more than live. But with surrender, changes do come; and God is carrying me to a life of absolute amazement in Him and in my value in His eyes.
I sometimes see you when I am at the grocery store, recitals, malls, and church, and I can hear you silently saying, I don’t want to disappear, but I am struggling with all that I am just to live.
Yes, I see you, and I’ve