The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living

by Lacey Sturm

I was spared for a reason.

I truly believe Lacey’s story has fallen into your hands at the perfect time.

They remind me to see the beauty in every day, to keep going.

That’s the strange thing about physical beauty. It makes people notice, wonder, and doubt themselves. It can be a lonely gift.

Even at sixteen, my mother was passionate enough to risk her life delivering me, a child expected to die anyway.

And as my mother fought for me to live, not thinking of herself, Granny now fought for my mother, knowing that no one in that hospital loved my mom like she did.

I was born two months premature, and since lungs are the last thing to develop, I was having some critical issues. They feared I would die at any moment because I couldn’t breathe correctly. Three days later, however, those same doubting doctors declared me a miracle. No one could explain why—no explanation, no real reason. I was breathing fine and could go home.

She was afraid I’d break. Maybe this was why she was always so tough on me. Maybe she wanted to teach me to be much stronger and more unbreakable than I looked.

Though my foster parents offered to adopt me, my momma, the state, and God decided she would be the one to raise me.

I survived, like we all do, against the odds. I should be dead. I should be a statistic. I shouldn’t be scribbling all over this page trying to describe the indescribable. So what happened? Was it chance, an accident, or dumb fate that I’m here now, a thirtysomething rock-and-roll mom looking back and collecting pieces of hope to give you? I don’t believe in fate or accidents. I believe in cause and effect. Behind everything lies a cause, a reason. Why does the sun rise? Because the earth revolves once every twenty-four hours. Why do we read? Because, some say, we don’t want to feel alone. Why am I alive, writing to you? Because I want to tell you that miracles happen. Because I want you to know how precious life can be. Because I want you to know how valuable you really are. Because the world will throw lies at you—lies aimed at your heart, aimed to kill. I choose not to listen to those lies anymore.

Now place it all in the hands of a God who cares and has a plan for each person. In the chaos, God’s plan was working.

Our lives stretch out like shafts of light reaching into the lives of everyone else. You and I, we sparkle with reason, a cause, a plan. We’re like a giant web of light and meaning and sadness and wonder.

What if we lived with the confidence that comes from walking in the bright of day? What if we treated one another with the love we desire for ourselves?

It can help you see yourself in truth and live unafraid, and when we live unafraid we live in the light of love. For true love casts out fear.

Chances are, if we lived like we knew this, our lives would shatter much of the sadness and pain that are so common in our broken world.

“Lacey, you are so beautiful, but sometimes it’s hard for others to see past the outside, or to see potential for the future. But one day, you will be a lovely swan, and everyone will notice your beauty! But because you were once thought to be an ugly duckling, you will be able to see the beauty in others that the world thinks unlovely. And you will be the one telling them they are beautiful, the way I am telling you. I know, because I was an ugly duckling too.”

I believe it was the grace of God that always covered the struggles we endured. Now this thirtysomething woman looks back on that dry-mouthed little girl and smiles and cries and sees how bitterness works, how hurt builds and stacks like bricks into a prison.

It was impossible for me to believe in God at this point because I knew that if there was a God, he must have made people for more than just dying horrible deaths, more than going to prison, more than the deep depression I was sinking into. But maybe God hadn’t made us for great things after all, I thought. But who cares anyway? I didn’t believe in God anymore, and that was that.

Death was a huge, dark, scary mountain to me as a child. This mountain of death shot up from the ground, and I was suddenly lost in the middle of it. I felt like I was left to find my way out all alone. What I didn’t realize at the time is that love is stronger than death.

Whenever the world around me was happy, it felt deceitful. It all felt fake and foolish and ignorant—on purpose. It made me angry at everyone. It made me want to hate them all. I was mad at the Texas sky for being sunny that September day. It felt inappropriate. I felt like the whole world was in on this deception—like even the weather was smiling at me and telling me to move on already. But I wasn’t falling for it.

Life was all wrong, and I could throw it away if I wanted to. It may be honest, and it may be half true, but it is not the whole truth, and therefore, it is a lie—a

If you move on through the rain, the lyrics suggest, sunshine will be there after a while. They encourage you to find ways to make the life of your loved one count. By letting the good memories of their life make your life more colorful and bright, you will, in turn, illuminate the lives of those around you. In this way, even though it’s hard to fathom while it’s raining, while you are mourning, while you can barely bring yourself to say goodbye, the sunshine will come. You just need to keep going.

I wasn’t aware that I was teaching myself to use my mind to steal my own joy.

I understood the resentment of a heart that felt disregarded and mistreated by life.

And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. (Phil. 4:8 NLT) Hateful thinking is not what our God-given ability to reflect and meditate is meant for. It is meant to be used to meditate on love, God, truth, beauty, honor—anything good. Our mouths weren’t made to speak hateful words. They were made to encourage, to teach, and to speak truth in love.

We were not created so we could use our actions and words in an abusive way toward one another. God intended our actions and words to be used for loving one another. God did not intend for his creation to be abused by others—or to wallow in self-pity. God created us so that we could love both others and ourselves. We were not meant to feel abandoned. God made us so that we could experience his embrace and the embrace of others—he made us for a special kind of relationship, a covenant relationship. We weren’t made for the kind of despair we lived in. We were made to live with hope, faith, and love.

Darkness can feel honest, and honesty can be beautiful and feel so inspiring. But darkness stops short of resolution. It’s deceptive. You can’t see all that lurks within darkness. The things that inhabit darkness live there because you can’t see them; that way they can deceive you, pervert you, and ultimately destroy you from the inside out.

Sadly, we can even be aware that something is killing us, and yet ignore our self-preservation reflexes until all we have left inside us is a death wish. Our addiction is so exhilarating that we think we don’t care if it kills us. We can’t even imagine life without it. And when we do, we think it will be a worthless, boring life that isn’t worth living. We get this warped idea because once the high wears off, we feel ragged, miserable, ugly, worn out, and tired.

So we stagger toward death with reckless laughter or deep, sad aching, and as we free fall we tell ourselves this falling sensation means we are alive. But the leap we took to get that feeling is a leap to our own destruction.

But I didn’t know that you don’t have to be suicidal to be brave enough to call society’s bluff, and you don’t have to be eternally sad to rebel against it.

It begins with rebelling against all the shiny happy people. Then it turns into a thirst for sadness. And it bends and twists into a very dark, animal-like thing, as if the sadness has given birth to an evil so sly and cunning that it seeps in and suddenly you’re contemplating death, like I was. Or cutting. Or puking your food out all the time.

It is not brave to kill yourself when things are sad and difficult; it is brave to live anyway. It is brave to find ways to lay down your life to serve the people around you. It is brave to forgive and to choose to love those who hurt you even though they don’t deserve it. It is brave to trust that the God who gave you life in the first place has a good plan in mind, even when everything around you looks like hell. It is brave to live.

Someone had to scream about injustice. Someone had to scream with passion. Someone had to scream like Jesus did on the cross over the evil in the world.

Singing, speaking, yelling—it all felt like an appropriate response to being alive, like I had a responsibility to change the world because I was breathing, and so my voice was meant to be a tool of change.

God places these passions in our hearts so we will never forget the good, so we will never forget that someone always needs help.

The broken heart that makes me scream comes from the broken heart of a God who moves within me, aching and yearning for his creation to know how beautiful, valuable, and loved it is.

But God helped me understand that his heart breaks when we hurt. He helped me see his compassion and lovingkindness. He also revealed to me that he is a roaring lion of a Father who wants to end our brokenness. In fact, he became broken himself in order for us to become whole and healed and well.

There would come a day when I would pray for him to use it to bring life to people who had been destroyed by other voices—lying voices. I prayed God would use my voice to scream justice over every lie seeking to destroy the very people he made for great things.

You can see what hurts your body and emotions in this life, but you can’t always see what hurts your spirit.

Let me say this about suicide: it’s a liar. It will whisper to you and fill your mind with just the right amount of evil mixed with something resembling truth. But those are the best lies! Suicide will tell you to cling to the drama, to the people who hurt you, to the tough circumstances of your life and say, Look at all this! It isn’t worth it anymore. You aren’t helping anyone. You make no good difference. You only make everything more inconvenient. You will always feel empty and achy. Living is too painful, so why are you doing it? You just need to sleep forever.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

The hard truth is, sometimes we have to stop and help ourselves before we are even able to help anyone else.”

I had seen men sexually and physically abuse people I loved, steal from their struggling families to feed drug and alcohol addictions, break promises to me and my siblings and my mother, and I’d seen seemingly nice, intelligent men turn into drunk, greedy, perverted monsters. A man had assaulted every woman I knew.

“The Lord wants me to speak to you,” he said. “He wants you to know that even though you have never known an earthly father, he will be a better father to you than any earthly father could ever be.”

“God has seen you cry yourself to sleep at night. He has seen you rehearsing the pain you have gone through since you were a little child. You saw too much too soon and it has caused so much pain in your heart. Jesus died to take that pain away. There is pain in your heart from your own sin, and from other people’s sins that have affected you. Jesus died on a cross to suffer the consequences of sin forever. That way we don’t have to carry that pain around with us. Do you want me to pray for you and ask Jesus to take that pain away?”

I almost wanted to shrink away because I knew I had no right to be in the presence of this infinitely good, perfect, holy God. This God was perfect love.

All the love I thought I had in me was nothing like true love. It was conditional, confused, and even hateful compared to the love I felt God lavishing on me.

But at the same time the horror of my true self was revealed to me, I sensed God reacting to me and was surprised when I realized he wasn’t casting me away but rather drawing me in closer. It was like he was saying, “Yes, I know you. I know all the things you have done. I am not shocked by any of it. Come close to me, my love, just like you are. I have already forgiven your past and future. And, if you let me, I will make you new. I will make you into all that I have planned for you. You are beautiful, my love.”

Beauty, I realized, lay first in our createdness. God created you and me in his image. We reflect his glory. To all of a sudden realize I was not an accident, a burden, or a mistake but rather intentionally created by a God of holiness, love, and purity changed everything.

And, being a girl he created, I was his daughter. I was in my createdness the daughter of the King of the kings. In this sense I was a princess.