I know I weary some readers pondering my family and home. I have friends and extended family who read these pieces who have experienced divorce, parental heartbreak, heartbreak about parents…, other heavy burdens, the works.

A lot of my acquaintances think that I grew up in a wholesome, stable Christian home surrounded by love and affirmation and so assume that my musings on marriage, parenthood and home express a protected, maybe even naive outlook on life.

In a way, I’m grateful for people thinking that. It reminds me of how far God has brought me. While I tell the periodic anecdote about my past, I have not narrated my “life story” in any public settings. Until just recently, members of my family of origin were still alive, thechance for those relationships to heal more, maybe deepen, made me hesitate to tell things that might reflect poorly on them. So I didn’t talk about the things I witnessed growing up.

Today, looking out the window, it struck me again how unlikely, how improbable this all is.

I come from a physically and emotionally violent home, accustomed to brutal beatings, assaults with knives, threats with firearms, regularly subjected to emotional terror and literal, physical torture—my brother playing “doctor” on me with real hypodermic needles, for example. My dad worked about 50 miles away, and after my mother left us when I was about 10, I feared to come home after school and often stayed in the woods outside my house until evening when he arrived. Eventually I found shelter at the public library, but then I could not know when my dad was home and I inevitably got home late, after dark, and received my punishment for worrying him—the belt, albeit administered reluctantly by him.

Much of the violence and terror was concealed from others, of course. I felt a profound shame at my parents’ divorce, and I chose friends who seemed not to notice or care what our home was like. Maybe their parents knew, maybe not. It was a time when families with problems kept those to themselves and put up fronts.

We lived in a house so filthy that I actually did not know that the wall joined the ceiling at a right angle. The spiderwebs up there accumulated so much grime and filth that they formed a grimy, grungy crown molding through our house. The wood rotted out under the linoleum in the kitchen so that the floor actually sagged several inches in front of the sink, parallel to the spot I’m standing in portrayed above. Our sewerage system leaked under, and inside the house so we had raw sewerage backing up into the house regularly. My mother dug a drainage trench, so for a couple of years, an open ditch carried human and household waste across our back yard…literally an open sewer right outside our door. My brother, who eventually weighed well over 325 pounds, never held any steady jobs, lived in the economic, social, and legal shadows, and died of heart attack after falling asleep in his truck, motor running, in front of his dilapidated mobile home.

I never even knew about washing my hair with shampoo, or the basics of self-care and grooming, until I was 17. My work and deportment were so poor in elementary school that I was placed just one level above the kids who would be shipped to juvenile detention if they messed up one more time. I never had an understanding adult teach me about the ways of men and women, didn’t even learn how to ask a girl out for a date until an Asbury College French professor literally gave me lessons on proper dress, correct social behavior and, at one point, even wrote me a script to read over the phone to ask a girl out, then drew me a map of the parlor in the girls’ dormitory, briefing me on every aspect of a normal date.

Then…in the middle of my sophomore year in high school…the grace of God came to me and Jesus Christ became Lord of my life. I told that story back on Day 284. That began a totally new trajectory for me. The people my faith put me in touch with showed me what a wholesome, healthy life looked like. I learned how other families loved and lived together. I slowly shed my shame over my parents’ divorce and began to stagger toward healing.

The important thing is that Jesus did not just “save my soul.” He did not just “forgive my sins.” He certainly did those things, but more importantly, Jesus Christ, and others following him whom he led me to, gave me a new, real, actual life. God’s grace, and the words of scripture, showed me a vision of life in which respect, integrity, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, reason, cleanliness and order could rule.

So sometimes when I think of my life, I’m surprised and even numbed at the wonder of it. Sometimes I still trip over some relic from the past, a stray emotion, a random over-reaction to some comment. Sometimes family or friends innocently say or do things that rake up buried fears and insecurities still lingering from those days, and I have to explain…and ask their forgiveness…and seek transformation and healing.

So I tell this stuff not to boast, nor just to wallow in my own current happiness, which can change at any moment. I certainly don’t share to make anyone else feel badly.

Rather, I hope that you too will discover and celebrate the grace of God that can take your life, wherever it is, however it is, and put you on a new trajectory. From whatever “Point A” we are at in our lives, God can draw a line from there to his perfect purpose for us. The journey is not easy, but it’s good. And I know many others whose story is much more powerful and transforming than mine.

We are all, in the end, improbabilities of grace, but candidates for glory.