I was about sixteen when darkness began to feel strangely familiar to me.
I was struggling in ways I didn’t know how to name. I was suicidal. I cut myself. I drank. And before meth addiction would eventually become part of my story, I found myself fascinated by spiritual things I did not understand.
At the time, I called it Wicca. Looking back through the lens of my Christian faith, I understand that season very differently. I was reaching into spiritual darkness while having no idea just how desperately my soul was searching for something transcendent.
I practiced calling the corners. I focused on the elements. I experimented with spells and different forms of divination. I was fascinated by the idea that there might be something beyond what I could see—another realm, another reality, something spiritual just beyond the veil of the physical world.
The irony is that I was right about that part.
There was more.
I was simply looking for it in the wrong place.
Then one night, I had a dream.
In the dream, I saw a specific symbol—a symbol I believed represented the spiritual world I had become involved in. It was so vivid and so compelling that when I woke up the next morning, I drove to a tattoo shop and had the symbol permanently inked onto my body.
I thought I understood what I was doing.
I thought I knew what the symbol meant.
But sometime later, I was at my parents’ house and showed my mom my newest tattoo. She looked at it and then disappeared into my old bedroom.
When she returned, she was carrying a Bible.
It was the Bible my grandmother had given me when I was about seven years old.
And there, printed on its spine, was my tattoo.
The symbol I had dreamed about—the symbol I had permanently placed on my body believing it represented my commitment to darkness—was staring back at me from the spine of a Bible I had owned since childhood.
It was a symbol of the Holy Trinity.
Father.
Son.
Holy Spirit.
Even now, there is something about that moment that leaves me in awe.
Long before I understood grace, grace was there.
Long before I was searching for God, I believe God was searching for me.
Long before I knew enough theology to call it prevenient grace, I was experiencing the mystery of it: the grace of God that goes before us. The God who moves toward us before we ever think to move toward Him.
I had gone searching for mystery in darkness, and somehow, mysteriously, God met me there and pointed me back toward Himself.
That tattoo is still on my body.
It is small. It is faded. And, aesthetically speaking, it is terrible.
I have almost had it redone half a dozen times.
But I can never quite bring myself to change it.
Because that imperfect little mark has become sacred to me—not because there is anything magical about the ink itself, but because of what it reminds me of.
It reminds me that there was a time when I thought I was marking myself for darkness while God was already writing a different story.
It reminds me that I did not have to understand Him for Him to love me.
I did not have to recognize Him for Him to be near.
I did not have to clean myself up, find the right theology, say the right prayer, or somehow stumble my way back into the light before He would come looking for me.
Romans 5:8 says that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
While we were still.
There is mystery in those words.
God did not wait for me on the other side of my darkness.
He entered it.
And when I think about that sixteen-year-old girl now—the one searching for something spiritual, something powerful, something beyond herself—I sometimes wish I could sit beside her and tell her:
You are right. There is more.
There is a spiritual reality greater than what your eyes can see.
There is mystery.
There is wonder.
There is a God who cannot be contained by the boundaries of your understanding.
But you do not have to summon Him.
You do not have to manipulate the spiritual world to find Him.
You do not have to know the right words.
He is already near.
And maybe that is one of the greatest mysteries of grace: sometimes we spend our lives believing we are searching for God, only to look back and realize that God had been pursuing us all along.
Even in the wilderness.
Even in addiction.
Even in rebellion.
Even when darkness seemed to surround me on every side, there was a God who had already stepped into darkness Himself.
He hung on a cross beneath a darkened sky.
He entered suffering.
He entered death.
And He did it for sinners who had not yet learned to look for Him.
For me.
And for you.
That little tattoo still reminds me of something I couldn't understand at sixteen:
I thought I had chosen a symbol.
But every time I look at it now, I remember the God who had already chosen to come looking for me.
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