You intended to harm me..but

Where there were stains from my poor attempts to clean myself, Your blood covered all. I woke up the other day with an ear full from the devil. His best weapons loaded and launched from the moment my eyes fluttered open. I began to feel dirty, unworthy, not good enough. It was as if my past decisions had built some army and I was Pearl Harbor. I sat through my three hour upper-division social work class and the girl beside me kept asking if I were about to cry. I couldn't even look at her. I left and drove straight to my boyfriends house. I needed him to know everything. I needed him to know I'd dated the wrong guys before him and he definitely wasn't my first kiss. Being his first really serious girlfriend, the devil kept saying,

"It's too bad he waited all this time for this, you aren't exactly rapped in plastic off the shelf. You're used. You're never going to be on his level. You might as well get this over with. You'll be glad you ended things so early this time."

I sat across from him on his bed. I couldn't look at him. Instead I fixed my eyes on the different shades of blue strips that make up his bed spread. Once I'd finished explaining I waited to hear confirmation so I could leave and it could be over. I heard him clear his throat and say, "that's it?" and before he'd let me respond, he said with complete confidence, "I love you. Don't you dare let the devil get in your head like that again. Everything is fine, I'm not going anywhere."

All I could murmor was, "I was expecting you to make me feel bad, or dirty or something."

His reply was perfect. "You are clean and you know it." That was the end of the discussion.

I got baptized recently, and there was this divine moment right after. After I stepped out of the pool I had to go around the side of the building and come in by the bathrooms where my change of clothes were. As I left my family and friends briefly, I rounded the corner to the empty all hallway were Stephen had run to meet me. He wrapped me up in his arms (me soaking wet, him still dressed in his church attire) and told me how proud he was of me. I'd been waiting for a moment like that. Praying that such a moment existed for me. Where I felt renewed and on track with God's divine direction, and there dripping wet, I knew. So when he said, "You're clean and you know it." He meant it. He meant that I am washed by the blood, and there's not a stain left on me. I'm thankful for those words of life and for someone who never lets me forget them.

‎"You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done..." -Genesis 50:20