The closer I draw near to Jesus, the more embarrassed I am by the things I once called freedom.
I spent years mistaking chaos for creativity. I thought intensity meant depth. I thought wreckage was proof I was alive. That’s what childhood teaches you when love is unstable and safety is conditional. You learn to stay alert. You learn to self-soothe. You learn to burn bright because stillness feels like death.
So I did what wounded children with sharp minds often do. I chased sensation. I chased escape. I chased the kind of oblivion that passes for relief. Addiction wasn’t a rebellion. It was an attempt at order. A crude, chemical liturgy. A way to quiet the noise without trusting anyone else to hold it.
And for a while, it worked. Or seemed to. The world felt electric. Words flowed. Pain felt meaningful. I mistook my own disintegration for art.
But here’s the unromantic truth no one in the cult of self-expression wants to say out loud. Destruction doesn’t create. It consumes. It eats time. It eats memory. It eats the future and calls it experience.
Drawing near to Jesus stripped that illusion bare. Not gently. Not poetically. He didn’t flatter my wounds or applaud my survival instincts. He exposed them. He named what I’d been calling “edge” for what it was: fear wearing lipstick.
What surprised me is where the real creativity began.
Not in the high. Not in the spiral. Not in the performance of being broken.
It began in renovation.
Jesus works like a master craftsman who refuses to build on rot. He goes straight for the load-bearing beams. The childhood trauma. The lies I learned early. The habits that kept me alive once and started killing me later. He doesn’t ask me to forget them. He repurposes them.
That is the work. Renewal. The slow, unsexy labor of tearing out what’s warped and reinforcing what can still stand. The kind of work that doesn’t look impressive in public but changes everything in private.
I used to think my job was to create something impressive for God. Now I see that the most beautiful thing I get to participate in is letting Him recreate me.
That is where meaning lives. Not in self-destruction dressed up as depth, but in a life being rebuilt from the inside out. Not in numbing the past, but in redeeming it. Not in escaping pain, but in allowing it to be transformed into something that finally tells the truth.
This is not less creative. It’s the only creation that lasts.
B🤍
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