Previous Challenge Entry (Level 1 – Beginner)
Topic: Adolescence/Teen Years (07/16/09)
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TITLE: Time of Jana's troubles | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jacob Drollinger
07/21/09 -
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Jana paced her room. She knew that her life was headed down a slippery slope, but she felt helpless to do anything about it. She was only sixteen, but it felt like she had been alive much longer. She had never envisioned herself at this point, but as with the lives of most young people, when it arrived at this place, it was nearly impossible to turn the ship around.
Jana felt so inadequate. She had never fit in anywhere, with anyone. She turned to look in her bedroom mirror. When had she gotten so heavy? She glanced at the fashion magazine laying on the nightstand next to her bed. The young model on the cover was skin and bones. Why couldn’t she look more like that? She took a step closer to the mirror and examined her face. Where had all of those pimples come from? Again, she gazed at the magazine on the table. The model’s airbrushed face appeared flawless. Why couldn’t her face look more like that?
Her grades had been slipping at school. It was impossible for her to focus. When she attempted to study, she found herself reading the same paragraph over and over. Jana had never been a poor student or a bad daughter. But now, she had been repeatedly lying to her parents about what she had been feeling. At least once a day, her mom would come to her door and ask her if she was okay. She would always answer, “I’m fine, mom.” Neither did she tell her best friend about what she was going through. She was so different from Jana. She had it all together. How could her friend understand?
In her state of sorrow, Jana had started drinking. She had never been part of the drinking crowd. She was drinking alone, something different out of the liquor cabinet every night so her parents wouldn’t notice; just enough to get her intoxicated, to knock her out. Sometimes it would knock her out. Sometimes it wouldn’t knock her out. Some nights her mind was going so fast, it simply wouldn’t shut down. When she couldn’t sleep, the next morning she would have to drag herself to school in a haze. Other times, she couldn’t quit sleeping, and she would spend all her time at home in bed. The dark music she listened to confused her already jumbled and convoluted consciousness.
She felt so hopeless. Nobody understood her. Nobody would ever understand her. Her mind was a battlefield, and there were countless landmines lying in the mire surrounded by a thick cloud of smoke. She took a quick look at the bottle of prescription pain killers under her bed, left over from when she had broken her leg a year ago. Was that really the answer? Was ending her life truly the only way out of the horror that her life had become? Did she really want to become just another statistic of teenage suicide?
There was no other way out. She began to sweat profusely. Her mind was made up.
There, in the darkness under her single bed, sitting right next to the bottle of pills, was a Bible, the Bible her mom had given to her for Easter five months ago. She didn’t see it, but for some reason when she reached for the pills, her hand went past the bottle and touched the book. Not knowing what it was, she abruptly pulled it out. No! She didn’t want to see or hear anything about the God who had abandoned her. Immediately, she dropped it. The book fell open to the book of Psalms. She tried not to look at any of the words, but couldn’t help fixate on one small passage of scripture. It was Psalm 33:20 “We wait in hope for the Lord. He is our help and our shield.” She read the remainder of the thirty-third Psalm, and she started to weep gently. Why had God allowed her to get to the point where ending her life seemed like the only option? She got down on her knees and prayed like she had never prayed before. Something inside her had been released.
The demon which had been oppressing her cursed, and the angels in heaven rejoiced. Jana would henceforth sing a new song.
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