Chapter 9: The Arrest

I never set out to write this story.

I lived it.

For most of my life, I survived in the margins—of certainty, of belonging, of myself. I learned early how to live inward, how to endure loneliness, how to escape into imagination when reality felt unbearable. That way of surviving carried me farther than it should have. It also carried a cost I didn't understand until much later.

Addiction deepened the margins.

Shame fortified them.

Silence made them feel permanent.

And somewhere along the way, I became convinced that God belonged to the center—while I belonged somewhere outside of it.

I was wrong.

I didn't meet God when everything came together.

I met Him when it fell apart.

I met Him in jail cells and hospital rooms.

In silence.

In Scripture.

In the long work of becoming honest.

The margins weren't where my story ended.

They were where God finally met me without pretense.

This book isn't a testimony of victory tied in a bow.

It's a record of survival reshaped by grace.

A slow emergence from secrecy into light.

Not dramatic.

Not complete.

But real.

I am not whole.

But I am present.

I am honest.

And I am still held.

Biblical Parallel: Jesus in the Margins

Jesus rarely did His deepest work in the center.

He touched lepers.

He ate with sinners.

He spoke with Samaritans.

He noticed the bleeding woman.

He defended the adulteress.

He did not wait for people to move toward holiness.

He stepped into their exile.

The margins were not a detour for Him.

They were the mission.

And they still are.

Reflection: The Margins Are Holy Ground

We often think holiness lives in sanctuaries and certainty.

But more often, it takes shape in silence.

In waiting.

In places we didn't choose.

God builds altars where we learn to stop pretending.

Where survival gives way to truth.

Where imagination no longer has to carry the weight of reality alone.

If you are in the margins—

if you feel unseen, unfinished, or disqualified—

you are not beyond grace.

You may be closer to it than you realize.

Invitation: Stay

Where are your margins?

Where have you learned to survive instead of belong?

You don't need to leave them yet.

You don't need to fix them.

You don't need to explain them.

Just stay.

Because grace does not rush us out of the margins.

It meets us there.

And it stays.