A Message from the Future

for past + present me (and maybe you too)

CPTSD is time travel against your own will.

You did not choose the setting of your story, after all. You didn’t choose the conflicts, the years of unrelenting stress on your body and mind, the identity-penalty statements (implicit and explicit) you bathed in. The poison of traumatization in a broken world in a broken body has infected you with a time-traveling superpower you didn’t ask for.

It is a superpower, but I know you’re not confused. This poison will still kill you. It is the poison of a broken heart, untended to and un-pursued, producing countless vices and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. And, as you know, it is possible to die from a broken heart. It’s possible to die from hopelessness.

This superpower to time travel only works backwards. It’s deficient, dangerous. You’ll frequently be forced back into your 4-year-old mind, your 10-year-old mind, your teenage mind. In the blink of an eye, when you’re met with something as “simple” as an un-responded-to text message or a moment of being misunderstood, you’ll think your safety and loveliness is under fatal attack, and you’ll conclude (again and again) that your name is Rejected One, the Unwanted, the Unknown. Your body will break down, and your relationships will suffer (some will slip from your grasp like a broken glass bottle, cutting you to the bone).

You’ll be trapped in your origin story’s worst chapters. You’ll only want to end it. You’ll think you’re simply logical to agree with the violent silence that shouts, “To be or not to be isn’t even a question, is it? You know the latter is the answer.” This is the type of time travel I’m talking about: temporal displacement. This is a sentence of death via infinite loops of evil episodes metabolized as an addiction to self-loathing.

Unless . . .

Unless some sort of redemption pulls you into a different orbit to time travel again. This is a different type of time travel.

You’ll naturally assume redemption’s time travel can wrinkle time to erase the places, people, faces that define your shame. You’ll even want it, at times, to erase you. You might not phrase it that way, but you’ll want redemption to do something it cannot and will not do: simply removing one detail, one moment of agony from your story. “After all,” you’ll think, “I’m just a blip in the vast, expanding universe. My life is of no consequence. Just edit this part out of my story. Then I won’t be so . . . like this.”

But you won’t see (at first, at least) that every hair you possess, every boring, exciting, embarrassing, and tragic aspect of your existence holds something cosmic in balance. Somehow—not by magic but by design—Mars and Saharan dust and generations yet to exist are inextricably connected to you. And the domino—or butterfly (I don’t think the label is what matters at the moment)—effect of your every breath and step means you cannot, you must not, erase, un-Name, nor deny even your darkest moments.

Redemption is a different type of time travel. It doesn’t dabble in erasure, though it can, in fact, wrinkle time. It can, in an instant, chronoport you to the most impossibly beautiful and hopelessly horrible scenes of your own universe, your own epic. But this time (well, these times, because it’s not simply a one-time kind of thing) when you land, you won’t be alone. To be clear, you were never alone; you just didn’t know.

But now, with the Presence, in the Presence, you’ll see each scene anew, one by one visiting them, until eternity bleeds all the way backwards so that the past is as the present is as the future.

What I mean is that this kind of time travel works backward and forward. You’ll be clothed with power to proclaim with-ness, communion, un-alone-ness to every iteration of your evolving, stubborn soul. And you’ll learn, with the Presence, like the Presence, how to kiss that terrified child within—the one with dimple-knuckles and tears hiding beneath an attitude. You’ll learn how to cradle the broken heart and gently breathe on the lifeless hopelessness nestled in the marrow.

Because you’ll increasingly see the Presence everywhere. It will wrinkle time and, at the same time, take all the time of eternity to turn your every millisecond into glory. At some point, you’ll know you’re simply logical to agree that all of the sufferings of this present time (and of the past) are not worth comparing with the weight of glory revealed through (not despite) the worst cracks in your character and plot. And you’ll discover your true Name. The one that, you’ll find, was always your truest Name—will always be You.

The Presence will be the antidote, the Namer, the Way. You can’t afford it, even on your best days. All the same, it’s free. And eager. And patient.

And far more good than you ever dared imagined.

Hey, did you know I wrote a book? (Well, a few technically!)

My latest book is my first book for grown-ups. It’s called Love Has a Story (Moody Publishers, 2024), and I think you should read the first two chapters to see if you want to get it for yourself or a friend (here’s chapter one and here’s chapter two). :)

Be on the lookout for news about my first fiction book, a novel-in-verse set to release in 2027 with InterVarsity Press. Can’t wait to tell you all about it!