"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

Ecclesiastes 3:11

When I was younger, I would read this verse and relate it back to what I saw in the mirror – an imperfect, pimply, brace-faced 13-year-old who was trying to find some truth in her current season of life. I interpreted this as a promise that the current season would someday pass; I would one day grow out of my awkward teenage self, and become “beautiful.”

In my selfishness, I interpreted this verse as being a hope for my outward perfection, rather than a promise of how God uses our hurt for His kingdom.

Throughout my life, I strived for perfection and focused so much energy on my inability to attain it. When I was little I truly believed my life was perfect, but that changed as soon as I found out I had OCD.

My struggle with OCD over a four-year period resulted in many sleepless nights for both me and my parents, countless therapy sessions, and constant emotional distress and tears. I was made hopeless, helpless, and belittled by a brain I felt had turned against me. Worst of all, the fear that I would never be myself again loomed was ever present. I felt like I was a smear on my family’s picture of perfection.

I couldn’t reconcile why my parents were stuck with a child who caused them pain and stress when they deserved the exact opposite. It was also difficult to realize that OCD inhibited my ability to ever be completely “perfect”, even if I was able to eventually control it. There is literally an imbalance of serotonin in my brain and there always will be.

After years of therapy sessions, I finally became “OCD-free” and slowly started to remember what it was like to feel normal again, but the occasional anxiety attack reminds me that I will always have this personally demeaning flaw.

Throughout middle school and high school, I grew closer and closer in my relationship with God. I started to see the context of the hell I had experienced with OCD through His lens. For a while, I had difficulty understanding why God had placed so much trauma into my life if He is a good God.

During a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting at my middle school, I got the answer from the story of Job. Job lost everything – his house, his family, his friends, his health – all because he would not be tempted by Satan. God knew Job would not stop praising Him through the trepidation, and that Job’s story of faithfulness would be told through the ages.

God did not put Job through anything he couldn’t handle; the same goes for our lives as well. He takes what we have gone through and uses it to make us beautiful from the inside – beauty we can use for the glory of His kingdom.

God’s definition of beauty isn’t what we see in the mirror in the morning. It’s what He sees in our hearts every minute of the day. It’s easy for us to look at our own lives and question why we have to temporarily battle through what we do, but God isn’t punishing us. He’s equipping us for our use in His plan. Where we see days, God sees decades. Where we see years, God sees millennia. All of His plans are in His time. The struggles we deeply believe tarnish our imperfection is literally God turning our hearts towards His plan.

I am still learning daily why God had OCD in His plan for me – and for that matter, various other difficulties life has thrown my way. The more I stop victimizing myself and start focusing on how I can use my story for His glory, the more I see testimonies and experiences unfold in God’s grand plan. God weaves and intertwines our lives because one thread of understanding can bring a nation to the Word. Struggles are how God shows His face to our weary world. He is making all things beautiful – good, bad, and ugly – because He is using all of it for the purpose of His kingdom.