Meet Elyas…

My name is Elyas. I’ve been involved in Rapha for a year and a half. My story and history have been riddled with bullet holes, so to speak. The experiences I’ve had contain a great amount of loss and heartbreak, such as sustained betrayal by relatives, welcoming abuse unknowingly all through my school years, and prolonged suffering at the hand of much self-loathing. I’ve come to realize that it is not merely what others have done to me that characterize my loss, but also what I’ve done with the experiences. I turned to drugs, drinking, and seeking out even more harmful relationships than I was already in. I have struggled not only with loving myself and others, but also letting others love me.

When I began to seek help, the Rapha community welcomed me with open arms. They gave me a safe place to admit things about my past and myself, whereas many of the other places I sought solace felt unhelpful and I tended to feel misunderstood.

To get a glimpse, I’d like to share a piece of my story. It occurred over the course of my senior year of high school. At the time, I had recently been prescribed anti-depressants and had devoted myself to wasting away by pursuing substance abuse. I was living with my mother and stepfather in Idaho at the time, and they were at their wit’s end about how to help me. They decided that it would be better for me to move to Montana to live with my dad and stepmom. In that move, I went from one considerably unstable environment to another. After some months of adjusting and pretending to have stopped with the drugs, I had a deeply traumatic experience. Someone close to me blew up emotionally. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Soon after, I found myself back in Idaho again and graduating from high school.

That final trauma was an immense shock to my system. What I believed about myself was that I deserved to be abandoned and it was my problems that led to so many explosions in the people around me.

The men, I have begun to love as brothers, in the Rapha community have walked with me. With their support, I have found a vast hope for my future. I have begun to find a love for myself and a new capacity to love others. The amount of trauma and pain is only fuel for the unfathomable redemption and healing that is so woven into this community.

I am finding a freedom to be myself, to allow myself to feel comfortable in my own skin. I have begun to realize the truth that my identity matters – that I matter. My hope comes from a knowing deep within me that who I am is worth loving. The healing I have found compounds into an always growing capacity to bring myself into any and all situations and relationships, and that makes a world of difference. I’m not going to say I am healed from all that has happened, but I have a direction and a community who is going with me into a future with hope and life.