The Room at the Top
I was fifty something years old when the dream came, but it did not belong to a fifty something-year-old woman. It belonged to an eight-year-old child who had spent decades hiding in the shadows of an abusive home, crouching in the dark and begging an unseen God for someone—anyone—to break through the front door and carry her away.
In the dream, I was not a woman walking into a shop.
I was part of the merchandise inside of it.
I was standing under the hum of flickering fluorescent lights in an old, dusty thrift store—a clearance warehouse filled with discarded cast-offs, scratched furniture, faded fabrics, and broken remnants nobody wanted. And somehow, with the brutal, matter-of-fact logic of a nightmare, I knew that I was not a customer browsing the aisles. I was part of the inventory.
I was merchandise on the clearance aisle.
If you have survived severe childhood trauma, domestic violence, or religious manipulation, you do not need that metaphor explained to you. You already know what it does to the human spirit. Abuse does not just wound your body or terrify your mind; it marks you down in your own eyes. It sticks a bright red discount tag on your forehead that whispers: Damaged goods. Secondhand. Defective. Despised. You spend your entire life convinced that grace, dignity, love, and protection are reserved for the pristine people in the clean department-store windows—not for battered inventory like you.
I stood there among the junk, waiting for nothing, expecting nothing.
Then the front door opened, and a Man walked in.
He didn’t come to hunt through the racks for a bargain. He didn’t casually scan the shelves looking for something intact or undamaged. He walked straight into that warehouse of human ruin, stopped directly in front of the clearance shelf, fixed His eyes on me, and called my name.
My first reaction was not joy; it was sheer disbelief.
Instinctively, I turned my head and looked sideways at the person standing next to me, convinced of the only thing my wounded heart knew how to believe: He has to be mistaken. He must mean someone else. I’m just thrift-store junk. Nobody comes to this aisle on purpose.
He didn’t blink. He didn’t correct Himself. He didn’t look away. He told me to follow Him.
I stepped out of that aisle and followed Him out into the open air. He placed me in a green jeep and drove me away from the marketplace of shame. We arrived at a building, and there, rising up before us, was a long, ascending stairway.
He didn’t give me a map and tell me to climb it by myself. He led the way. Step by step, we ascended—leaving the street, the noise, and the clearance floors far beneath us.
At the very top of the stairs, He opened the door to a room and ushered me inside.
I stepped across the threshold and caught my breath.
The room was filled with things—familiar things, sacred things, pieces of a life I thought had been obliterated decades before. Sitting on the shelves, tucked into corners, and carefully arranged under His watchful eye were all the lost fragments of my story.
He looked at me, and I realized the stunning, holy truth: This Man had been collecting and preserving all my things for years.
While I was hiding as an abused child in the dark, crying out for a rescuer who seemed silent… He had been there. While I was feeling discarded on the auction blocks of shame… He had been there. While the enemy was telling me that my childhood was entirely wasted, ruined, and erased… this Man had walked behind the scenes of my agonizing history, picked up every single stolen fragment, carried it up the stairs, and guarded it in His personal sanctuary until the day He brought me home.
Nothing was lost. Not one tear had evaporated unnoticed. Not one year had been thrown away.
The Anchor Behind the Veil is an incarnational memoir/bible study and theological treatise that bridges lived human trauma with the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is neither a dry academic commentary nor a sentimental personal narrative; rather, it is a collision between raw, ground-level suffering—childhood abuse, domestic dysfunction, poverty, abandonment, and legalistic religion—and the cosmic, objective Christology of Hebrews.
The central thesis of the book is that Jesus did not lecture humanity from a sterile, untouchable celestial tower. He took on mortal dust, entered human frailty, and walked straight into our suffering as our sympathetic Pioneer (Archēgos) and Forerunner (Prodromos). By taking our anchor not downward into shifting earth, but upward behind the heavenly curtain, Christ offers an unshakable reality that sustains the soul even when life’s foundations roll and buckle like open water.
For years, I believed the lie that my life was an untethered disaster of random cruelty, broken floorboards, and unanswered prayers. I thought the Book of Hebrews was an ancient, impenetrable puzzle about Levitical priests, blood, and tabernacle furniture meant only for scholars in academic libraries.
I was wrong.
God was not giving me clinical theological theory; He was writing Hebrews into my bones.
When the writer of Hebrews tells us that Jesus came to destroy the power of death and deliver those who were held in lifelong fear and bondage (Hebrews 2:14–15), that is not abstract prose. That is the Pioneer who heard the cry of the terrified little girl praying in the dark.
When the New Testament speaks of exagorazō—being bought completely out of the marketplace of slavery so that you are never put up for sale again—that is the Man who entered the thrift store, bypassed the pristine showrooms, and paid for damaged goods with His own royal blood.
When Hebrews 6:19–20 declares that Jesus entered “as a forerunner on our behalf” (prodromos) behind the veil, that is the Man who walked up the stairs ahead of me, opened the door to the room at the top, and preserved my stolen life in the presence of the Father.
And when the floorboards of your life begin to heave like open water, you discover what the writer of Hebrews knew all along: an earthly anchor dropped into the mud of human performance, emotional goosebumps, or religious checklists will always drag and slip in the gale. But our anchor is cast upward. It hooks past the shifting clouds, straight through the cosmic curtain, and fastens into the immovable bedrock of the throne room where the seated King reigns forever.
The little girl who prayed in the shadows for a rescuer was not forgotten.
The Man who bought her off the clearance aisle has brought her up the stairs.
And now, with the ink of lived reality and the living Word in hand, it is time to turn around, walk down to the doorway of a sleeping, distracted church, and tell you who He really is.
Grab your coffee (or maybe your shoes) and let the journey begin
