DARKNESS FALLS
/Beyond the Music | Chapter Two
“I was so young, I couldn't know…”
Some of the deepest wounds we carry happen before we're even old enough to understand what's happening to us.
Before we have the words to explain it. Before we know what's normal and what's not. Before we even know that something is wrong.
And yet those very things can go on to shape so much of who we become.
That's a big part of what Darkness Falls is about.
I was just a little girl when darkness entered my life through someone who was supposed to protect me. My earthly father.
My parents separated when I was around a year old and divorced when I was two. Around that time, my dad had gotten heavily involved in drugs, including meth, and was living a lifestyle that brought a whole lot of darkness into our lives.
I know now that people don't usually end up in those places without carrying wounds of their own. I don't know everything my father experienced growing up, but I've often wondered what happened to him that contributed to the choices he eventually made.
Because hurt people really do hurt people.
But understanding that doesn't excuse what happened.
My father sexually abused me.
And I was so young that I didn't even have the ability to fully understand or communicate what was being done to me.
There were times when my mom was sick and my father had full care of me. I was taken into drug houses, around people and environments no little girl should have been exposed to. There were times my mom didn't even know where I was.
My dad would take me, keep me, and sometimes come looking for us when she was trying to leave.
For years, I went back and forth between my mom's side of the family and my father's.
My mom began noticing physical signs that something was wrong. She took me to doctors, and eventually a detective became involved.
My older cousin was also being abused by him. When she was finally able to tell her mother, things began coming to light.
Eventually, authorities intervened, and when I was around six or seven, we obtained a restraining order.
I never saw my father again.
But just because someone is no longer physically present in your life doesn't mean the effects of what happened disappear.
Sometimes that's when you begin to discover just how much was left behind.
Little Girl, Prey From the Start
One of the lines in this song says:
“Little girl was prey right from the start.”
And I think about how many people have stories that began when they were so little.
Some people don't even have clear memories of what happened. They just grow up carrying the effects.
Fear. Shame. Confusion. Rejection. Unworthiness. An inability to trust. A desperate desire to be loved. A tendency to tolerate things they should never have had to tolerate.
And sometimes we don't even realize those things are connected to something that happened years before.
We just think that's who we are.
We build personalities around survival. We develop patterns to protect ourselves. We enter relationships through the lens of what we've experienced.
And then those patterns can become so familiar that we mistake them for love, or for our identity.
I believe the enemy loves to take advantage of those early wounds. If he can influence what we believe about ourselves while we're young, those lies can follow us for years.
But here's the thing.
What happened to you is not who you are.
And the enemy doesn't get to decide what becomes of your story.
My Life One Day Would Become Art
This is probably one of my favorite lines in the whole song.
“My life one day would become art.”
And I don't just mean the music.
I mean my whole life.
The way I dress. My tattoos. My style. The way I create spaces. The way I put things together. The way I express myself. The way I hold space for other people and minister to them.
The way I take something I've walked through and find a way to bring meaning, beauty, truth, or freedom out of it.
My life has become art in so many ways.
Not because what happened to me was beautiful.
It wasn't.
But because God can take things that were meant to destroy us and bring something beautiful out of what remains.
And I think that's an important distinction.
We don't have to call evil good to recognize that God can redeem what evil tried to ruin.
The things that happened to me didn't deserve to happen. But they also don't have to be wasted.
And now, even the music is another expression of that.
The little girl who couldn't explain what was happening to her grew into a woman who can use her voice.
And not just to tell her own story, but hopefully to help other people recognize what's been happening in theirs.
Learning to See Beyond the Person
As I got older, I began doing a lot of healing work.
In my early twenties, long before I fully surrendered my life to Jesus, I was involved in different spiritual practices, inner-child work, quantum healing, and other things I was exploring while trying to understand myself.
I look at some of those practices differently now.
But I also know I was searching for healing, and I believe the Lord was drawing me even during those years.
I began becoming more aware of how trauma works. How things we experience as children can affect our choices as adults. How unhealed wounds can show up in relationships, beliefs, behaviors, and even the way we see ourselves.
I also began looking at my father differently.
Not because what he did was suddenly okay.
It never was.
But because I started to understand that there was likely a whole lot of brokenness behind the man who hurt me.
I began to see his life through a spiritual lens, too. I believed there was demonic influence involved in the darkness he had entered.
And one of the Scriptures that eventually became so important to me was Ephesians 6:12:
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood…”
That doesn't mean people aren't responsible for their choices.
It means I began recognizing that there was more to the battle than the person standing in front of me.
And that understanding helped change the way I approached forgiveness.
I didn't have to pretend it never happened.
I didn't have to say it was okay.
I didn't have to have him back in my life.
I could recognize what happened, acknowledge the damage, and still choose not to spend the rest of my life chained to it.
Forgiveness Is the Key
Forgiveness was already something I had begun working through before I came fully to Christ.
But when I got saved, and then began experiencing deliverance, things started changing on an even deeper level.
There was so much shame that began lifting.
So many beliefs I had carried about myself that needed to go.
And not just things connected to my childhood, but things I had picked up along the way through my own choices, relationships, and the environments I'd continued putting myself in.
Because that's another part of this.
Sometimes we experience darkness through what other people do to us.
And sometimes, as we get older, we begin participating in things that keep us surrounded by it.
I had entered terrible relationships. I had tolerated things I shouldn't have. I had continued patterns that were familiar to me, even while I was trying to heal from them.
And I needed freedom in those areas, too.
As I began walking with Jesus, I experienced what I understood to be deliverance from spiritual oppression. I was renouncing things, letting go of beliefs, and removing things from my life that I no longer wanted to be connected to.
I was learning boundaries.
Learning to recognize unhealthy patterns.
Learning to choose differently.
Learning that I didn't have to keep accepting the same treatment just because it was what I had known.
My standards changed. My relationships changed. My surroundings changed.
Even the way I thought about myself began changing.
And that freedom didn't happen through one single moment.
There have been so many layers.
So much shedding.
So much learning.
And still more to learn.
But I can look back and see just how much the Lord has brought me out of.
One of the lines says:
“Forgiveness is the key. The Lord too then forgave me.”
Because I also had to recognize how much forgiveness I had received.
Not that my choices were the same as what was done to me as a child. They weren't.
But I had my own sins. My own rebellion. My own ways of living that needed to be surrendered.
And Jesus met me there, too.
Forgiveness wasn't just something I was learning to extend.
It was something I was receiving.
Oh Devil, You Didn't Know
This is where the song really turns.
“But oh devil, you didn't know. I would use this all to fight and shake your world.”
I love this part.
Because what was supposed to silence me has become something I speak about openly.
What was supposed to bury me in shame has become part of my testimony.
What was supposed to keep me bound has become something I use to help other people recognize their own chains.
And that's not because I'm so strong.
It's because Jesus is.
Revelation 12:11 talks about overcoming by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.
And I think about that so much.
Our testimonies matter.
Not just the pretty parts. Not just the things that sound acceptable to share in church.
Sometimes it's the darkest parts of our stories that somebody else needs to hear, because they're sitting in the middle of something similar and don't even realize freedom is possible.
I don't share these things because I want people to focus on what happened to me.
I share them because I want people to see what Jesus can do.
And because I want the lies exposed.
The lies that say you're ruined.
That you're dirty.
That you'll always choose the same people.
That you'll never be free.
That your past determines your future.
No.
Those things don't get the final word.
Redeemed and Justified
“Redeemed and justified, just as if I could never die.”
I'm not talking about never experiencing physical death.
I'm talking about eternal life in Jesus Christ.
The redemption He purchased. The justification we receive through faith in Him. The promise that death itself does not get the final victory.
I think about how much of my early life was surrounded by darkness, and how different my eternity looks because of Jesus.
And that's why this song isn't just about childhood abuse.
It's about salvation.
It's about forgiveness.
It's about deliverance.
It's about what happens when the enemy thinks he has a person completely wrapped up, only for that person to come to Christ and begin exposing the very things that once held them captive.
It's about taking the testimony and using it for the Kingdom.
And that's what I want my music to do.
My songs aren't just worship songs in the traditional sense.
They're testimony. They're Scripture. They're teaching. They're prayer. They're ministry. They're spiritual warfare.
They're pieces of what I've lived and what the Lord has shown me.
And I believe He's bringing so many of those pieces together now.
Tetelestai — It Is Finished
The song ends with one word.
TETELESTAI.
The Greek word recorded in John 19:30 when Jesus declared:
“It is finished.”
His finished work on the cross is the foundation of everything I'm talking about.
But personally, those words carry so much meaning when I look at my own life.
The old ways of living.
The darkness I was born into.
The lies I believed.
The shame I carried.
The patterns I kept repeating.
The future I might have walked into if I had continued down the same roads.
I'm not saying every struggle is over or that I've arrived at some perfect place.
But that old life doesn't get to own me anymore.
And the more I walk with Jesus, the more I understand what it means to live from what He's already accomplished.
The enemy may have thought he had me.
He may have thought that little girl would grow up buried beneath everything that happened to her.
That the shame would silence her.
That the abuse would define her.
That the patterns would continue.
But he didn't know what Jesus was going to do with my life.
And now the very things that were meant to keep me in darkness are being brought into the light.
The lies exposed. The chains broken. The testimony spoken.
And the music? That's just another way the Lord is using it all.
“It's time to fly.”
Something interesting about that line is that when I was little, I used to have a lot of dreams about flying.
I would be flying over trees, over places, over all kinds of chaos happening beneath me.
Sometimes there were shootings or other really frightening things going on below, and I was flying above it all, trying to get away.
I've since learned that dreams about flying can sometimes be connected to wanting to escape what's happening in your reality.
And I think about that little girl now.
How much she was carrying without even knowing how to explain it.
How badly she wanted to get away.
And how interesting it is that all these years later, one of my songs ends with those very words.
It's time to fly.
Except now I'm not trying to escape my life.
I'm finally stepping into it.
Into the ministry. The music. The calling. The things the Lord has been preparing me for through all these years, even when I couldn't see what He was doing.
I was once a little girl flying above the darkness in her dreams, trying to get away from what was happening beneath her.
And now I'm a woman who gets to walk straight into dark places carrying the light of Jesus Christ.
Not running from the darkness anymore.
Exposing it.
Bringing testimony where there was once silence.
Bringing truth where there were once lies.
Bringing freedom into places where the enemy thought he'd built a permanent home.
And not because of anything I could accomplish on my own.
But because of what Jesus already finished.
The story isn't over.
In a lot of ways, I feel like it's only just beginning.
And what the enemy meant for destruction, the Lord can turn into testimony.
Tetelestai.
It's time to fly.
— Devereux Grace