God Always Gets His Way

Yesterday I did something that I never thought I would do. I sat down with the pastor of my church and spoke with him about the sexual abuse in my childhood. I felt badly for the guy. I hit him with a fairly heavy topic out of left field, but as he told me, when people ask to speak with him privately they are rarely seeking gardening advice. That was an interesting metaphor, as part of the reason for my speaking with him was to plant a seed. I just didn’t know that until I was finished.

When I wrote of my childhood last October (here, here, and here) the response I received was quite unexpected. There were many people who contacted me privately and said, “Me, too.” Some of them were virtual friends and some of them were virtual strangers while others were people in my community and still others were members of my church. “Me, too.” Those were powerful words. After I wrote and posted those entries the big question that I asked myself was, “Where do I go from here?” I had to wait awhile before I received that answer.

Some time last year my friend Jim, the recovery minister in California, asked me when I was going to sit down with my pastor and tell my story. My reaction to that suggestion was somewhere along the lines of…

“What?! Are you freaking high? What are you smoking in that church of yours? I’m supposed to waltz into my pastor’s office out of the blue and drop this bomb shell?”

Well, that’s pretty much what I did.

Why?

If I learned anything from telling my story and reading the stories of other abuse survivors on an excellent website called Violence Unsilenced it is that there are more people like me than I ever would have expected. We all share a common need. We need to regain our voices. Regaining their voice is a critical step in recovery for the abuse victim because silence becomes an ingrained pattern of behavior for the abuse victim. Silence is an excellent tool used by abusers to control the abused. You may not appreciate the skill that an accomplished pedophile uses to explain to his young victims that everything they are doing is perfectly natural but we have to keep it a secret (because other people just don’t understand), unless you’ve heard the presentation. Most people cannot fathom the fear of harm imprinted in the mind of an abused woman when her husband or boyfriend tells her that he will kill her, and sometimes their children, if she utters a word. It’s very easy to say, “I would never let that happen to me.” Many of the women telling their stories at Violence Unsilenced said the same thing.

Silence is the easiest response when victims speak out and are met with disbelief by family members and condemnation from people intent on protecting the abuser. It happens far more often than you would imagine. All too often the victim is blamed for causing problems with a fictions story of abuse, so they learn to keep quiet. Silence is needed when surrounded by people who subscribe to the myth that abuse victims grow up to be abusers, so if we can identify the victim we should prevent them from interacting with our children. Better be safe than sorry, you know. And the victim becomes victimized again, this time by a well intentioned but clueless society. I’ve lived that last scenario while sitting in the middle of a Virtus training session, the program started by the Catholic Church to train people on how to spot abusers. The trainers weren’t spouting that rubbish, but many of my fellow attendees were. I wondered what their reaction would have been if I stood up, grabbed the microphone, and told my story, but I sat silently for fear of what would happen to my children in our community after word got out.

I regained my voice after two things happened. The first is that I learned to trust God. I learned that He would protect me if I spoke out. I did speak out when I shared my story on this blog. The second is that I confronted my mother after 30 years and asked her how she could have failed so completely to protect me from my pedophile when she suspected what he was before I ever went to his house and never took the proper steps to prevent it from happening. I knew the answer to that question before I asked it, but the question absolutely had to be asked. It needed to be asked for 30 years. My mother, a woman of amazing strength and courage, handled the question with equally amazing Grace.

One thing that I have learned about Christians and recovery is that there are many congregations and many pastors who meet abused people with judgment and condemnation rather than with love. I’ve heard too many tales of Sunday school teachers removed from their position after they approached their pastors in need of counseling and told their story of abuse or of a troubled marriage. There is no room for human frailty and suffering in some communities of fallen people depending entirely upon Christ’s sacrifice for their salvation. These are churches that do not understand Grace, something that I have known for awhile and a fact that my pastor spoke of in our talk yesterday. I was pleased to hear him say that. If he hadn’t I would have been concerned. Abuse victims need a safe, Christ-centered, Grace filled place to share, learn, grow, and heal. I discovered that my church is that safe haven. At least it is inside my pastor’s office. I suspect that it is in the majority of the congregation, too.

So, I told my story without a an agenda. I wasn’t trying to accomplish any particular goal except to tell him what happened and offer up myself as a resource to him or other victims should the need arise. I planted a seed. I was called to do it. And like Jonah when he ran from God and suffered the consequences of his fear and disobedience until he answered the call, I ran from that call for awhile until God caught my attention. I couldn’t string together two complete sentences for a week until I took care of that task. God always gets His way.

My Mask

I have taken off my mask.

For just over two years, on two different blogs, I have shared a little bit of who I am. I am a follower of Christ. I am my wife’s friend as well as her husband. I am a father to three children. One of them is a cardiac kid who gave us quite the scare a few years ago. I am a homeschooler. Along the way, I have dropped hints of my familiarity with Alcoholics Anonymous. I am familiar with that program not because I am an alcoholic but because I am the adult child of an alcoholic. Most of all, I am grateful. I am happy to be alive and grateful to God for His protection and guidance along the way. I couldn’t have made it this far with Him.

All this time, I have blogged from behind a mask. Oh, I told myself that I was blogging from behind a mask because of the need for internet safety. I blogged from behind a mask to protect my children from the bad guys who might seek to find where I live, and harm them. The truth is that I blogged from behind a mask because I was not comfortable with letting anyone see who I really am. So, I chose a very good looking mask, Cary Grant, and wore it in the blog world. Everyone enjoyed it.

Yesterday, that mask came off.

For the time being I am going to honor my wife’s request and use the black and white navy photo that ended yesterday’s blog. I won’t use it for long. I’m not a 23 year old kid standing on the battleship Missouri (yes, that is where that picture was taken) posing for an award photo. There’s an amusing story behind that photo that I will have to write one day. Major Havoc has been Jonsing me for a chance to take my picture for weeks. He wants his own camera. I am going to let him take my picture. One of the pictures that he takes should be good enough to accurately show the face of the 44-year-old man who writes this blog.

I learned an enormous lesson last month. It wasn’t an abstract lesson or a theoretical lesson. It was a concrete, real world lesson, one that I started to understand when my daughter was in the hospital and I felt like one of the apostles on the boat in the middle of the storm, staring at the sleeping Jesus in disbelief. The lesson is simple.

I learned to trust God.

I took off a mask that I wore for 35 years and revealed one of the most damaging events of my life. I decided to finally trust that God would protect me from harm and go ahead and tell people who I am. I took that leap of faith and God did not let me down. I cannot describe how refreshing the air is when you take off the mask. Freedom is incredible.

The Bible is filled with stories of people who were told by God to do something. Some did as they were told. Some didn’t. There were rewards and consequences for each choice. I trusted that God would protect me and I was rewarded with an outpouring of love and support from readers of this blog that has been nothing short of astounding. For that I am grateful to each and every one of you for the manner in which you responded to three October blogs that were probably very difficult to read. They were difficult to write, too.

You were amazing.

Along the way I’ve learned something that truly surprised me. I’ve learned the enormity of, “Me, too.” I will not tell you how many people contacted me privately to tell me that they have an event in their past that is similar to mine. A few are regular readers and many of them are not. The number is quite large. Most of them do not have the court story to go with it. Justice, at least here on earth, was not served. In my community, I have met people who saw a book that I was reading, asked, “What’s that?” and entered a conversation where they exhibited genuine Grace and understanding from personal experience.

This experience has helped me to clearly see how widespread the problem of physical and sexual abuse is, and how many people are looking for help. I found mine through a long and painful process of meeting God and understanding what He can do for me. It was an active effort over the course of many years. It challenged me to re-evaluate who I am, what I believe in, and how I behave. It gave me practical scriptural knowledge (it still does!) and a sense of direction. He’s been waiting for me to get to this point in my life for a long time. I finally caught up.

For weeks now I have needed to write this post and say one thing to each and every one of you who reads this blog.

Thank you.