Trigger Warning: This shares some of my personal story of abuse.
Sometimes bad things happen that, in and of themselves, have no redeeming value.
Sometimes all we can do is honor the injustice and/or suffering of a victim by allowing space for it, refusing to try to pretty it up for our own comfort, and sitting with their pain. In doing so, we affirm their value.
-Amy Renee
As a child abuse victim I was taught to repress pain. AKA, I got beat by my foster mother if I cried.
I want to share about why hearing how “this was God’s plan” messed me up and how God helped me heal and untangle this mess to heal properly.
I grew into an adult who could not feel pain or sadness. Every other emotion I could feel but pain and sadness became numbness. At some point I had to learn to look for other emotions such as anger as an indicator to help identify hidden pain. Only in my 30s did I learn something that helped unblock this emotion that I wasn’t able to feel.
Here is a bit of my journey and why telling someone ‘God uses all for good’ can do damage:
As a child who got saved at 7 years old in Sunday school, I identified strongly with Joseph in jail while I was in my foster home. Joseph was stuck – but God used it for good. I internalized that story as my own.
I misapplied “God works all things for the good” to mean He causes all things. That did a lot of damage long term … That hyper-calvanisim/determinism view attributed things/ evils to God that didn’t belong to Him.
As a child my environment consisted of living with a pedophile and a psychopath. These were my foster parents and the abuse of all of the kids in the home was extreme. One of my foster siblings committed suicide another went into prostitution and became a drug addict.
I always thought I was fortunate because “I had God to hold me together” and in so many ways that was true! I thought I survived that decade of abuse well because of God. That he would use it for my good and I still believe that.
As an adult I learned that the numbness was actually a wound that needed healing. This stress response made it hard to know when I was hurting emotionally.
Think of how if you put your hand on something hot your bodies pain receptors let you know “something is wrong – ouch- remove your hand ” Well as an adult not feeling emotional pain not only kept me from grieving but it also set me up for putting up with a lot of unhealthy crap because my tolerance was so high and I didn’t have the proper “ouch” withdrawal response to let me know something was harming me. Numbness is awkward but much easier to overlook than pain.
I needed to feel pain & sadness again, because although anger was helpful to power through hard times (it came with bursts of energy) it wasn’t helpful if someone hurt me. Sadness is a better reflection in some situations (and helps in communication with people better).
To learn to undo numbness and re-learning to feel sadness, started with undoing that teaching that God was responsible- or purposefully placed me in such an abusive home- for my good.
I really had myself believing God was the one that caused or designed this for my good. But there is a world of difference between “God caused this for our good” and “God will use this for our benefit.” Another unhelpful teaching: God never lets you go through more than you can handle (this is found nowhere in scripture and is a twisting of a verse about standing up under temptation or God providing a way out of temptation)…
I needed to unlearn these wrong teachings to heal. I needed to untwist what had become twisted.
I thought God *caused* the abuse like Joseph’s case too- in order to develop him into a stronger person. When we attribute abuse to God and conflate this as His *doing* we make God into an abuser and that really distorts our ability to trust God.
One of the areas where Christians don’t do well is in acknowledging the devastation of the wound. We can tend to gloss over the devastation of any kind of suffering but especially sexual assault, with Christian platitudes like God works all things together for good or God is sovereign. Those are very good and glorious biblical truths, but when they are misapplied in a way to dampen the horror of evil, they ultimately dampen the goodness of God. Goodness and darkness exist as opposites. If we pretend that the darkness isn’t dark, it dampens the beauty of the light.”
-Former gymnast Rachael Denhollander interviewed by Christianity Today after she started off a chain of events by being the first to testify publicly against doctor Larry Nassar in the largest U.S.A. sex abuse scandal in sports history.
There are narratives that make sense as a child that need re-evaluation as an adult. For example young kids tend to see their parents as superheroes till they grow up and are able to evaluate and notice things as an adult that you can’t see when you are a child.
As an adult my own testimony needed re-evaluation. Looking at my own story as an adult meant looking at God’s role in my childhood through adult eyes.
Childlike trust in God is beautiful but childish thinking bout God is not so beautiful. This is a difficult area to venture into when you have gone through abuse (and much more different then for those who grew up in a healthy and safe home)! There are certain Christian platitudes that make total sense if you ignore situations of abuse, neglect or abandonment.
For those who have lived out rather harsh or horrifying realities (or trauma), it takes a while to feel ready for the dam of questions to break open above you and spill out over you. Nobody wants to feel engulfed.
One thing that fit those pieces together was asking about God’s character.
Matthew 7 was helpful:
9 “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”
God is essentially saying we know how to treat our kids well and give them what is good and not what is harmful. Now that I was a mom, I realized that I would never put my child in a home with a psychopath and a pedophile “to develop their character”. That would be absurd!
I started asking harder questions like: what about a little girl who gets brutally gang raped so bad she can’t walk! This happens more often then we care to know, or all the people who got gassed in gas chambers… do we really want to do this dance to attribute all this horror to God “for our own good?”
Once I looked at the abuse through my adult vision of being a mom and using my “loving -parent-eyes” to see the situation something very strange happened: something Job finally did before God answered him and something most of us are petrified to do!
I got angry about how God allowed things to go down and I expressed it rawly, truthfully and without sugar coating it.
“God I’m really upset that you allowed this to go down!” I needed to go there! Yes I did.
And God was able to start the process of healing when I was able to pour out my heart and like Job, start expressing my anger, frustration at the events directly to him rather then pretending I was ok with everything (I didn’t think I was pretending but sometimes we are repressed and trying to convince ourselves because the alternative is admitting pain we may not be ready or able yet to acknowledge or face!)
Telling people God uses bad things that happened to you to bless others is a frustrating message to hear when you’re in the midst of pain, trauma, depression, anxiety, etc. Even when people don’t mean any harm it can absolutely come across as insensitive. A lot of Christians console themselves with such sentiments when hard or difficult things happen. I think in some cases to avoid becoming angry or truly processing the trauma that has occurred and wrestling with what that means in relation to God and the world around you. It’s easier to say “God works things out for good” (which I still believe He does but it’s been turned into a cliche) and move on with their “testimony” once the situation has been “resolved” or things are better. -Corrie
Until we are ready to do the emotional work needed to get there and pour out our hearts like Job finally does at the end of the book – Job gets no response from God up until that point. Where we cannot acknowledge the pain there is no healing!
I was walking around with a deep wound that was bandaged over and I had no idea something was wrong until that wound got poked at! Sometimes we are the walking wounded but unaware of how!
It took me a while to throw out the stupid platitudes, like Jobs friends had when they wanted a good reason for why God allowed for this. It comforts us to imagine someone else caused their own pain or “it’s for the good of them” and much harder to just go “wow… that’s so wrong! There is no good purpose behind that little girl gang raped so bad she can no longer walk! This wasn’t God’s magnificent design nor her fault! There is no platitude to turn this harmful snake into a beautiful loaf of nourishing bread! It’s simply a venomous harmful snake!!!”
It’s not a gift from God. It’s not a good gift.
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” Isaiah 5:20
Once we get to that point we become like the psalmists who vulnerably pour out their hearts and are not fearful to say “how long Lord?” Or to acknowledge their grief, feeling of abandonment or frustration.
Get this: Psalms was the old Testament prayer book and Jesus quotes it on the cross when he feels honestly ditched by God. He has learned to pray in pain from his heart without sugar coating his feelings.
He didn’t say “My God, My God, thou art wonderful – thank thee for this good plan!” He instead quoted the psalmists of chapter 22:1 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?”
I love this because it shows His humanity so much and we need to start there for healing or help! I love how Jesus says before he dies: “Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.”
Luke 23:46
Nobody commits their Spirit to a God that has forsaken them… but if you want to know that He is worth committing your Spirit into start with the truth of your feelings of pain and abandonment without trying to justify God’s behavior or pretend you are ok with the turn of events. Just be straight that it hurts like crazy and tell Him you are not ok that He feels so far off from your groaning.
Start there and watch what He does! For myself I said to God plainly “There is no good reason you could give for any of this anymore. I want to stop attaching your name to the evil committed against me and pretending you endorsed it!”
My friend asked me: “well what do you want God to say in response to your pain?”
Me: “Nothing! I want God to say ‘I have no justification and I don’t agree with what was done to you. It was bad period. There is no good explanation. I’m not here to Godsplain. I’m here to sit with you in your pain and let you know I abhored it too and wept over the destruction and will weep with you going forward”.
And wept, He has.
And wept, I have.
With that the ice on my sadness began to thaw. Numbness is slowly being replace by the emotion I lost! My tears!!! They flow again!!! And each time they come down and I feel pain in my heart I thank God for the healing.
That I can grieve. That I am no longer trapped by my numbness. I’m no longer clumsily walking on a foot that has gone numb, dragging it along. No longer is there that lump in my throat that stays there without being able to become dislodged by my tears!
The tears fall. And God cherishes me and doesn’t disregard or minimize or explain away one darn tear.
Instead He keeps them:
Psalm 56:8 “You keep track of all of my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”
Thank you Lord!
berean thinking 