My story begins at the age of about five. My family consisted of a father, a mother and myself. My brother was only born a year later in 1974. We lived in South Africa in a suburb that was still pretty much undeveloped. Life was simple or so it seemed to a five year old. My parents had immigrated from England two years before when I was three. While on the journey over to South Africa they met another family who were also immigrating, the Johnson's. The Johnson's were to become one of the closest friends my parents ever had. The Johnson's were seen as just another extension of our own family. We were just another extension of theirs. They had earned a special place in our lives through, what appears to me as a hidden agenda. A deceptive presence oozed its way into our home. An unspoken exchange had taken place without anyone's awareness. The Johnson's friendship in exchange for my parents independence and privacy as people. My parents sold their right to protect and nurture me. The Johnson's control was such that they were able to blind my parents to the reality of the wickedness that would soon come. The cost of that friendship was too high. Not only did they have total control over my parents, but over me to. They became my legal guardians and that opened a door for them to have infinite rights over me. Their friendship was all that mattered and there was nothing more important than that. The Johnson's friendship seemed to become a sort of medium through which they entranced my parents. Nothing else existed outside that. Their friendship was like a blinding light that obscured everything else. While my parents were blinded by such deceptive friendship, behind the scene I saw what was actual reality. But the Johnson's had successfully won my parents over. My mother and father were no longer a reliable source of help to me. The Johnson's had made dead sure of that. The Johnson's had two sons, Peter, 15, Paul, 13 and a daughter Jane who was 11. I saw each of them as my brothers and sister. We were a very close "family" and seldom did anything without the other. What we did, they did and what they did, we did. Peter was always the responsible one while Paul and Jane were the ones who always got up to mischief. I formed a very close relationship with Paul and Jane. Because of the depth of what appeared to be friendship, my parents now successfully blinded, believed they would be good companions for me. I was in very capable hands. Unable to continue with their responsibility to nurture and care for me, Paul and Jane became to me what my parents once were. They were saints to my parents. Paul had two sides to him. At a glance, the one side was angelic - the side my parents saw. The side that they trusted. Only I could see the other side. A side that his parents and Jane covered their eyes to. No-one else had eyes to see or ears to hear. His other side was so evil and brutal that in a picture I drew, he was depicted as some sort of satanist standing over me with an axe in his hand, dripping in blood. I was his innocent sacrifice. Paul and Jane were the only two people who ever baby-sat me while my parents were too busy. My parents socialized a lot and that created the opportunities for Paul and Jane to spend more time with me than they should ever have been allowed to. In the same picture my parents' backs are toward me. That seems to have been the only side of them I ever saw. That and a great big door separating me from them. They were always leaving me. And no matter how much I was trying to scream to make them turn around, a great big hand would always be covering my mouth, stifling my scream. I don't remember much interaction between them and myself. My memory holds no such thing. My time was taken up feeling trepidation for the next time they would walk through that door leaving me alone - again.
There was no time to be a child. Wild imaginations and fantasies were never part of my life. Survival became a desperate thing for me if not the only thing. Child's play? There was no security to dream. I'm sure I tried to imagine my world being a different place. Tried desperately to make it happen. But there was nothing safe in my world and nothing loving and all the imagining in the world couldn't remove me from the real world. I guess I eventually gave up dreaming and concentrated on surviving. I learned at a very early age that no-one would be there for me. I made up a fantasy friend who I would talk to every night. I would tell her all my problems and she was always there for me. Wherever I went, she would be there watching and protecting. My family weren't into religion, so there wasn't even a God who I could call out to.
I had learned all about how my family worked and how the real world was by the age of five. The full understanding of the dynamics of my family have only become clearer as I've got older and had the courage to face the reality.
While my parents were forming their friendship with the Johnson's, my mother's nephew, Simon, and his wife and daughter had come to stay with us. They had also recently immigrated from England and needed a place to stay until they got their feet on the ground. He was an alcoholic and I will always remember the terrible fights and arguments Simon and his wife would have. Sometimes he would get physically violent and throw things at her. During one of their brawls he had thrown a very precious hairbrush of mine at her and had broken it. I was very upset by this incident because the hairbrush had sentimental value to me. But that was the attitude toward anything I thought precious.
By the time I got to the age of five years old, my home was emotionally distant. Needing love and attention, I turned to the nearest people who were available, Paul and Jane. Any morsel of attention would have done and so I took what I could. But even that had its price. Paul and Jane began to sexually abuse me at this point. It first began with all three of us. I was forced to have oral sex with Paul while Jane, at the same time, had oral sex with me. Fingers poked and prodded me with such force, creating such pain. No-one was excluded in this new "game". This was not like the other games we used to play together and the confusion was startling and left me reeling. This "love" hurt. Paul, with his cunning, sadistic mind, approached my father, who was like a best friend to him, and told him all the disgusting things I had done to him. My father was appalled over my "naughtiness" and proceeded to take me to my room and beat me. An allegiance had now been formed between Paul and my father. I'm sure my father was aware of the fact that I couldn't possibly have come up with the idea of oral sex on my own accord, but such was his need to please the Johnson's that he would believe anything, just to keep the peace. Paul had seen my father's response and knew he could get away with anything from now on. This closed my resource for getting help. I never again believed that I could get help from my father. In my five year old mind, if my father had reacted to it the way he did, why would my mother be any different? To me, they were one and the same.
Because of my father's non-chalant attitude toward what had happened, it seemed to me that he had given permission to the male species to do what they liked. I became an easy prey for any man that entered our home. There was some kind of conspiracy going on.
My mother's nephew, Simon, in one of his drunken states one evening, approached me. Feeling sorry for himself as he always did, he wanted a little assurance from me. He just wanted a hug and he would be on his way. But once I was in his clutches, the hug suddenly turned into something dangerous. I could feel his arms tightening around my body and there was little I could do. He was a big man and I was so little. He wouldn't let me go and all I felt was fear and terror. I tried to push him away and I suppose in his drunken state, he lost his balance and I was able to move away. He tried to pursue me, plunging at me, but fortunately at that time, I was quicker than he was and I got away. I remember the lust I saw in his eyes as he tried to pursue me. As I grew older, he was always someone I regarded as a filthy pervert and someone who always repulsed me when I was around him.
My father's permissiveness of Paul and Jane's abuse of me seemed to release inside of himself his own perverted fantasies. Although I do not remember much of my father in my childhood, I have one memory that made me feel very uncomfortable. He had come into my room one day. I don't know what made him come in or why he was there. My father was reaching out his hand to me. To do what I don't know. That part of the picture remains hidden. I was startled by what he was trying to do and quickly moved away from him. He, out of embarrassment, withdrew his hand. His words to me were, "Whatever you do, don't tell your mother." I felt my father's embarrassment. I not only felt his shame, but I internalized it. In the course of internalizing it, he had become the victim and I the perpetrator. I was ashamed that I had shamed my father like that and caused such a weak response. Suddenly I was the one who should have been apologizing. Not him. If he couldn't take responsibility for his own shame, then someone should. That became me.
But I was angry with him. Angry because he didn't have the courage to own his shame. Angry that I had owned it for him. Angry that I felt I had victimized him. Angry that he was so weak he couldn't protect me. Wouldn't protect me. Angry because he had openly acknowledged who his allegiance was with. I felt sick. Being angry in my family was not an option, so it was one of the very first emotions that were buried. That and the shame of the moment when he crossed the line between a father and daughter relationship. He had perverted a sacred relationship.
Once the sexual abuse began it seemed to snowball. Abuse became the hand of punishment in my life. For all my mistakes, wrongdoing, imperfections, I was punished. Paul thought up ingenious ways in which to trip me up. Any action to him could be perceived as a mistake depending on his frame of mind. It started with him asking me to do things for him. I would have to fetch a glass of water, get some food, clean up for him, go and sit next to him. Whatever he fancied at any point, I would have to get or do. If I was asked to do something, it would have to be done perfectly, to his standard. This was my chance to finally be acceptable. But there were never any rewards for me in these games, but I never stopped trying. I just tried harder and harder. If what I did was not done to his standards, he would say to me "You know what will happen if you don't do this". And he would point to his genitals. The abuse took many forms. Oral sex, sexual touching, masturbation, verbal sexual innuendoes, to Jane teaching me how to kiss. I didn't just need acceptance but now I needed to do well to survive. His standards would always change. What was acceptable one day wouldn't be acceptable the next. Perfection sometimes didn't meet the mark. I was inevitably punished. It wasn't because he was unrealistic, it was because I didn't perform properly. Performance became my survival and also my most vulnerable point. There was danger in performing. It became a kind of treadmill for me. To survive I had to perform, yet if the standard of my performance was evaluated, it could also mean death. Whenever my performance was noticed by Paul, abuse naturally followed. Later in life, the same cycle was played out. I performed well at everything I did. Yet, I would cower in fear if anyone noticed or complimented me. It has been a very difficult cycle to break. I also learned that touch brought pain. It was the vehicle through which betrayal came. No-one ever touched me without it hurting. If touch was ever nice, it always exacted a high price. Any touch equaled punishment.
By the time I was nine years old I already had a three year old brother, John. We had moved out of that horror house into a nicer house in a nice neighborhood. Except for Paul and Jane still baby-sitting, my outer world seemed very secure. One evening while being baby-sat, with my brother sleeping upstairs, Paul, Jane and myself were playing downstairs in the lounge. It was always fun to play. It was nice to be noticed. I enjoyed the attention. But always at the back of my mind, there was trepidation. How long would we play for before he hurt me again. Maybe he thought the "foreplay" would ease me up a little - throwing cushions at each other, laughing over jokes. It never did. On the outside I went along with the play but always waiting for that moment. As much I tried to stall by trying to make the game go on longer, I never had enough power to make it happen. He always won. My brother needed his nappy changing and so off we went to help Jane. In my parents room, John was laid down on the bed ready to be changed. I was there eager to help as a little sister normally is, wanting to play "mommy". Sometime during the course of changing his nappy, I found myself standing over my brother, with Paul and Jane standing behind me. Urging me on. "Do it!" "Do it!" The same threats ringing in my head - "If you don't do this, you know what will happen, don't' you". My mind must have gone blank at that point, because I don't remember what I felt or thought. All I could hear was their laughing and jeering as they forced me to have oral sex with my brother. The fear. The horror. I wanted so desperately to move away from their anger, their violence. Powerless. "God, where are you?" "Surely this goes beyond allowing someone to have a free will." "Surely, now you'll step in and stop this evil". Silence. With Jane somewhere in the room, my brother still lying on the bed, Paul now forced me to have oral sex with him too. The rage inside me! Wanting to hit Paul as hard as I could yet being too frightened to. Would he do more harm to me? What would he do if I allowed him to see how angry I was at him? Everything in me wanted to scream "I didn't have to do that to my brother! You were going to abuse me anyway!" I'm not sure if that anger was directed more at Paul or myself. Only we knew what happened that night.
That night I completely shut down. I shut down emotionally, mentally and physically. I put all those memories into the furthest corner of my being and left them there for 30 years hoping that I would never have to look at them again. I now have two boys of my own. When they were about 3 years old, I would have horror pictures flash through my mind. Not realizing they were flashbacks, I flogged myself for such sick perverted thoughts. The flashbacks felt like they had a compulsive force to them and I became afraid of hurting my children. In my subconscious mind, the powerlessness to stop hurting my brother was still a grave threat. In certain instances, it felt like I had never grown up. I was still thinking a child's thoughts and feeling a child's fears. Only until this memory had been retrieved and worked through was I was able to acknowledge that I would never hurt them. I was no longer powerless.
If there was ever a reason to keep silent over the abuse, it was this one event. How could I tell anybody what Paul and Jane were doing to me when I had done the same thing to my brother? My own naiveté and innocence condemned me. It secured my silence and their secret. And life went on. For me I survived in that I carried on growing and moving through my life, even if it was like a zombie. The abuse that continued didn't hurt so much now because there was no one home anymore to feel it.
The guilt of that night screamed out at me like demons in the night. I couldn't get away from them. As hard as I tried to push them back down, there was no turning back. I couldn't use that old survival strategy anymore - denial. My guilt screamed out for retribution. For justice. The only justice I could find and the only retribution that would nullify the offence was death. I wanted nothing but to die. I didn't want to know that God could forgive my "sin". I didn't want to be guilty in the first place. I went through the fiery furnace of a living hell for three days. I was wrestling with a great monster. I lost touch with reality. The only thing that was real, was this heaviness. I wanted to scream at the world to stop moving. Time stood still for three days. Forgiveness wasn't deserved in this case. I didn't deserve it even if I needed it. How could I look at God again? What did He think? He seemed to be standing in amongst the crowd, screaming with them "Guilty! Guilty!" I felt I was being swallowed up into this chasm of darkness. My own adult reasonings weren't enough. I needed someone else to tell it how it was but still frightened I'd be found guilty. After His deathly three day silence, which felt like an eternity, God finally whispered into my soul. "Not Guilty!" "Be still once more my soul. The Lord has been good to you."
It seemed that just when Paul stopped abusing me, someone else took over. I must have worn a label around me saying "Please abuse me!" I was 13 years old. I was by this time abusing alcohol, inhaling any substance that would give me a high and attempted suicide regularly. I wanted out. I didn't know who I was, where I was going. I didn't know anything except for that dreadful depression that followed me everywhere. Our peer group were into the same things too so it was easy to fit in. My angelic exterior had my parents convinced that I could do no wrong and so I was trusted to go out and do my own thing.
A particular boy in a our peer group, Frank, took a liking to me and I to him. He was physically strong and seemed nice enough. We had the kind of relationship where we were "boyfriend-girlfriend" when it suited him. I still needed to feel special and so I had no problem with that but he became one of those guys who never understood "No!" He would always start with the non-sexual touching which inevitably made me feel safe. As a result, I would drop all my defenses by relaxing, at which time he would suddenly change from being a gentleman into a greedy animal. Being physically stronger than myself, he used his strength to pin me down. His insatiable lust reminded me of a wild animal which is driven only by hunger. Its prey becomes only an object through which to satisfy its greed. His hands would roam over every inch of my body working their way to my breasts and finally under my dress. He would sometimes grab my hand and force me to stimulate him until he would orgasm. Other times, still fully clothed, he would lie on top of me and satisfy himself that way. He would get this faraway look in his eyes like he was in a trance. If I cried out for friends to help, they would only laugh and turn a blind eye. If I tried to tell him to stop, he never heard my voice. At sixteen I accused him of making me pregnant. That fabrication came out of my desperation to stop a situation I was powerless to stop. He never laid another finger on me after that.
Eighteen was an exciting year for me. I was able to take my drivers test and that meant independence. I took lessons from an instructor to master the art of parking. He took me into the quietest parts of Sea Point in Cape Town to teach me how to park. During these times, he would make comments like "this car is too small for two people because our legs are always touching". The next week he had progressed from sexual innuendoes to "accidentally" touching my leg in the course of driving. I felt sick and violated and never took any more lessons.
In the same year I was just finishing college. I was eager to find a job and know that someone out there wanted to employ me. If I had never felt acceptable up until now, this was definitely my chance to prove it to myself. After numerous attempts at job applications, and being turned down due to insufficient experience, I came across an advertisement in the newspaper for models. No experience was required. What a way to find acceptance. I was elated. I called the number and I was pleasantly surprised to get an interview. I took a friend along the first time. It was a dingy little flat in the heart of Sea Point. I wasn't that comfortable with the idea but my need to prove my acceptance clouded my judgement. After the initial interview, I didn't expect to get invited back. I was a Christian by then and I began to think that this is not what God wanted me to do.
Two months later I got the phone call for another interview. He had some clothes that he wanted me to try on. I tried to pleasantly wave him off by telling him that I wasn't interested. He used all the excuses under the sun to get me there and he was persistent. Being shy and a little embarrassed, I told him the real reason why I wouldn't go. I was a Christian and I didn't believe God wanted me to do this. To which he remarked "Oh, I'm a Christian too, but I haven't been to church for a while". To my immature Christian mind, I thought God had placed this opportunity in my path to help this man come back to the Lord, so I changed my mind and went. This time without a friend. After trying to talk about the things of the Lord with this man, who seemed very uncomfortable with the idea, he asked me to try on some clothes. I was uncomfortable about removing my clothes and told him so. He complied. For a while. "I can't fit these clothes properly with your clothes on" he said. Not wanting to disappoint him I removed the clothing he had asked me to. Sitting down, he asked me to turn my back to him and bend over. He proceeded to penetrate me with his fingers. Time stood still for me. I was terrified he would realize that I knew what he was doing in case he got angry and raped me. I just stood there praying. "God, what am I going to do?". I was able to gather up enough courage to tell him I had to leave. I was late for another appointment. To my relief he left the room and allowed me to get dressed. Forcing myself to gather my composure I left the flat. Once in the car, I completely broke down. How I got home that day, I will never know. With the insistence of a friend, I went to the police station and filed a report. It finally went to court a few months later and he was found guilty of sexual assault. The incident was never mentioned again and life for the family went on as usual.
By the time I reached my twenties, I had become hardened toward men. However, I became involved in two abusive relationships. The sexual abuse took the form of anal penetration and forced masturbation. I quickly broke them off. With each new abusive situation, I pushed my past further and further away from me until eventually everything went underground. Abuse was not part of my life or my history. In fact I didn't have a history. Everything under the age of nine was non-existent.
My memory may have been blank yet the pain inside continued and grew steadily worse each year. I still entertained the idea of suicide and always hated parting with pills in the home. They were my safety in case life got out of hand. No matter how I tried to find happiness, the pain inside kept screaming out to be claimed. I went for counseling where I dealt with everything else except my abuse. That wasn't allowed to surface.
Only once I reached my late twenties and had been married for a few years did I begin to feel safe and settled. With that safety my past was now ready to be claimed and worked through.
I had been a Christian since I was sixteen years old and my relationship with the Lord was everything I needed. I felt more acceptable than I had ever done. I finally met a person who really loved me. But the more I pushed negativeness away, the more it tried to get out. And it began to poison my relationship with the Lord. I had suppressed all my anger and hatred and it was now being projected onto the Lord. I began to accuse Him for all the pain I had. I saw pain as evidence of God's unfairness. God was powerful and I was powerless. He would use His power to subdue me, to hurt and abuse. My God was a man afterall. If men, made in the image of God, could hurt me like they had, why would God be any different? The discomfort of the pain never eased and it grew to such proportions that I couldn't ignore it anymore.
I started dealing with my abuse by first looking at the abuse that took place when I was eighteen. That was the easiest to start with. And then I moved back to when I was thirteen. I admitted that I had been abused. But it went no further than that. Quietly and very secretly at home I began to work through Dan Allender's Wounded Heart. But the secret was still mine. I moved through the material steadily with no problem until the flashbacks started. These were flashbacks involving Paul. These were too painful, so I continued working with the memories of abuse that I felt "comfortable" with and tried to ignore the rest. But once the memories were out, there was no quieting them. They just screamed louder and louder. But nothing seemed to be working. My relationships weren't getting any better and somewhere in the back of my mind I started questioning my relationship with God as never before. Why did the mention of God as a Father cause such repulsion in me? Why had I never addressed Him as Father? My turning point came one evening when I decided to go before the Lord and address Him as Father. My prayer that evening went something like this:
I only waited a few moments and then He came. I could feel His presence moving toward me in a way I had never experienced before. It was both awesome and frightening at the same time. But as His presence drew nearer and it seemed as if He would suddenly materialize before me, I had my first flashback of my childhood of my father (the incident that was mentioned earlier). I felt physically nauseated. I told God to back off and please not to hurt me. I told Him I couldn't handle His presence. And He did back off. I ran around the house trying to find help. What help I expected to find I don't know. I grabbed my Bible and read the first thing that I opened it to, to try calm myself. That didn't work. I went back into my room and this time I prayed to Jesus. I asked to please protect me from the Father, to make sure He didn't hurt or harm me. That brought me comfort because I had always seen Jesus as my helper and my comforter.
That prayer opened Pandora's box and things that I had tried to keep hidden were now coming out. Pictures that I had "just imagined" became real memories. And I couldn't stop the process. The memories came like demons in the night, haunting my every waking moment. I dreamed them, I walked them, I lived them. I went through weeks of what seemed to my family like a trance-like existence. The present didn't exist for me as I walked back into someone else's past and relived someone else's horror. My husband and children lost their mother and wife for a time. None of it made any sense.
I had prayed for a more intimate relationship with the Father. Why all this horror? What had I done? What was God doing?
Nightmares invaded my sleep in the form of wild animals chasing me. The same recurring nightmares. My memories crept in slowly as wild animals began to change into actual people. What I couldn't face in reality, would come through my dreams. Understanding became clearer as I analyzed each dream in which the present and the past were fused together.
As the truth of my past settled in, I finally joined a support group. I could finally admit that my past was real, it had damaged me, and it was necessary to get help. All the excuses of "it's not that bad, everyone else's abuse is far worse", flew in the face of such devastating reality. I went into private therapy too. Over the course of a year, I uncovered most of my childhood memories. Medication helped during times when I lived for weeks in a flashback. It helped me keep me to stay grounded and stopped me going insane.
My journey back into the past has been a very private and unique experience. How do I adequately give words to something that I myself at times have been unable to understand? Tears and words became one and the same thing. My journey has been a deeply spiritual one. Perhaps the meaning I've been able to draw from this experience has come as a result of that. With each step back into my past, there has been a spiritual parallel too. There are two sides to this picture. The one side holds the visible picture but on the back side are all the threads and knots drawn together to create the visible picture on the other side. For all the spiritual experiences that have been present, God never reached inside and took my pain away. It has never been a comfortable journey.
I learned early on in the process, that my ultimate goal was not pain relief. I would have been sorely disappointed if it had been. It may have been something I screamed for but more essential to this was to find God's Father heart for me. "As the deer pants for the water" so I thirsted to know the Father heart of God. At times I was angry with God that this was my goal, because it took me down a road where my thirst and hunger for Him grew worse while the pain increased and the valleys grew darker. I wish that God could have found a different way of revealing Himself to me. There must have been another way! But had He quenched my thirst too early, I would never have continued on the journey and it would have short-circuited the process. That hunger and the hope of finding God as Father, drew me like a magnet through each valley. The deeper and darker the valley, the hungrier I got for my Father. I never would have thought that the path of pain and suffering would lead me to my Heavenly Father. If I had known that at the beginning, I probably never would have prayed for that intimate relationship I was missing. Some things truly must remain a mystery on the path to change. "It is God's glory to conceal a matter.."
I began to grieve as the pain surfaced and images of a fantasized happy childhood home were crushed. All my images of fun and security were shattered. And with each one I had to go through the same grieving process over and over again. I went through one step of grief to another without any of it having any logical order. I had to grieve for the illusion of a mother and father that were non-existent yet which I had painfully hoped I had had. I had to grieve for what was true. I had to grieve for each individual loss and that meant going deeper into each step of grief over and over. Save for the beacon of hope ahead, I would have lost my way. I had to be as passionate about my relationship with God as I was, because it is the only thing that kept me walking.
I went through different valleys with different depths, learning new things as I went. One particular valley that stands out from the rest is one I called "The Valley of Ashes". At times the Lord would bring a picture to help me understand where I was and what I was experiencing. This was one such time. This valley was covered with ashes. The rocks, the trees, the floor. Even the horizon was grey. There was a stench of death in the air. And here I was right in the middle of it. The ashes lay around me, but God had given them a voice of their own. They were crying out in pain because they had died alone and no-one knew they were even there. They were screaming out to be claimed. To be given a voice inside a real person. Screaming out for someone to take on the life they once had and find meaning amongst the injustice. I was the only one God had selected to bring them to life. But it meant not only walking through the valley and hearing their voice. To my ears, I couldn't hear them. To give them life meant feeling each painful moment they had, to cry the tears they once had, to embrace their anger and grief that they never had the opportunity to feel. They needed to grieve, and so did I. I have taken on their life and as I write, I still remain in the Valley of Ashes. Grieving. As I grieve and feel the pain which appears to be someone else's (although in reality they aren't), and as I feel the heartbreak of their sorrow and suffering, I get a glimpse of God's heart for me as He has walked through my life with me. We both sit in the Valley of Ashes. In spite of the presence of death all around, this is the only valley that holds comfort as I feel life being breathed into the ashes.
The Valley of Ashes has only come toward the end of this journey. Many more came before where the presence of God seemed absent. What we have established together in our Relationship together has been bonded firmly within times of wrestling and doing battle together.
All my anger over the years, the bitterness and the resentment toward my abusers was all played out in my relationship with God. He was the closest One to me. It led me to ask all the questions that to this day are still unanswered. My questions that I threw into the face of the Lord knew no bounds. "Why? Where were you? What were you doing? What's the point? Why all the suffering?" These questions were part of my rage. It was the only way I knew how to express the rage. The more I asked the questions the more rage I felt. It didn't seem it would ever come to an end. My rage took on a life and person of its own. This person of rage was covered with huge spikes of steel protruding from him at every angle. I had tried to bypass him but he was too big and always blocked my path. I had to embrace this "person" and allow him to take me where I needed to go.
As my rage petted out, my questions lost their power and they lost their relevance. I was driven to my knees in grief. The grief led me to a place of resignation which at first seemed like such a hopeless, despairing place to be. It felt like I'd come to a point where I didn't care anymore about anything. And that included my relationship with God. I didn't care what He did from then onwards. I felt nothing. It seemed as though I had forgotten God. I had even wondered if it would be better for me to convert to "unchristian". It was a terrifying part of the journey because I was afraid I would lose my faith in all this and it had always been my only reason for living.
Someone asked me during this time "If you were to express your anger to God appropriately, what would you say? Just get it over and done with." I suddenly realized I didn't want to express my rage at Him. Not anymore. What I was really asking the Lord, in a very roundabout way was not "Why? Where were you? What were you doing?", but rather "I need someone to understand my pain. Someone to know what I'm going through? Someone else to be angry as I am. Someone else to feel the anguish of my pain with me." I began to notice a change inside each time I felt the despair and the "I-don't-care" attitude. I found peace. What had begun as giving up, had now become a place of surrender - I was able to surrender my Why? What? Where?
There was a hatred at a God who said "Suffer the little children to come unto me, for such is the kingdom of God". He didn't know what He was talking about. My anger at God surfaced unexpectedly. I had never allowed by rage to surface against Someone so important to me. Yet at times His love for me demanded that I be angry because my anger separated me from Him. To get close meant being real and risking everything as I embraced my anger and faced God. I beat the air with my hands, wishing that He would materialize so He could feel the pain of my hands beating His chest. I needed Him to feel the anguish of my soul and He didn't have the courage to show Himself. It was easy for Him, because He was hidden behind a cloud of glory that I couldn't reach into and He didn't seem able to come down and face me. Wrestling with God became much like Jacob's experience. I always limped away with a greater understanding of this Mighty God who, as I struggled and beat Him, found that I did much of my struggling and wrestling within the circle of His loving arms as He clutched me to His heart and cried with me. God wasn't afraid of my anger like I was. He knew the pain beneath it. A great silence would usually follow. Like the calm before the storm. But the storm never came. During moments of His greatest silences, I learned just how mighty God is. Have you ever truly listened to God's silence? His silences revealed more about His character than if He had spoken audibly from heaven.
The time of expressing my rage brought me to a cross-road. The one fork in the road led to anger that would always demand that He answer my questions and the other seemed to be a road going nowhere. I was tired of feeling angry. I chose the latter. My questions found no answers and my soul never really wanted answers to those anyway. It needed more than just answers. My goal to find the Father heart of God would not be satisfied with mere answers. What I found was a deeply grieving soul. God will never answer my questions of who, how and what. Those were superficial to my hungry heart. But He did answer the obscured unexpressed cry of "I want someone to understand, to feel my pain". He provided answers to those by giving me Himself. He answered 2000 years ago in the person of His son Jesus. Jesus had His Gethsemane and asked the same questions my pain was asking. He cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" How many times I've wondered that myself. My anger led me to grieve and led me into the arms of my Father who was there to comfort and share my pain.
From this unexpected exchange, I learned the secret of asking the right questions and having the right goals. He never answered questions that came out of my rage. He just allowed their expression. But He did answer questions that came out of my grief. In my rage He remained silent, in my grief He comforted me and hurt with me.
He showed me His Father heart and I finally began to experience intimacy with Him. His Father heart contained all the understanding of my pain. It contained within it, His own pain over what has happened. He felt my pain with me. He felt my anger with me. He shared everything. And I wasn't alone anymore.
I became my Father's daughter for the first time and I was loved with a holy love that wouldn't hurt the way others have hurt me. God's hand has hurt me in other ways. To ask God to do otherwise, would be to ask Him to love me less. His love for me has known no bounds. It has taken me in and out of valleys, and continues to do the same, because each valley conceals different depths of His love. The depth of each valley is the same as the degree to which I hunger for my Heavenly Father. The valleys that still remain undiscovered in which God's love is concealed, I have yet to face. I have learned to hand over each journey to Him over and over again. I only pray that I will continue co-operating with Him.
I have been promised from God's word "I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name" (Isa 45:3)
"And the God of all grace, who called me to his eternal glory in Christ, after I have suffered a little while, will himself restore me and make me strong, firm and steadfast. To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen"
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