Bridging the Gap

Often I would be playing ball or riding in the car with my parents, or walking to lunch with friends, feeling like I hadn’t a care in the world, when I would suddenly remember. As the reality of my abuse would bob to the surface, I could feel my stomach drop and tighten, and my face momentarily cringe and then right itself. Rarely would it last for more than a few seconds before I would force it down below the surface, buying myself as much time as possible until the next eruption. Sometimes that looked like busyness – throwing myself into my studies with freakish intensity, or lots of running and working out. Other times, it looked like escape, either through excessive sleep, or, in later years, binge drinking. I don’t remember crying much at all during those years, as I expect that I knew there to be a well that I couldn’t afford to tap. Instead, my vocabulary expanded to include words with which I could objectify and describe anything, and my sense of humor broadened and sharpened to deflect any question or statement or person that simply got too close for comfort. Even though I worked hard to look like every other kid around me, in a room full of kids, I felt hopelessly different and alone. Any gestures of care or friendship towards the girl people thought me to be could not be received because I knew that the person they liked or thought was funny or nice was not who I really was. Although I couldn’t afford to dwell on it, I knew and lived out of the belief that, if people knew the things that I had done or was allowing, they would walk away forever, repelled and disgusted. And so, like many teenagers, I became, on the surface, who I thought I needed to be in order to be accepted, but was unable to receive or live out of that "acceptedness."

During the years of abuse and for many years after, I struggled greatly with the shame of complicity. In my mind there was a really big difference between the first incident of abuse, when I had no idea what was coming, and any subsequent occurrence of abuse. Had I been a very small child, not able to articulate what I was experiencing, and not physically able to put up a fight, I felt like forgiveness would have come quickly. But because I was an adolescent when the abuse occurred, almost full-grown physically, and seemingly able to communicate, forgiveness eluded me. Every time I got into his car, or walked into his office or his home, was further evidence to me that I was playing a part in my own abuse, effectively making it something less than abuse, and excluding me from any hope of relief or forgiveness, as I simply did not qualify. Shame is a great excluder. Regardless of the number of books I read and experts I heard talk about how sexual abuse is absolutely never the fault of the child, regardless of age, and even though I could have written a book on the subject myself, and believed it to be true and applicable to anyone else’s story, I simply could not believe it for myself.

That place of self-condemnation and isolation was one of my sources of greatest despair. It was this pit in which I was stuck for years, and into which I easily slip even now. I also think that the pit of self-condemnation and isolation is the site of some of Satan’s greatest victories in my life, both during the abuse, and for decades following. Much of my despair came from the realization that there was a hopeless disconnect or gap between what I could assent to intellectually, and what I could really internalize and live out of. The lie that I believed was that God’s grace and forgiveness couldn’t be true if I could not make sense of it, and logically apply it to my situation. For years I labeled it as self-deprecating humility, as it seemed very Christian to label myself as unworthy of God’s grace and forgiveness. But what I later realized was that that which I had labeled as humility, was really pride and intellectual arrogance in disguise, in that I believed that I had the capacity to out-sin God. Even though God had sent Jesus to bridge the gap between Himself and each person on earth, I believed that I had somehow managed to dupe him. I was totally shocked by this realization, but that moment of surprise brought with it also a sliver of hope, and a yearning to yield and surrender my mind to God, and allow him to save me from myself. Satan is the master of disguises, and he can make intellectual arrogance look like humility all day long, but God, if invited, trumps him every time.

I’ve written before about "winceable moments," when shame makes me look away and feel isolated and unforgiveable. The memory that most represented the shame of complicity to me was the bedroom in my pastors’ basement in which I would stay when my parents went out of town, leaving me with the youth pastor and his wife, believing that I would be safe in their care. To me, the fact that I allowed myself to be left there, knowing what could happen, was unforgiveable, and so as I sought to yield my mind to God, and allow him to save me from myself, I went to that room in prayer, and asked Him to meet me there.

As I laid in the bed, I could hear the sound of my pastors' footsteps hitting the metal edging of the stairs as he made his way to my room in the dark of night. I would, on those occasions, curl up and try to be unwakeable as he entered the room, but this time, during the prayer, Jesus entered the room just behind him. Jesus came to the side of the bed, his eyes locked onto mine, and scooped me up in his arms. He then carried me out of the room into a field of flowers, and as he set me down, I could see that I was in a simple white dress, and could feel the grass tickling my bare feet as Jesus and I stood quietly side by side.

I would like to say that I was healed right there on the spot, but yielding often comes slowly as does healing. I was not surprised that Jesus took me out of the bed and the field of flowers was a nice touch, but I needed to know why. After all, God rescues 3 year olds from fires and grown ups from prostitution and drug addiction and murder, and everything in between, and so I needed to know where I stood. For weeks after that prayer time I asked God why. One morning, as I was drying my hair, I whispered for the zillionth time “God, you took me out of that room and set me in the field of flowers because………” and this time he completed the sentence by saying “because that room was no place for a child.” Tears filled my eyes, and decades of shame and heaviness fell away as his truth bridged the gap that I had tried to bridge with logic and understanding for years. Surely I had read and heard that children are not meant to function in that kind of adult world many times before! But only when I invited God into the picture, through the presence of his son Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit, was the Truth able to close the gap, penetrate as deeply as had the abuse, and heal wounds that had before seemed untouchable.