Two More Puzzle Pieces Fit In 

I was talking with a survivor of profound abuse this week....her father died before she was born...her step father sexually assaulted her beginning at age 4. She has been angry at God for not protecting her...it isn't fair that she has had to suffer all these years over the actions of a man who chose evil actions and a mother who chose such a man to be her husband.

And she is right. It is not fair.

As we spoke, and I suggested she consider that her anger might be better focused on the perpetrators and not God, two things came to mind-two puzzle pieces which fit into my own healing journey, which I had known, but which hadn't yet been part of my understanding.

First, the Christian scripture where Jesus says, "As you did it to the least of these, you do it to me," (Matt. 25:40) revealed to me the truth that whatever my perpetrators did to me, they also did to my God. I was not alone. God was not there watching, with God's hands tied, or complicit in the abuse (as I had interpreted the pious ones' "You are never alone, God is always there for you"), but rather, God was there, being abused too, like in the story in Elie (Eliezer) Wiesel's Night of the young boy being executed by hanging in the death camps:

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: 

"Where is He? He is - He is hanging here on this gallows...."

The thought of God, the very essence of love, goodness, hope and wholeness suffering the abuse that I suffered...beyond being unimaginable, relieved me of the belief that I must have been flawed to deserve that kind of treatment. There was no deserving involved in my abuse or the abuse of my God. It was an act of evil --       a CHOICE -- not a consequence.

The second puzzle piece that slipped into place was that God-whom I thought had abandoned me at best, and meant my abuse to happen at worse-actually protected me all these years that I have raged at God, by being the container where I could put my anger. It was not safe for me to rage at my abusers when I was a child. I depended on those people. They were bigger and more powerful, and I was a dependent child. But the rage I felt would eat me up if I held it in...God stepped in and took that rage full force, neither deflecting it, nor denying responsibility. God didn't deserve my anger, but he willingly accepted it, knowing that it was too big for me to handle.

And now that I am an adult, and have learned to focus the anger on my perpetrators, instead of God, (and then work through that anger and let it go), that container that once held my anger is empty, ready to be filled up with the joy of knowing God's love for me, God's sense of humor, God's wishes for my wholeness, health and happiness.

God didn't abandon me. God was right there, accepting the abuse that neither of us deserved, because love does not keep score about what is deserved and what is not.   What Dan Clendenin wrote about gratitude is, I believe equally true about God's grace and love for me:

A life of gratitude accepts the bad with the good. Genuine gratitude is not a zero sum game in which thankfulness increases the more fortunate you are and decreases the more adversity you experience.

A life filled with God's grace accepts the bad with the good. Genuine grace is not a zero sum game in which grace increases the more fortunate you are and is withheld the more adversity you experience.

Evil exists and evil actions hurt people. That is just the way it is. But, God's love for God's children is not diminished by this fact or by the consequences of evil actions. And, somehow, I never heard that in Sunday School.

Elaine Oxenbury