Thirteen years ago I sat down to write a story. It was a story of the pain of molestation and the grace of God and His incredible love. It is a story born out of the awareness of how much God is for us. I made the decision to write a novel, to present the story in a fictional way, mostly because I am a private person and I knew the story needed to be told but I lacked the courage to be vulnerable. There was more to it than that. I had family members who knew what my childhood had been. They were supportive of me. Yet, the implied decision was that there was no good to come out of talking about it. So the novel would allow me to share my experience with other women and still remain personally detached from it.
I wrote the rough draft of a love story with struggles and a happy ending. I put it in a closet, where it remained for more than a decade. During those years, the Lord allowed me to be in relationship with several women younger than myself whose lives had been, and still were in some cases, chaotic. Beautiful daughters of God who had, for years, while sitting in worship services with the same abusive history I had, still been struggling with the effects of the trauma. We were forgiven, cleansed and a new life of freedom was waiting, but there were still the questions. It is hard for little girls trapped in adult female bodies to see God as good, to see Him as protector, when those who were supposed to be our natural protectors had either abused us, abandoned us, rejected us, or molested us.
I understood this because I had lived three decades as an adult Christian wondering where God was and why He allowed those things to happen to me. I worked the works of religion in the hope that God would love me. I didn’t think He would abuse me, but I wasn’t sure He wouldn’t punish me, or fail to love me. The cleanness I had felt at my baptism had long since faded because I had messed up more than once since my initial salvation experience.
When I realized after talking to so many kingdom women that my story and my struggles weren’t unique to me, that seated every week in our walled worship houses are row upon row of women whose relationship with God are still being affected by the ugly of our pasts, I dug out the manuscript. I sent it out and got both rapid and slow rejections in the editorial world. After a couple of health issues last year and turning 63, I considered that there is now more of my life behind me than there is ahead of me and I do not want to stand before a loving God failing to give Him glory for the heart healing He had paid such a price to give me. He healed me freely in Jesus and I can do no less than freely give this testimony to other women who the Father desires to walk in that same healing.
So I made the decision to publish my novel on Kindle. I self-published because bringing God glory is more important than profits. The point in the novel where my healing testimony is hidden happens when Bianca’s friend, knowing Bianca was intimately molested by her father, explains how God showed her where He was when Bianca was in that situation. I will post that section here. Before that, though, let me share this.
My details are only a little different. One morning in my kitchen, I was listening to a program about ‘the dark places in our heart’ and I began to cry and I heard myself say, “God, I want you to take me to those dark places and bring Your light. I’m scared to go there by myself.” As I put down the dish towel and went to pray, my feet felt like they were ensconced in concrete and in my mind, well, I wished I had not asked God to take me to the dark places. At the same time, my heart was crying to be free of the questions that sometimes made me wonder if I was good enough, or clean enough, or lovable enough for God to care for me or about me. What God showed me that morning changed my life and assured me of His love.
The snippet from Seeds of Strength, available on Kindle here, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074L95G51, follows.
“Soon I would be a wife and I didn’t know if I was fit to be a Christian wife with my virtue gone before marriage. The thought of intimacy frightened me and I wasn’t sure I should marry Tim at all
…So I got angry and poured out my anger to God. ‘Why did you let that man be my father? Where were you when he was hurting me?’ And I remember that day so clearly. I was doubled over in agony with the memories of what had happened. The same fears I had when it happened consumed me. I was crying and I couldn’t stop. Exhaustion took over. I was drained. All I could do was lay across my bed. A picture came into my mind. In the picture I was back in the room where the horribleness of that time happened. But this time I felt no shame. I knew what was happening but I couldn’t see it. Then, in something I had never seen in all those times I had relived it in my mind as a child, I saw in the darkened corner of the room, a man. He was weeping. He was brokenhearted. I just knew. Then I knew it was the Lord. In that moment, it was as if the Lord Himself opened His heart to me and let me see that He wept over what an evil man did with the free will the Creator had given him. God was hurting for me, and in that time I knew God had been hurting with me at what my father had chosen to do.”
May this bless you. You can read the book free with Kindle Unlimited. If you know a woman who struggles with the questions of where was God and why did He let “this” happen, please share with her. If you are that woman, please…let’s talk.
God loves us. He loves us so much that He gave us a choice, free will, as to what actions we take and choices we make. God does not love what evil people do with their free will. He will heal us from the torment of what we endured. Jesus came to heal our broken hearts and He longs to set us free.
For His Glory 