Today’s Journey, Thoughts on Healing

Today’s Journey, Thoughts on Healing March 19, 2013

SpiritualAbuseWeek
​Art by http://dani-kelley.deviantart.com/gallery/

 

It’s Spiritual Abuse Awareness week on the interwebs.

I’m honored to be writing a small piece of my abuse & healing journey this week on Rachel Held Evans’ blog. as a part of a bigger group of bloggers seeking to bring awareness to spiritual & other abuses.

Things have been a bit quiet here on GwG as I’ve written this post & am working on a to-be-published (hurrah!) Ruth Bible study.  For the first time in my life -helpfully- I’m understanding the weight of sharing these stories in writing.  I’m feeling the work aspect of it.  And while my story below is a heavy one documenting a tulmultous journey I feel incredibly blessed, honored, humbled, amazed not only that I’m alive to share it but that in sharing it I can help someone else.   So while my heart is in some ways heavy over this I feel over the moon to give this gift away.  As the old Church ladies say “Let Him Use Ya!”

~

I gave my life fully, completely to Jesus at 19.  That same December I went off to a large student conference where 500 of us gathered for a Hope & Healing seminar for abuse victims.  Since I knew Jesus now, I thought it might be nice to explore the idea ofhow to help other women who had been through something similar. I, of course, had no healing left to do, because I, Gracie Green had met Jesus in early April.

I ended up hunched over on the floor, violently weeping, shaking uncontrollably while my InterVarsity staff worker, York prayed over me and soon called others over to help.  Total train wreck.
Months later, I began counseling to finally address the beast in my life: as a kid my father had sexually abused me for several years.  It took every ounce of my emotional, spiritual and physical being to continue to address the abuse, the consequences, the ramifications for three very long years.  I continued in counseling while I was violent with suicidal desires, deep in depression addicted to shopping, masturbation, sleep & powdered doughnuts all the while my Ma became very ill & poverty had encroached it’s claws onto my bare back.  I could barely move my neck.  All that grief rose up and landed right on my shoulders, a constant reminder that everything was painful.  Everything a disgrace.
But, Jesus.
The shame of the abuse, the shame of the depression, (which was still largely a stigma for me) the shame of the masturbation alone for crying out loud, I would have buried myself and wrote “unworthy” on the tombstone if I could have, none of that looked like healing.  I often wondered, ‘How the hell is this healing?  How am I anything remotely resembling God’s healing so full of mercy?’
What I see now, I couldn’t see then…
~
You can read the rest of this post over on  Rachel’s blog.

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