Folks will tell you that love is a feeling. I beg to differ. Love is a decision. In the words of my pastor Buddy Gray, "Nothing you can ever do will make God love you more, and nothing you can ever do will make God love you less." And as you will see, I am the perfect object lesson for this statement.
I didn't always understand love. My parents divorced when I was 6 yrs. old. I was told at one time that my father simply didn't want to be a father anymore. This was the beginning of my concept of God. The Bible says God is a father, and apparently some fathers don't want to be fathers. My best guess was that I had done something to make my Dad want to give up fatherhood, so I started on my lifelong journey of being good to make him love me. Being good to earn his love, and being good to earn God's. Being the oldest child in a single parent home, I pressured myself to be the missing parent for my sister. I felt personally responsible for her well-being. I also pressured myself to do well in school (straight "A"s were all that was acceptable), and I became the poster child for excellent behavior, both at school and at home. I never wanted to be a burden to my mother. She had enough burdens of her own, what with raising us alone and trying to make ends meet. I managed pretty well for a couple of years, then 1979 happened.
I was 8 years old, and my father, with whom I had had a reasonable relationship to this point, was mistakenly shot in the head. The bullet went completely through one man's head killing him, and then got lodged in my father's brain. He was in a coma for at least a couple of months. When he regained consciousness, he had little long term memory and no short term memory. My father, who was an extremely intelligent man, had to watch Sesame Street daily to relearn letters and numbers. Everything in his room was labeled. It was like working with a kindergartener. He wasn't expected to survive, so praise be to God, he has done remarkably well. He has regained much of his long-term memory, and managed to hold down a simple job here and there. He was also instrumental in getting the Brady Bill passed in the 1980s (anti-gun legislation). Unfortunately, his "accident" took it's toll in other ways. Dad was easily frustrated with his extremely slow progress. He turned to alcohol, I'm assuming to relieve the psychological pain. He also had an explosive, unpredictable temper I had never seen before. As a little girl, I was afraid of him, however, he still had visitation rights. He agreed to see us girls at his mother's, as his judgement and caretaking abilities were impaired, and he needed another adult to be ultimately responsible for our well-being. I didn't want to see him. But I didn't want to rock the boat, so I kept quiet.
I'm still not sure why the sexual abuse started. I choose to believe that my dad didn't realize what he was doing. His brain simply wasn't working right. What I know for sure is that he never acted as if he remembered abusing me the day after it happened. Often times he was drunk when it happened. I was abused several times, over the course of several years. I hated my dad for what he did, but I could never go as far as to blame him for doing something deliberately wrong when I knew his memory and decision-making ability were seriously compromised in the accident. To this day I don't know if he remembers doing it. At any rate, it messed me up, as you can imagine. My perfectionistic tendancies were heightened even more, as I felt I must not be "good enough" or he wouldn't be doing this to me. And I must not be "good enough" in God's eyes or He wouldn't be letting this happen to me. As usual, I didn't want to cause problems, so I kept my mouth shut. I felt sorry for him. His life had already been destroyed. In my 9-yr-old mind, I didn't need to make things any worse for him.
Time went by. We moved, and we moved - wherever Mom could find a better paying job. Finally, we moved to Florida to stay, and that ended my visitation dilemma. Distance put a stop to the visitations and the abuse. My mother remarried. I never really got close to my stepfather. Needless to say I was very wary of men, and at 13 I was just beginning to understand my own sexuality and felt very uncomfortable around him. Life had taught me that men A) left you, and B)abused you. I kept my distance. By high school, I was pretty emotionally "on my own" . My mother and I were never close. I never let myself get close to her. She was no teddy bear herself, so she never really pursued a close relationship with me. I think I believed, in my warped mind, that she should have protected me from my father. Never mind that I had never told her what was going on.
It was in high school that God became the potter and I the clueless clay, though it would be years before I realized it. I had always attended church (I was even youth group president or vice, I can't remember which), therefore I knew who God was and I believed that Jesus had died for my sins, but it was all an intellectual understanding. I talked the talk and walked the walk out of fear of disappointing yet another figure in my life: God.
I truly believe that the 18 inches from your head to your heart are the longest 18 inches in the world. It can be so hard for the heart to accept what the mind already knows to be true. Our human nature is to take control of a bad situation in a futile attempt to make it alright again. That is exactly what I did. And God loved me exactly enough in my pitiful humanity to keep me from complete self-destruction while still allowing me to learn the hard way - my way - that my being in control was a really bad idea.
I became extremely depressed in high school. Like a lot of teenagers, I hated being with my parents and I felt life was a drag. Unlike many teenagers, I really hated myself. I couldn't measure up to my own expectations. In my mind, my father would have left me alone and my mother would have fought for me and shown more affection if I was worth the effort. I thought I had to be everything to everyone (which, by the way, is impossible) or risk being rejected and worthless. I had tried and failed to control my own fate. It all finally caught up to me my sophomore year. I stopped eating, for the most part. I ate in front of others when necessary, but other than that, I punished myself by swearing off food. I became self-mutilating. It felt so good to hurt myself. For those few minutes I could numb the emotional pain inside of me. In fact, it felt so good that even today, when I am under an extreme amount of stress, I am tempted to hurt myself again. I also started having panic attacks. Some were legit, and some were forced, both for attention and to experience that "high" feeling right before passing out. Once again, I was trying to escape my pain.
Ultimately, none of those actions got me what I wanted: Permanently rid of the pain. So I attempted suicide. Several times. They were feeble attempts, really, but the desire to die was definitely there. The only reason I didn't try something completely fatal is the God-directed concern of my high school Peer Counseling teacher. You see, as soon as the school administration got wind of my suicidal tendancies, they notified my mother (who was extremely embarrassed and angry with me). They also sentenced me to time in Peer Counseling. In peer counseling, the teacher pairs you with trained students who can relate to your situation in hopes that the peer relationship will help pull you through your crisis. I still don't know the initial reason Bonnie, the peer counseling teacher, started meeting with me instead of assigning me a peer counselor. All I know is that it was a God thing that she did. I so desperately wanted somebody to make my life okay again. I hoped Bonnie was my "somebody". What I really needed was God to be my "somebody", but it would be awhile before I realized that. Bonnie and I had a several conversations, one of the earliest being the one when she told me that people who commit suicide go to hell. Not knowing the Bible well, I believed her. I now know that this is not true, and being a born-again believer herself, Bonnie never thought it was, either. She knew I wanted desperately to please God, and she was simply willing to tell me anything she thought would keep me alive another day. It worked. God used a lie to keep me alive until he could get all the right people in the right places at the right times to pull me out of my pit. It has been 23 years, and Bonnie has since become a second mother and an excellent friend to me. We still keep in close touch.
Bonnie referred me to a therapist, and my mother thought this was a brilliant idea. I did not, but I went , grudgingly. She was yet another Bonnie, so I'll refer to her as Bonnie 2. Bonnie 2 was my counselor for several years. Although she encouraged me to work through my feelings about the abuse and the bitterness I had toward my mother.
God was also working through my youth leaders at church. God knew exactly what I needed when he put Ray and Carol in my life. Ray was the first man I ever really looked up to. He loved Christ like no one I had ever seen. He actually got giddy when he talked about Him. There was a countenance about him that I had never experienced in any other man, and somehow I knew it was the Lord in his life. It was as if we claimed to worship the same God, but in reality he was worshipping a far different, far more exciting God than I. I wanted his God. Ray was also the most gentle man I had ever met. He treated me as his own - I knew he really cared about me. He was the real deal - the Christian man I never knew existed. His wife, Carol, was the person who led me to Christ. She was completely devoted to Ray, and although I saw them squabble a few times, I knew their marriage was never in jeopardy. This was a committed couple with the Lord at the center of their marriage, and I was impressed.
My acceptance of Christ was a turning point in the security of my salvation, however, it was not a turning point in my depression and way of life. Things actually got worse for me after I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Don't think Satan will leave you alone once you've accepted Christ. On the contrary, things can get worse. A saved Christian is automatically an enemy of Satan, and he will find your weak spots, attack, and show no mercy.
My weak spots were fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, and my perfectionism. I knew I was going to heaven, but somehow I felt that no matter how hard I tried to please God, I was a failure to him and to everyone around me. For some reason, I was unlovable. I now know that I was unlovable at birth. Everyone is. And there is simply nothing you can do on your own to be a non-failure in God's eyes. God is a perfect being and therefore can only be in the presence of perfection. Seeing as how we are human, we are not perfect, and are therefore found unacceptable in God's eyes. Until we learn that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more, and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less, we remain forever isolated from the love He simply wants to give us - no strings attached. We'll get to more of that later. I have much running from God to do first.
My suicidal behavior didn't change much. I still hated myself. Finally, Bonnie2 suggested that my parents check me into an adolescent psychiatric hospital. I was all for it. By this time I was such a serious danger to myself that I was willing to try anything. Mostly, I just wanted to run away from the world I was living in, and the hospital was as good a place as any.
At the hospital, I was immediately placed on suicide watch. This is what they call it when the hospital won't let you out of sight of a staff person. Even at night, when you are sleeping, someone is sitting in your doorway, just waiting for you to try something dangerous so they can stop you. After a week or so they left me alone at night, but they gave me a roomate just in case. During the day I was required to attend 3 therapy sessions with 2 different therapists, sit in group therapy twice a day, drink Ensure milkshakes to force weight gain, and take Lithium for the bi-polar diagnosis I received. During down time, I had to remain in the common room, where I learned to play lots of card games and watched every episode of Quincy ever broadcast. I had to jump several hoops to get released, not the least of which was passing an exit evaluation with a psychiatrist. I quicky learned to say what they wanted to hear and manipulate the system, and I was discharged after 6 weeks, which is a relatively brief stay as far as stays in psych hospitals go.
I continued to fight the anorexia, suicidal thoughts, and self mutilation well into junior college. When I was 19, I met LuAnn. LuAnn was one of the few people who made me feel as if I was okay just being me. She wasn't my mother telling me what to do. She wasn't my therapist telling me what I needed to become. She was my friend. And she was also trouble.
LuAnn's background was similar to mine, and she felt as accepted by me as I did by her. We agreed that men were not to be trusted. Neither of us had felt particularly loved by our mothers. In our own, convoluted way, we were looking for female acceptance. The situation we found ourselves in was the perfect breeding ground for trouble. As happens in many such relationships, LuAnn and I became more than just friends. We met each other's needs in every way. She and I were involved in a sexual relationship for 3 years. In retrospect, I have to say that this is the furthest away I have ever been from God. LuAnn was filling a need for me that only God could fill. Am I a homosexual? No. Was I sexually attracted to her? No, but I was so afraid of losing her love that I was willing to do anything she wanted me to do to keep it. This was the closest thing to love that I had ever experienced, and I wasn't about to give it up.
LuAnn and I parted ways almost 3 years to the day that our relationship officially began. She had found someone else. She had been my first love, and I was devestated. Soon after we broke up, I went off to college. My first year was horrible. I had a very hard time adjusting to such a big change. In spite of my twisted thinking and ungodly actions, I still had a desire to be what God wanted me to be, but I didn't know how. Once again, enter God.
I ran across a flyer advertising a Campus Bible Fellowship. I decided to try it out. In Campus Bible Fellowship I met Bev. Bev was an Independent Baptist Missionary to the University of South Florida campus and a biblical counselor. She immediately sensed a need in me and took me under her wing. Bev knew scripture better than anyone I had ever met. She would counsel me several days a week, and was forever pointing me toward God. She did not allow me to put her on a pedestal, hard as I tried. I started healing, and she was forever reminding me that it was God doing the healing, not her. She gave me homework each time we met, and it was always Bible memorization or applying Biblical principals to my own life. I began to realize that the Bible had the answers I was looking for.
One night, during a very rocky moment in my emotional stablilty, Bev helped me to see that I needed to quit trying to make myself "good enough". I needed to let God make me "good enough" by loving me. Nothing I could do could ever make God love me more, and nothing I could do could ever make God love me less. And it was all about Him loving me, not me loving Him.
Bev asked me a seemingly innocent question: "How do you define gift?" According to Webster, a gift is something you give someone, expecting nothing in return. Then she showed me Romans6:23 "For the wages of sin is death, but the FREE GIFT of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Then Ephesians2:8-9 "By grace you have been saved BY FAITH. And this is not your own doing; it is a GIFT of God, NOT A RESULT OF WORKS, so that no man may boast." Saved from what? Our sins. And why did God save me from my sin? Because He loved me. And 1 John 4:10: "In this is love, NOT THAT WE HAVE LOVED GOD, BUT THAT HE LOVED US and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." Then Romans 5:5-8: "While we we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for an unrighteous person- though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die - but GOD SHOWS HIS LOVE FOR US IN THAT WHILE WE WERE STILL SINNERS, CHRIST DIED FOR US." Why did He give us such an incredible free gift when we have done nothing to deserve it? Because He loves us. And our salvation - our love from God through the sacrifice of his Son - requires nothing from us but acceptance. He wants to give you His love, but you have to accept it with your heart, not your head. Until we get our concept of God straight, we can't possibly understand what real love is. I had received God into my head, not my heart. Bev and I then prayed for me to receive Christ into my heart. From the moment I prayed and accepted God's FREE GIFT of love through the death and resurrection of Jesus, my heart began to change. God softened it up. It was risky to accept His love. All I had known of love was very conditional. But isn't that faith? And isn't faith a risky thing in general? I always equate a leap of faith with cliff jumping. You never know if there will be rocks or pillows at the bottom til you jump. I implore you, trust God that there are pillows and jump.
Since I got my concept of God's love straight, He has made it possible for me, over time, to forgive my father and my mother. I also turned over all the major "stuff" to Him. I swore off men, praying that He would provide me with the right one in His good time. And He did. We've been married 9 years and have two wonderful boys. I am no longer anorexic (in fact, I could stand to lose 50 pounds. I'm not exaggerating!). I no longer desire to die. I want to live, and share God's message of love with others so they can see how much He loves us, and how He is with us all along the way, even when we are running from Him.
So, would I change any of it if I could go back and do it all again? Absolutely not. It's not about me. It's about God's plan, and a bigger picture I can't see. He will use all of this to His glory if only I'll let Him. And His glory is all that matters. My prayer is that in reading this you will be drawn closer to Him, and that the awesomeness of His love will humble you and touch your heart like it has mine.
