God designed the church to help restore damaged individuals through love and the working of spiritual gifts. Man has sanitized this messy process and removed the effectiveness of the church to function in this way. Love should be the church's response. Sometimes love is gentle and long-suffering, and sometimes it is bold and harsh. In order for love to exist and work, we need vulnerability.
Some people believe that those with physical disorders must not have enough faith to be healed, and this false idea also gets applied to emotional wounds.
There is a prevalence of people abused at an early age by people inside their “circle of trust”. This is the family, the church, the community, the very relationships that make up this child's world. Young children are “untainted” by the destruction of the world – they have yet to construct false identities or believe an abundance of lies or give their hearts to idols or commit a lot of sins. The church should be seeking to create communities where this circle of trust can remain intact, and these children can become what God made them to be without succumbing to destruction first. If nothing else, we should be seeking to create a very nurturing environment that can minister to even the most heart-wrenching pains.
When a child is hurt by someone in the circle of trust, they immediately seek answers, for needs to be fulfilled. The first need is to be rescued. One of the first effects of abuse is a disintegration of trust in people and God. The victim starts making decisions about themselves and the world around them.
The victim's search for answers leads to a lot of false conclusions. They accept blame for the abuse. This leads to guilt and shame. This can lead to excuse-making on behalf of other abusive people in their life. They might also reject their “victim-hood” in the incident of their abuse, but act powerless in every other situation in life.
Another common conclusion: the victim is disqualified from God's love. They don't believe that God will love them or act on their behalf. This directly guides their sense of self-worth. This leads to them trying to gain “qualification” - they try to strive their way into acceptance, position, control, etc. However, they can never go back in time to redo the situation. The only way out is to face the pain and get healing from God.
Victims also display cyclical patterns of behavior.
Children think and feel in a certain way. Their worldview is directly affected by their vulnerability and sense of trust – by their dependency on others and the needs they have. When adults try to look back on past pains, they can't reason those situations from an adult perspective. They must humble themselves and accept how the worldview of a child was altered in that moment – that the pain might have been immense for something that appears utterly reasonable to an adult.
Victims must learn to let their abuser have the blame for their abuse. This can be especially hard if the abuser is in the circle of trust and if the abuse was never made known, because a long, drawn-out relationship will have been built over the years, and in many cases, the victim might even love the abuser, or feel indebted to the provision or care the abuser has given to the victim, or might have worked very hard to regain a position of favor with the abuser, to salvage some semblance of relationship.
People really don't like revisiting past pain. It challenges their functioning sense of reality. And it hurts. It gets messy. That is the reality. It is offensive, and chaotic. It's like being told to walk through a room full of fire to get to healing. You have to be okay with being weak. This fear of the pain drives people to drugs, escapism, promiscuity, control issues, self-harm, etc. They are simply trying to survive and fulfill the needs that were never met.
Songs:
John Reuben – There's only forgiveness http://www.johnreuben.com/
Ben Pasley – Rugged Old Hand, from his album “Residue” http://www.benpasley.com/ and http://entertheworshipcircle.com/
This episode originally broadcast live on August 7, 2015 on KXEN 1010AM in St. Louis, MO
For more info:
www.sunministries.org
Theme music: “The Resistance” by Josh Garrels (www.joshgarrels.com) licensed by Marmoset Music (www.marmosetmusic.com)