I dropped a bomb on you, Baby. I dropped a bomb on you.

I dropped a bit of a bomb yesterday inadvertently. For those of you close to me, the fact that I dropped a bomb should cause no surprise. Launching grenades to stir the waters is kinda my thing. That said, it was inappropriate for me to divulge the information on my blog regarding being a rape survivor without further comment for a couple of reasons. Primarily because it occurs to me, after receiving several emails and messages, that some important people close to me did not know this information. And reading about it on my blog was not the correct way to divulge such personal information to those I love. I am sorry. You know who you are and you deserved better. I can assure you that it was not calculated, but an oversight. An oversight born of the second reason it was inappropriate-- I didn’t comment further about it to report my feelings on the situation or the redemption of the situation. So it became just a confession of scandal. A bit of sordid gossip. And it was more than that. And yet, so much less.

I say that I may have overlooked sharing the information because, quite honestly, I really don’t think about it all that much anymore. Key word—anymore. There was a time when it consumed me. But that is no longer who I am. God has healed this deep wound; it is NOT time that has healed this wound. Yes, time has made the edges fuzzy, but it has not erased the memories I have surrounding the two events.

Yes, two.

The details of the events are unimportant. It is enough to say simply that one event occurred during high school and another in college, and that I assumed the second occurrence was some type of punishment for not “handling” the first incident properly. What you do need to know, I suppose, is what I now know about myself, about the nature of sin and shame, and, most importantly, about God.

For starters, I want you to know that I am no longer ashamed to say I am a rape survivor. The word “rape” is like a black hole in a conversation. No one really knows how to respond or what to say. But I know now that I have no reason to be ashamed. I did nothing wrong. By definition, I could not have prevented it. And yet I bore the shame, alone and in silence, for many years. And it nearly killed me. Literally.

Shame enslaves the heart of every sexual abuse survivor. Jean-Paul Satre called shame a hemorrhage of the soul. Shame prevents us from speaking out. It combines the fear of rejection with the fear of intimacy. Shame is intense and is a shared emotion, taking into account the reactions of others. Attempts to dissipate the shame by giving words to the unspeakable seem only to increase it. Shame is mirrored by the listener, sometimes quite obviously by a blush, an averting of the eyes, a hunching of the shoulders, or by silence. The telling then feels like a confession, an admission of wrongdoing, and the sense of both shame and guilt multiply. And it was never my job to bear the guilt and shame of this sin.

The main problem with rape is not the act itself. That occurred in a moment. However, the rape left me with several lies I believed as a result. I want to speak to these lies because I know that, unfortunately, the lies I believed are not unique to me.

For starters, I believed I brought it upon myself. That somehow I deserved it. Do you see how damaging it can be for someone to believe that they do not even have the right to decide when and how they want to be touched? To not even have authority of their own person?

Secondly, I believed that God was not for me. I grew up in a Christian home. I was active in my youth group. I went to cheesy summer Christian camps. My parents would always tell me that God had great plans for me, plans to prosper me and not to harm me, plans to give me hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11). And yet, what I heard and believed was that yes, God was a good God for God’s people. But because this horrible thing had happened to me, I obviously was not in that number. That God’s love and mercy was for some other girl, but not for me. I also saw no hope of this ever changing.

Scripture tells us that hope deferred makes the heart sick. And for most of my adolescence and early adulthood, my heart was very, very sick.

Unfortunatly, in high school, I was too afraid to seek help. In college, at the behest of loving roommates who saw me struggling, I began to get professional help. However, for some reason or another, I never actually talked about the incidents. I was misdiagnosed with BiPolar II disorder, which went well with my Creative Writing degree and made me feel somehow darkly special. But the meds never seemed to quite work or regulate me. (Probably because they were the wrong ones.)

It was not until I’d moved to Richmond to live with my sister and her family and began to see a new Psychologist that I actually began to clearly recognize what was going on. I was, and had been for some time, struggling through PTSD. I had attempted to redeem myself and failed miserably. I could no more redeem the situation than a cold cup of coffee could reheat itself. Both require the work of an outside power source. In my struggle to regain control and autonomy, I had been an agent of sin and bore that guilt and shame as well.

Once, while on a walk with my godly sister, she encouraged me to not believe in God. She said, “From where I sit, the god you are describing was not only absent, but powerless to help you and impotent to change you. You should abandon that god. He is doing you no good.”

I shared with her that I understood the promises of God to His people, but that it had become abundantly clear that I was not His people and so could we all just stop pretending I was? Again she told me that she knew the real Living God. The One she believed in had defeated death, had turned a denier into His first Pope, a murderer into His most acclaimed Apostle. She assured me that He did have plans for my future and for my good. I rolled my eyes and from memory quoted her the complete scripture, saying, “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

She smirked. “You do not know. You know the words, but you do not know the context. You need to investigate the context.” When we returned home from the walk, she handed me a Bible. “Read the entire chapter.”

What I saw was that God was not bragging about his great and wonderful plans to His warm, fuzzy, safe, do-gooding people. He was proclaiming His hope to a people in exile. He was speaking to captives. People who, while in exile, had abandoned Him. And I read further--He would draw near to those who cried out to Him and He would bring them out of captivity. I saw a glimmer of hope that my station was not permanent.

I also began to see that despite the fact that I felt alone and forsaken, I was not. (Hallelujah our feelings are not barometers for truth!)

What I had in my youth failed to see was that I had never been alone. Never. And because I had never been alone, the sins were not just against me, but also God himself. It was His image in me that had been stripped away. The dignity I no longer felt was an affront to Him because He had given it to me. I slowly learned that not only was Jesus there with me in my darkest hours, but that he was pissed off about it as well.

I remember the first time I ever really understood what the cross was about. Shockingly, it was while watching the movie the Patriot. The scene in which Mel Gibson’s character was unleashing his grief over the murder of his son. And by unleashing his grief, I mean to say he was brutally attacking a British soldier with a tomahawk. He was singularly focused and covered in blood. His wrath was both justified and uncontained. It broke Mel Gibson’s character to tears. It occurred to me that that’s how mad God was about what had happened to me. And He continued to be mad about all the lies it had led me to believe about myself and who He was. It broke me to tears when I understood that His love for me was so great it really did cause a physical reaction in the heart of God. It also broke me to understand that His love for my rapist was so great that instead of taking it out on him, God bore the punishment Himself, on the cross.

I was wrong to say yesterday that Jesus only bore one cross. He bore a cross so big that it covered every sin of every person for all time. Every rape. Every evil look. Every adultery. Every lie. Every murder. He was forsaken so that I would not be. He bore shame so that I could hold my head high. He was separated from God so that I could not be. He did not consider his suffering on the cross to be greater than the need for God’s image and glory to be fully reflected and revealed in me. The depravity of what happened to me was great. The wrath it caused greater still. And yet, the greatest thing was God’s never ending, unstoppable, all-consuming love for me.

I will say that unlike my infertility, this has been a wound for which I have not yet seen its complete redemption. I can wholeheartedly boast in my infertility. It is truly the greatest blessing ever bestowed upon me for in it I have seen God work mightily both in the miraculous conception and birth of Henry and the adoption of Gracie.

I have not yet seen the fruit that this will certainly bear. Most likely I will not see it this side of Heaven. But I am confident that God’s image remains in me. I am confident that someday I will stand alongside many saints and we will point to our scars and say, “Come see this thing God healed.”

As for now, I simply trust that is true about all of us…

7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.


13 It is written: “I believed; therefore I have spoken.” With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak, 14 because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence. 15 All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.


16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

-2 Corinthians 4: 7-18