A Note:

I am driven to be a whole person. To recollect the shattered pieces of myself and my soul that were broken and lost as a result of everything that happened to me. I have faith that when we are able to heal and rise above our hurts and pains, we will be in a much better way. After I accepted Christ, I felt truly complete. Complete in a way that I cannot fully explain. I felt such peace. But I feel as though we must dig deeper, healing parts of us that have been hurt, for that love, the love of God to fully saturate our beings. I can truly say that forgiveness has been a process for me. I thought once that it would have been accomplished and put to rest every problem I have ever had, once I made that initial act of forgiveness. But I could recognize after a while that forgiveness is a continual battle. Like love, it’s an act of the will. But it takes a while for the feelings and emotions to follow. I had blamed myself for the abuse. Forgiving them involves forgiving myself first. We need to be as compassionate toward ourselves as we try to be toward others. I needed to take care of myself first. I needed to forgive myself for being human, a child and show myself the compassion and love that I deserve. I felt so much shame as a result of what they did to me. For so many years, I hated myself because I thought on some base, core level, I was filthy and worthless. I still feel unlovable at times. I want anyone who has been through these experiences to know that it’s not okay to feel this way. These were crimes that happened to us and no child, regardless of what they were doing, deserves to feel this way about themselves. The weight of this crime is on the abusers. This is a sin that particularly upsets God. But with each act of forgiveness that I offered to the people who hurt me, the more I felt complete within myself, closer to my God. Each time I was able to extend that mercy towards them, the more compassion I started to feel for them. It would become clearer to me that there was good in their lives. This was an aspect of their lives and not their total lives. No matter how often it happened, this wasn’t everything they did with their lives. When I first realized, it was difficult for me to have sympathy for people who could commit such terrible crimes against children. It was easier and safer for me to look at their dark side. There was no way, at the beginning that I could have seen them as human beings instead of evil incarnate. This belief served to detach my soul from the overwhelming degree of shame that I was experiencing and also to give validation to the fact that I was in every respect completely innocent. As time progressed, I could determine to remember a number of good memories and could identify specific things that encouraged me. As time progressed, my heart softened a bit. My first thought when I remembered was that they were pure evil. This feeling festered for a while as I remained, for self-preservation’s purposes in a state of bitterness. Then I realized they were just hurting. They deal with their pain by doing what their perpetrator did. They need compassion as well as judgement for their actions. They made the choices. But they are people who suffer just like us. I can’t believe their focused desire was to ruin the lives of children. They were acting out of horrendous pain and not out of intentional evil. After I was able to forgive for the first time, I was able to think about their anguish. I truly believe in my heart that a lot of the stuff that happens in our world is learned behavior. I don’t want to think of some of this stuff like child abuse as intentional, deliberate decisions to harm innocent creatures. I began to see them as more than vile, heartless creatures. What they did was wrong. But they too live in pain. This in no way justifies their actions but it humanizes them. To realize that they were not totally depraved and not deserving any kindness or sympathy. I realize that they also have done some good in their lives. They are more than their sinful actions. Eventually I was able to forgive my perpetrators because I saw them as victims just as I had been. They repeated behavior they had learned. I don’t think enough about, appreciate enough, how much I myself have been forgiven. How can I not forgive others, whatever the offence, when I have been forgiven so much more than I can even conceive? God not only forgives sin, God loves the sinner. That’s the example I want to follow. I like to think of the Creation like this: Man was created in the image of God. This means that we are all created as good, whole, perfect beings. It’s the enemy who comes to destroy. He is the one who placed lies into the minds of mankind, turning us against each other. A lot of the time, I have to remind myself how blessed to have a God who knows what it’s like to be human. The temptations, the fears, the shame and the hopes and dreams. We can unite in love and faith once we realize that everyone suffers. That everyone hopes. That everyone dreams. It’s a truly global cause that every human experiences pain. Have faith. Society is increasingly isolating itself with technology and other coping mechanisms. We need to do this together.