Where was God?

by Sallie Culbreth

Abuse is a very lonely and isolating experience that causes intense struggles. It feels as if there is an internal tug of war as you decide whether to keep people out or let them in. It often feels as if there is so much at risk that your life will be shattered regardless of what you do. The harsh legacy of abuse is that a broken person has a broken heart.

In the mind of a survivor, there are many individuals that he or she holds responsible for the abuse. These may include the actual perpetrator, the passive person who looked the other way, organizations such as a church or club unwilling to rock the boat by confronting abusive leadership, the culture or country that either offered no protection or even condoned it, and very often, God.

Many people wonder, “If God loves me, then why is life so painful?” This is a powerful question that requires a thoughtful response. As you think about this, perhaps it is helpful to consider the way our Creator designed us before we can accurately recognize what went wrong and why life is this difficult.

Our origins were perfect. No pain, hunger, poverty, prejudice, violence, or abuse. Our origins also included an unobstructed connection with God. In fact, nothing should come more naturally than to be connected to God’s love.  A wall between Creator and Creation was never meant to exist. Spiritual hunger was never meant to be left unsatisfied. These spiritual rifts are anomalies not included in our spiritual DNA. The proof of these origins is that we instinctively know something is terribly wrong. We long for something better because those tiny fragments of our origins still float around in our hearts and call us like words of a forgotten song.

God created people with the power to choose. We are not puppets. He* wanted our connection to be based upon free choice, not rule-bound obligation. It is with this power of choice that people have strayed from our origins, leaving humanity without much control over anything. It is obvious that we are not naturally or adequately equipped to combat the things that plague us, like pain, hunger, poverty, prejudice, violence, or abuse. In spite of all our knowledge and technological advances, the human race is still fairly ineffective in finding solutions to our most basic social problems. You don’t have to look past a local newspaper to see evidence of that!

It is as if the earth has been infected with a terrible disease that brought these vexing problems into existence.  Death, violence, sickness, rage, poverty, hunger and abuse are symptoms of this infection. Religion calls this disease “sin.”  I once heard a minister define sin as an inappropriate response to a legitimate need. Regardless of how you think about the human condition, it is quite obvious that something is very, very wrong. It is also important for you to know that people were not created to live this way.

Life is difficult because we live in an unnatural environment. Your body, mind, and spirit were not built to carry the disease of sin. Its impact is like a virus that continues to break you down and do harm to you. It creates hardship and struggles. Even the earth has suffered. A steady decline in the ecological health of the planet is evidence that something is terribly wrong. This difficult condition is not what God had in mind. It is contrary to the original design and so it routinely malfunctions. It is for this reason that everything feels so wrong.

Think about life this way:

Suppose you, a living being who requires air in order to survivor, were suddenly forced to live the rest of your life floating in a stormy ocean. If that happened, you would spend all of your energy struggling to keep your head above the water. You would work hard to get air into your lungs before the next big wave hit you. To survive, you would need an air tank and face mask until the time came that you were rescued and returned to dry land, your natural habitat.
People of faith believe that God essentially provides people with the spiritual air tank and face mask. That we have been given the means to survive in this abnormal, unnatural condition until we can return to our natural habitat – our origins – which is an unobstructed connection with God. Christians believe that this was made possible through Jesus.

People do wrong things because they are not puppets or robots. People do right things for the same reason. God is not interested in mechanical, obligatory responses to him and is unwilling to force himself on you. Throughout the Scriptures, God makes it clear that his desire is to be connected with people through a mutual, free-choice relationship.

Whether you realize it or not, you’re probably like most abuse survivors. We have double standards when it comes to God and how we think the world should work.  You and I make choices every day to do the right thing or not. That’s because – even under the harshest of circumstances – our thoughts are our own and the power to make choices are ours, too. Even under the most brutal, totalitarian societies, no matter how persuasive the consequences are, people make choices about compliance or rebellion, subjugation or revolution.

But when it comes to our abusers, we hold those people to a very different standard.  We somehow expect that our abusers are in a different category, altogether.  Believing that the power of choice should be reserved only for us – we often times think that our abusers should be puppets of God. That God should have been able to pull their strings and stop them from exploiting or harming us. The fact is, all people have the same power of choice. Everyone is responsible for his or her own choices. You are. Your abusers are. Neither of you are God’s puppets.

One abuse survivor shared this story about the power of choice:

One day I found myself very stressed and overwhelmed. My six year old son was behaving badly and I could feel myself growing angrier and angrier. Toward the end of the day, I was walking up the stairs in my house and my son was right behind me. His behavior continued to deteriorate. As I reached the top of the stairs, I was literally shaking I was so angry at him. Everything inside of me wanted to turn around, pick him up, and throw him down the stairs.

I prayed and asked God to help me. I asked for help to bring myself under control before I hurt my child. I actually told God what I felt like doing. The Holy Spirit’s response was direct and clear. “And if you do pick him up and throw him down the stairs, whose fault will it be? Yours or mine?” Of course it would have been my fault. I had the power to choose and so made the decision to honor and respect my child. At that moment, I made the choice to break the cycle of abuse.

I turned to my child, told him to go to his room and stay there for a while until he and I both calmed down. Then I went and washed my face, prayed for wisdom, thanked God for letting me vent, and suddenly realized something truly amazing.

I didn’t abuse my child. I had the power to choose. It could have easily gone the other way. God gave me the freedom to make that choice. It was the same choice my abusers had to make. They chose to abuse. I chose not to.

J.P.

It was a person’s choice that caused your abuse. It was NOT God’s choice, it was theirs. Nevertheless, the mere existence of this kind of behavior is so far removed from God’s original design, it has overwhelmed and shattered our Creator’s heart, too. The Scriptures are very clear about its impact on God (Genesis 6:6 in the Hebrew Bible), and uses the strong emotional words of “grieve” and “pain” to describe its effect on him.

It’s interesting to think about God’s response to the downward spiral of Creation. That response was to put on an Earth Suit in order to gain first-hand experience with the human condition. You and I function in an Earth Suit. So did God. He looked like us, lived like us, and experienced joy and pain like us, too. Jesus was Creator embedded into his Creation.

Jesus, in his Earth Suit, was not simply a sacrificial lamb. There was much more to his mission than to die a martyr’s death – otherwise he could have died with the babies that King Herod ordered to be slaughtered shortly after Jesus’ birth (Matthew 2:1-18, New Testament Bible). But he didn’t. He grew through childhood and adolescence and into young adulthood. He teethed. He scraped his knee. He went through puberty. He learned a trade. He also helped people to gain a better understanding of our Creator’s heart.
When Jesus came to those closing moments of his life, there were no short cuts taken. He was given the full experience of what the power of choice can do when it is used to harm another being.  In those last days, the experiences of Jesus are extremely familiar to abuse survivors. See if you recognize your experiences in those of Jesus:
His betrayal began with a kiss. A kiss is a symbol of love, affection, and intimacy. For Jesus, it was instead used as a weapon of betrayal and injury.
Everyone abandoned him, or looked the other way, pretending they didn’t see what was happening. They were more concerned with protecting themselves than intervening on his behalf. They swore they didn’t know him, even when evidence was to the contrary.

His religion – his faith community – used God as a weapon to condemn and injure him. The religious leaders twisted the Scriptures to suit their own agenda and then leveraged the political and military authorities until they complied to their agenda.

His civil rights were violated. The authorities, despite their awareness that he was an innocent man, did nothing to halt the misuse of power. They cowered in self-interest and ignored their own laws to avoid a confrontation.

He was stripped naked and tortured by the military. The soldiers used a whip on him that ripped his flesh from his body. Because he was naked, he had no way to even protect his genitals from the mutilation that most likely took place. Not only did they torture him, but they made sport of him, calling in the rest of their company to come watch what they did to him.

He was paraded naked through the streets, to the jeers and violence of the gathering crowds. Once he arrived to his place of execution, the crowds continue to hurl insults and venomous hatred toward him, even as his body was being nailed to a cross.  To add insult to injury, his executioners actually gambled for his clothes.

His pain was so intense, his heart was so broken, he felt so completely alone that he could no longer sense his connection with God. In fact, he screamed out to the heavens, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

(I’ve written a book, No Longer Alone, that explores the experiences of Jesus in-depth that you might want to read, should you be interested in learning more. You can also read the New Testament Bible’s account of these events, found  in Matthew 26:14-28:20; Mark 14:1-16:8; Luke 22:1-24:53; John 18:1-21:25).

As you navigate through your own abuse, through the betrayal, the torment, and the exploitation, I hope you consider – or reconsider – how your spiritual connection with God might be reconfigured. Jesus – called the Lamb of God in Scripture – is a fellow abuse survivor.  Our Creator, embedded in Creation, has experiential knowledge of the human condition – including the darkest parts of what people are capable of doing to each other.

I don’t pretend that these ideas will resolve all of your difficult spiritual questions, but I hope they help you to think about your connection to God in a way that brings greater comfort and strength for your journey.

Where was God? Probably wishing he’d made puppets. But then again, if we were, then that would have crushed all the beauty that is possible when people choose to love, to respect, to celebrate, and to live as sacred beings, created in the image of God. Created to reflect our origins and live perfectly connected to the Giver of Life and Light.

*God is not an anatomical male. God is Spirit – a unique being, who is complete and transcends gender, time, or space. God is balance. However, for the sake of language, which at this point does not have a pronoun for God, we use the pronoun “he” or “him” as a matter of simplification and one of familiarity for most faith traditions. Please do not let the limitations of language limit your connection with God.

 

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