Refer to STEP 10: I believed that God still has a purpose for my life.
A critical part of recovery from spiritual abuse is developing a New Testament mindset. Too often, we talk about being a born-again Christian, but when adversity comes, we fall apart and complain about how hard life is on us. My question is this: Why shouldn’t it be hard?
Your Heavenly Father allowed His Son to go through extraordinary humiliation, pain, and death. Things didn’t go well for Jesus, and His All-Powerful Father just sat by and let it happen—without interference. It’s what we’re celebrating this week—Christ’s death and Resurrection. We plan activities during Easter week, but for most of us, we never really consider the value of taking up our crosses and following Him.
Instead, we whine and complain that things should be going better for us. We want all the burdens of our problems taken from us, or at least substantially alleviated. It never occurs to us that the strain of life has eternal value. What we consider to be a nuisance or distraction is of priceless value to our Father.
We want to walk with the Lord, just as long as it’s easy, conflict free, and politically correct. When it isn’t, we either buckle under to the prevailing culture or complain so much we miss the value of the lesson.
We look at the idea of suffering, which is integral to Christianity, as abnormal and a sign that our walk must be flawed. This simply isn’t true, and it’s not taught in the New Testament. To learn the lesson from your abuse, you must recognize that God has a purpose for it.
Could we say this a little differently? Instead of trying to make someone who is very hurt right now say that God has a purpose for it, could we say that He might want to use this experience in our lives further down the road than what we can see right now. I’m not sure I could have seen or had hope that there was a purpose in it when I was in the middle of it and I’m afraid I would have been mad at God for letting it happen because of some big plan he had for my life.
If you take any other form of abuse (physical or sexual) and tell someone that God has a purpose for it and they are to learn a lesson from it, it will be hard for that person to swallow. Have someone hit you in the face or have your children hit or be molested and then tell you that it is for a purpose of God’s. It doesn’t even start to fly.
Abuse is not “just life being hard.” Abuse comes from someone who is usually knowingly abusing. I just don’t want to come off with simplistic answers to such a hard thing.
Barb:
You’re absolutely right. Your perspective is much wiser. Thanks for setting me straight. I’ll try and be more thoughtful in the future.
By the way, three of my daughters were molested by a trusted person, so your point was well made. I write about it at length in http://www.himynameisjack.net/
Forgiveness has been very hard because they were all preschoolers and completely innocent.
Again, thanks.
Jack
The excerpts of Pushing Jesus really ministered to a situation I encountered today. Thank You!