Christianity Oasis Forum

[modelbuilder]

Forgiveness, a powerful word, a divine action and something in the midst of pain hard to do. When I was a lad certain events took place in my life, events that were painful, humiliating and dehumanizing. I am not going to cover or share those events at this time but to say I have forgiven the individuals that were involved. I in no way feel that I am to seek out the remaining individuals and speak to them, I know two of the people to be dead and have no way of contacting those who might be remaining. I will say that I have unsuccessfully searched several times for one person in particular as has my beautiful wife. Sometimes it seems that part of God's healing is closed doors to the past along with time and distance.
I will say that in my forgiving I had to forgive God - BUT GOD NEVER SINNED OR DID ANYTHING TO NEED FORGIVENESS FOR! you will say. And yes God is holy and has never sinned and I agree with that with a loud Amen! But hearts in pain and feelings of pain throw our spiritual perception off. An offense perceived is an offense indeed to the preceptor, and any offense real or imagined needs to be forgiven.
God allowed the pain, humiliation and dehumanizing to be inflected upon me for four and one half years and that as a child. I had not planned on sharing this information at this point but it seems to give context to all of this the offense needs to be revealed. I was sexually abused from the time I was ten years of age to the time I was fourteen and one half years old. I have come along way in my healing process from all of that and for that I am thankful. It remains, however; that God allowed it to happen for reasons way beyond my ability to understand - there are events that God allows to take place in this life that will never be understood in this life. Some events do not break a heart so much as they shatter it, and each piece of that shattered heart has to be dealt with to become whole again. In my case one of those pieces had a lot of unforgiveness and hatred to God - He allowed it happen, He did nothing to stop it and let it ruin a good chunk of my life. I did not want to admit that truth that I hated God for all of that, that was an ugly truth and completely unacceptable for me a Christian man. But the Holy Spirit showed me that I had this hatred and anger and unforgiveness towards God working in me with the following results: Inability to trust God the way I wanted to and the way He wanted me to trust Him. Difficult to hear God clearly. The intensity of those feelings however well buried affected all of my earthly relationships to one degree or another. All that stuff prevented God from using me to the degree He desired. The list goes on but you get the idea. I penned a letter to God drawing up my "charges" and then forgiving Him, and then I repented for believing all of those horrid and sinful things that I had believed about God and He forgave me. I am in the process of learning to see God as He is, and really we all are. If one of those wounded places gets poked and the pain comes again I have to forgive again, seventy times seven, and remember and dwell on God's love. I will never understand in this life why God let all of that happen and when I quit trying and trusted God I got something wonderful...I got peace. Blessings to you all.

[dema]

I think you were very wise. I have often gotten mad at God. And yes, I do tell him I am angry. I still do my best to obey. I acknowledge that God is God and he IS the standard. And yet he allows so much misery. How can that be best?

I've gone through the logic of it all. If God always sent angels to rescue little kids running out in front of buses, then wouldn't they all run out so that they could get rescued by angels? And yet, the thought that it ever occurred to anyone to abuse children. Surely it seems that they should be struck with lightning when they abuse children.

We do have to work through our pain. The way you worked through yours seems to be very efficient. We need to see each thing or category of things, weep, get angry and give it to God - let it go. That is the path of healing. I think when people tell someone to just give it to Jesus and run away - that is exactly what they are doing - running away. They are in denial that such a thing could even happen.

God bless you in your journey.

Model building - that is another thing I've found - acknowledging the child that was hurt and letting him do things he liked at that age is important. I'm glad you do that as well.