Some of the things that have Shaped me Shouldn’t have…

I bet you can already hear the song playing in your mind! As a bit of a disclaimer, I want to let you know that this post will be deeply personal and intimate (Into me you see). I will be letting you look into the window of my soul. If you’re uncomfortable with discussions about childhood trauma and healing, this one’s probably not for you. God bless you either way you choose!

Our first brood of chickens was purchased as a rebound from a horrendous experience with ducks. We wanted duck eggs. They’re much larger than chicken eggs and evidently have a much higher concentration of protein in them. So, we bought ducks from our local hardware store and boy, they are so stinking cute as babies! I built them a huge house that I was calling “The Cathedral of Notre Duck”. I cuddled and played with them. I loved watching them swim around in a container of water and play and squeak. Baby ducks are just adorable. Ours just happened to be all dudes.

So, our rebound birds were chickens. Not having learned anything from the duck debacle, we again bought birds from a hardware store chain, without reading the sign that some of them might be roosters. We bought 8 birds assuming that they were hens. We had 4 roosters. I mean, the good news here is that our odds improved, but roosters don’t lay eggs. Eggs were the point. And roosters present a whole different list of challenges than hens do. It’s their nature to rule the roost and they’re going to assert their dominance if they can. They fight like crazy! We had Ancona’s and Lavender Orpingtons. 3 of them lived to receive names and they are listed here by their place in the pecking order: Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving’s Little Brother, and Benny.

Benny was always at the bottom of the pecking order. He is skittish and runs at the first sign of trouble. He never challenged for dominance in the coop mostly because Thanksgiving’s little brother was always being a jerk to everyone. He would beat up Benny to assert dominance, and then get beat up by Thanksgiving. It was a rough life for Benny in the roost. That was until we decided to clear out the roosters for the health of the hens. We got rid of all of them except the gentle, docile, skittish Benny.  So when the roost was cleared of all his competition, the flock of hens took to him and he became the supreme ruler of our coop.

Benny was not our strongest, most dominant, or biggest chicken. He’s just the one we kept. He wouldn’t protect the hens, he would run away at the first sign of danger and leave them to fend for themselves. He wasn’t the logical choice. I mean, I did have reasons, but I don’t think they were good ones. To be honest, there were better options, like no roosters. He’d been with us since the beginning and we found it hard to get rid of potentially the last chicken we had from our original brood. Plus, he was more gentle with the hens. So, Benny became the lord of his domain, and we named his hens “The Jets” because Elton John…

None of the previously mentioned story would matter to me without an experience I had in my first year of ministry school. There was a great deal of healing and soul searching that happened in that first year of school. In one exercise, we were encouraged to write some things on a mask and take the mask off so that the Holy Spirit would have access to all of the things we were hiding. I had a vision of an interaction with Jesus the week prior that puzzled me. It’s what I affectionately refer to as my encounter with table flipping Jesus. In my mind, I had placed inside of a white box what I thought it was that He wanted to deal with, my love of money. When I went to hand it to Jesus, he slapped the box out of my hand! I was a little stunned, but then he leaned over me and hugged me and whispered in my ear I love you so much! The exercise with the mask brought this experience back to my mind and I realized that there was something else going on that Jesus wanted to deal with. In that class, people began to share their experiences and they listed numerous childhood traumas. The more they talked, the more I resonated with the things that they said. I began to understand that there was something else hiding in me. It was then that I became aware that I needed to deal with something that happened in my childhood. Before I move on from this paragraph, I want to share one of my favorite verses with you. It’s an amazing verse that illustrates what happens when the loving gaze of Jesus pierces the shadows of our souls. 

But everything exposed by the light becomes visible – and everything that is illuminated becomes a light.

Ephesians 5:13

There is a real concept of exposure ruining things. Think of old school photography as an example. If the pictures that are being developed are exposed to light in the process of development, it can destroy the pictures. That’s not the type of exposure that’s being discussed here. It’s been my experience with the searching light of Jesus’ love that he never destroys us. Even the things we wished never existed are made beautiful in the light of His love. They become redemption stories that can give off the light of hope to others. That’s what’s happening to my story!

Enter Benny:

When I was starting my healing journey, around the age of 33, my first sponsor had suggested that I try to remember when shame entered my life. Where is the first time that shame entered my life? I can remember being young and feeling shame, like around the age of 6 or 7. In hopes of understanding this, I decided to reveal my addiction to porn to my parents and include them on my journey of recovery. I mentioned that my sponsor had instructed me to try and remember when shame entered my life and that I thought it was around the age of 6 or 7. The next words my mom spoke would change my life. You mean when you were possibly molested by that guy (Benny) at kids camp? I’m pretty sure you can imagine my state of shock. 

I have pictures of this kids camp. Our group was called “Benny’s Batmen”. It was about 15-20 six to eight year old boys in a dorm with one counselor. I have memories of the dorm and the boys, and of Benny. I remember being creeped out. I’ve had those memories for years, but I had nothing to reconcile them with. Things started to click together in my mind in a way that I wasn’t prepared for.

I won’t even begin to tell you I handled that well. I spent 3 days in bed crying. I cried out for vengeance and accepted shame. I finally pulled myself back out of bed and rejoined society. I got the chance to speak at our church’s men’s fellowship shortly after that. I decided to vomit all this information onto that group of guys “to encourage vulnerability”. That was really awful. It went horribly and felt terrible! I crashed and burst into flames! What I was really trying to do was make it someone else’s problem. Then, when I couldn’t get vengeance, justice, or relief, I balled up the emotions and tossed them aside into a dark corner of my subconscious. I determined that I couldn’t prove that I was molested and though there was some validity to my emotions, it must’ve all been so that I could develop empathy for others struggles. I decided to wholesale reject the possibility that it could be true. I pushed the whole thing behind me and I believe that this decision doomed me to struggle for years with my emotional, mental, and spiritual health. 

At 40 years old I was tasked by the Holy Spirit to approach my trauma with Him and surrender it to Him. It’s probably the single greatest moment of healing I’ve ever experienced. I felt like I was supposed to revisit the white box gift encounter with Jesus. I felt like the lights had been turned on in my subconscious. The thing that had been hiding in that place for years became exposed. I likened it to having a dead rodent somewhere in the house. Even if you can’t see it, you can probably tell that something is wrong because of the smell. I knew something was wrong inside of me, but I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t until the light of the love of Jesus came in that I was able to see the stinking thing and bring it to Jesus.

This time, I opened the box, and placed my trauma inside of it. I turned and offered the box to Jesus. To my delight, he embraced the box and pulled it tight. He treated the box like a long lost prized possession. I heard him say Well done! Well done. I just broke and began to weep. I could feel His love coursing through me! I developed empathy for my attacker and a heart of forgiveness almost instantaneously. It was the most amazing thing I’ve experienced to date with the Holy Spirit. It was a sweet experience that gave me a key to healing for this trauma.

That’s what the healing of  trauma looks like with Jesus. It sounds like it’s going to hurt. It looks like it’s going to hurt, so the natural, rational inclination is to run! I can almost hear my subconscious yelling,  Run away from the healing and save yourself! It just doesn’t hurt! I’d liken it to walking up to hug a cactus only to have the cactus swapped out with a ten foot teddy bear at the last second. The really funny part of this second encounter is that I happened to be driving around my hometown running errands. The Holy Spirit showed up so thick in my car that I had to pull over at the local gas station. I couldn’t drive anymore!

The most healing thing about this encounter was that the Lord showed me that the sins I had struggled with for years didn’t originate in me. You see, I struggled with pornography for years. I was outright addicted to it for 19 years, but I can remember having extremely sexual thoughts from the age of 8. In this encounter with Jesus, I could feel the weight of all of that lifting off of me. I wasn’t the horrible and disgusting person that I believed I was! I was the victim of something terrible.The things that had defined me were placed there. 

There’s a very real truth about the nature of addiction: the addiction is only a symptom of what is happening on the inside of you. There’s some emotion or trauma that you’re unable to reconcile, so you turn to an addiction to make yourself feel better. In a lot of cases, the addiction is the only thing that makes you feel good. Without an experience with the power of God, the symptom of an internal issue can and will try to destroy you. Since this experience with God’s power, I’ve never felt the same. I have a freedom and lightness that I never believed possible. I encourage you, whether you believe you’re struggling or not to seek out the light of God and let Him illuminate the dark places of your heart. Let Him bring His light into the places where the things that scare you hide. He’s so gentle and kind! He only wants the best for you! 

While I was and am grateful for the experiences I’ve had in the healing of this trauma, I wasn’t aware of how far reaching the claws of this trauma were. What transpired in the next few weeks shocked me in the best way possible. It began to frame and highlight some of the other issues that existed in my life that I had no idea where they came from. Since this post is becoming fairly lengthy, I’m going to pause here. I’ll talk about some of the other things in another post soon. 

I want to leave you with the thought I started with. There are things that exist in my life that shouldn’t. There are things that shaped me that shouldn’t have been able to. They did, though, and I’m left with figuring out what to do with them. There’s a quote that I feel like sums up the place I find myself so well:

It’s not my fault, but it is my responsibility. 

This felt harsh until I realized that taking responsibility for the things that exist in me makes me the powerful one. I get to choose what recovery looks like. I get to choose what growth looks like. For me, both of those things look like Jesus. I can’t think of a better way of recovering or growing that what Jesus offers us in Matthew 11:28-30 (NIV):

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. 

My charge to you, my fellow weary and burdened souls: find rest in Jesus!