I carried the pain around for years, though I did not realize its magnitude. I was sometimes aware of the raw, aching wound. Certain songs would make me cry uncontrollably. But surely the effects would go away after enough time had passed. After all, I was not the one who had suffered.
The things I heard and the things I saw as a Child Welfare caseworker were hard, but they were things that were outside of me. So I pushed away the hurt and carried on with life.
Then we adopted children from the foster care system (three amazing, beautiful, precious souls). And I entered into their pain. But again, I didn’t acknowledge that their suffering caused me to suffer. I didn’t live through the things they did. I never experienced separation from my birth parents. So I pushed the hurt deeper inside and focused on being a mom.
If you have children, you know how hard it is to watch them hurt, especially when you are powerless to take the hurt away.
I couldn’t keep stuffing the effects away forever. The suffering of the innocent is hard to bear. Last week all of the buried trauma of the past came bubbling to the surface.
It scared me. The immensity. The blackness. My rage. And the pain. How can invisible wounds cause such physical pain?
I knew I needed to deal with the emotions, the memories, and the helplessness I felt. My husband said, “Give it to God.”
So, I asked God, “How?” I would have loved to throw this burden on him and erase it from my life. I asked him to take it away. He said, “No. But I’ll walk through it with you.”
As I have been resting in his presence, God has brought to mind words of wise counsel and Scripture and I am learning three things:
In the darkest of times, God is always there. Not only does God work everything for eventual good, he is present even in the times of greatest hurt and evil. That is our hope. It’s not just that Jesus Christ (God in human form) died for us, taking on all our sin so that we have the opportunity to be reconciled to God (though even that is more than we deserve). But God remains in time with us, offering comfort and hope in the face of what threatens to overwhelm us.
We are not meant to bear the burden alone. My mistake was in thinking I had to be strong and deal with the hurt myself. I should have been turning to my Savior all along. That’s why he says his burden is easy, his yoke light. It is not that living as a Christian is easy, but that God is there to walk with us, to shoulder what we cannot.
It is a privilege to share in his suffering. Just like my heart hurts for my kids, God’s heart is grieved at the consequences of sin in the world. We are his creations and he grieves for us. He grieves for the innocent and he grieves for the guilty. We are to be imitators of God. Sin and suffering should affect us. We must hurt with the hurting and share our hope of the personal God who loves each of us. True Christian compassion and love demand no less.