SONG STORIES
WHY
Sometimes you don’t know for years that you were born onto a battlefield…
As children, we wake slowly to the family setting we are born into. When we step onto the “stage of life,” the play is already in full swing—characters have made choices that shape the circumstances into which we are born, and scenes that played out long before our arrival set the tone and atmosphere that we breathe in like air. We toddle around the stage set, bumping into the realities of our family’s play, and we accept it as life. For some, that life is stable and full of love. But for others, it’s more like being born onto a battlefield, and it can take years to realize, “This is not normal.”
This is my story. The story of a child coming to grips with the physical and emotional abuse in her home. The story of a heart mended and given wing to fly.
It’s a hard story to tell because of the pain. But it’s a good story to tell because there is restoration and healing. I tell this story not to dishonor my family but to give hope to those who also have been hurt and need to be healed.
MONDAY
Monday he is sunshine, with laughter in his eyes… Tuesday he is silent, a cloud on the horizon…
Memories, like photographs, are the captured light and shadow of a moment. They recall not only the sights we saw but also the smells, tastes, sounds, and especially the emotions of a moment.
My earliest memory “photographs” were made in Enid, Oklahoma, where my dad was stationed after his tour of duty as a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War. There are the silly snapshots of things that kids deem important, like eating a bean burrito at Taco Bell with my mom, or “wrassling” (a combination of wrestling and tickling) on the living room floor with my dad, or playing in the backyard with my sisters Jodie and Nina. There are sweet memories, like the time my mom taught me a song she’d learned at a Bible study, or the time my dad put together a jungle gym for me and my sisters in the backyard. These are the colorful “memory photos” of my early childhood, bright with the sweetness of a young family living together and loving each other.
Scattered in among these are a few shadowy “photos”—my father ranting and slamming tools around as he worked on the car, and the way my four-year-old mind snapped to attention when I saw the fear in my sisters’ eyes. When I wanted to keep playing, my sisters gave me a look that said, “Keep quiet.” I couldn’t have known then how much they, at ages 10 and 7, had already seen of my dad’s explosive temper.
Dad was often like a playful big brother, making me and my sisters giggle with his crazy antics. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, one day he’d be on edge. The tension would build until his rage finally exploded onto one of us. He’d grip our arms tightly and shake us, leaving three stripes of bruises on each arm. He’d hold his red, angry face close to us and talk through clenched teeth like a bear about to roar. When he was finished, he might shove us hard and yell, “Get out of my sight! I don’t want to see your face!” or swat us on the head impatiently and shout, “Get your act together! Use your head!” I cowered under his rage. I wanted this scary man to go away. I wanted the dad I knew and loved to come back.
Compared to the violence that would come in our teenage years, these incidents were small, but they marked the first moments of awareness for me. I had just bumped into the first piece of painful reality in my family’s stage set: my dad could be frightening.
Just as painful was the unspoken education I received about how to cope with Dad’s rage: silence. I learned by watching my mother and sisters that no matter how bad the explosion, the rule was to pick up and move on as if nothing had happened. So we marched on like good soldiers, but it was like swallowing something very bitter and letting it burn slowly, down in our bellies, and it bore painful fruit in years to come.
SHE GETS BY
She gets by in her own way…
You’d think, between my dad who hit and yelled and my mother who didn’t, my anger would land squarely on my dad. But it was more complicated than that.
Of the two, my dad was the more affectionate one. He hugged me, joked with me, encouraged me, and told me he saw potential in me. That was like water to a thirsty flower, and I drank it up. But Mom was not as warm. Physical affection did not come naturally for her, and words of encouragement were rare.
Mom was a tall beauty—cool and distant, like a beautiful bronze statue. I could admire her from afar, but she offered no motherly arms of comfort or shelter from Dad’s storms. She might have learned this cool detachment from her John Wayne-like dad, who was kind but tough and silent. No doubt the loss of her own mother at a young age affected her. And on the heels of that loss came all the stress of being a fighter pilot’s wife during the Vietnam War.
When I want to be angry at Mom for not protecting us—for keeping the home so beautifully neat, while the secret of violence festered—I realize that my anger is real and legitimate. But from this distance, I also see a woman who learned from a young age to steel her heart against the pain in her life. A woman who, in the chaos of my dad’s storms, was barely making it herself.
PERIWINKLE SKY
There’s a peace about this place…
Whatever concerns or fears I had about my dad’s anger, it remained a “no talk” issue. My sisters and I didn’t know we could talk to each other about it, Mom wouldn’t talk about it, and of course talking to Dad about it was too fearsome to imagine. So, while Mom distracted herself with housework, I found my own way to cope. I escaped to the backyard, where a tree swing and a family of rabbits awaited me.
We were living in a little German village by this time, and that backyard and swing were my haven, my patch of peace. There, all the tension in my young body would melt away as I experienced the carefree moments childhood is supposed to be made of. Young as I was, somehow I felt God’s presence with me there. And as I sang and prayed on that swing, I learned that He was the friend I could reach out to at any moment.
And if I had my choice, it would only ever be this way…
THE SHIP IS GOING DOWN
Pulled in a hundred ways, God help us, the ship is going down…
After three years in Germany, the military moved our family to Alabama, where my parents experienced a time of spiritual growth and my dad’s anger virtually disappeared. For a little over a year, Dad was like a changed man, and our home became a place of peace and happiness. But then it was time to move again—this time to Springfield, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D. C.
The pace of life was faster in Springfield. My sisters were now teenagers, Mom was working outside the home, and Dad had a high-pressure job. Living in a high-stress suburb under those conditions can be tough for even the healthiest of families. But mine was not a healthy family.
In the years when love and trust should have strengthened our family, violence and intimidation weakened it. Verbal abuse and “no talk” rules prevented us from communicating well or solving problems constructively. The storms of life began to pound down on us, and we were totally unprepared.
As the daily pressures of life increased, Dad resorted to his old, familiar way of dealing with it—rage. Hitting us, shoving us, chasing us, and grabbing us by the arms and shaking us while yelling in our faces. Eventually, he started grabbing my sisters around their throats. It was terrifying.
At first, the episodes of abuse were sporadic, interspersed with fun family trips to the beach or to an amusement park. In those early days, we still had meals together as a family, still tried to maintain some sense of closeness.
But with each new wave of violence, the debris of unresolved pain and resentment built up between us. The times of peace between Dad’s explosions became shorter, and his outbursts of rage more severe. We were a family in name, but sometimes it just felt like we were five hurting people living under the same roof. I couldn’t have described it well then, but looking back, it was like I was hearing the boards in the hull of our family’s ship creaking and snapping. Would anything be left of us if this continued?
WHAT IT COULD HAVE MEANT
What it could have meant if he had admitted his need…
The older I grew, the more I realized that “image” was like an idol in our home. In an effort to keep up a good front, my parents never let on to the people around us how broken things were on the inside. My dad might yell and curse on the Sunday morning drive to church, but once we stepped out of the car, we knew the routine: façades up, smiles on. As far as I know, no one suspected what was simmering beneath the surface.
To the outside world, our well-dressed family and beautiful home might have looked impressive, but we were like the dirty cup Jesus describes in Matthew 23: 25-26—all the effort was put into making the outside look perfect, while the issues of the heart were sorely neglected.
Back when we had lived in Germany, my first-grade teacher had noticed I was out of sorts one day and privately asked me if things were okay at home. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “Does somebody in your home get angry sometimes?” I nodded my head silently, staring at the carpet.
“Do they ever hit?” she asked gently.
I looked up at her in wonder. How had she known? I nodded my head, and tears brimmed in my eyes. I looked down again.
“Is it your dad?” she asked softly. I stared at the carpet, letting the tears roll down my cheeks, and then silently nodded. That dear lady hugged me and said, “Oh, that’s hard, Laura. I’m so sorry.”
I felt relief, even hope. Maybe Mrs. Moore, this teacher that I loved, would help us. But that afternoon, when she called to talk to my mom about our family problems, Mom shut the conversation down and promptly told me to never again tell anyone what happened in our home. I obeyed. Our silence protected the family secret, but it also ensured that the problem of violence would go on unchecked.
GOODBYE LITTLE GIRL
There is no safe place for you here, little girl…
So, where did the tree-swing-loving girl from the days in Germany go when her family began to fall apart? Well, in the early days, my escape was television. From the age of 10, I came home to an empty house after school each day and watched TV for hours to fill the time.
As Dad’s outbursts of rage became worse and my home life became less predictable, I began to lean on friendships for my sense of identity. I couldn’t have put it into words then, but I longed to feel loved, valued, and secure. The attention I was getting from friends at school came closer to satisfying that ache than anything I was experiencing at home, so I built my life around my peers.
That put me in a vulnerable spot. It made me fearful of rejection and overly aware of what my peers thought of me. Later, when boyfriends came into the picture, I only felt valuable if a guy was interested in me. I couldn’t see it then, but the years of my dad’s abuse and my mother’s refusal to protect me had etched the message on my heart that I had no worth and that something was wrong with me.
I learned both at home and at school that I was only accepted if I behaved a certain way. So I became a chameleon—transforming myself to become whatever would win me acceptance. That’s how I lost touch with the real Laura inside—that little girl who’d found a quiet place of communion with God on a tree swing in her backyard in Germany. It took a long time to find her again.
POISONED FRUIT
I knew the fruit was poisoned, but I ate it anyway…
Mom and Dad had always warned us about the dangers of partying, drinking, and messing around with guys, and I took them seriously. So when I saw my sisters becoming rebellious as teenagers, I was upset and worried for them. But by the time I was fourteen, the appeal of being in the popular crowd and getting attention from guys was stronger than my resolve to do what was right.
I dove headlong into the party scene, and at first, I enjoyed it. Drunken laughter at a party, talks under the stars with friends and a shared box of cigarettes, riding in my boyfriend’s convertible with classic rock blaring—it made me feel like I belonged. But over time the shine wore off.
I was an empty shell of a person grasping for something to satisfy me, but nothing really could. Most of my relationships were shallow because I had no real love to give. For years, I felt that the only worth I had was in my appearance, so I ignored the aching place inside and fixated on trying to make the outside look perfect.
Back when I was 10 years old, my sister Jodie had developed a weight problem. I think all the years of abuse finally got to her, and she tried to numb the pain with food. Since my family was so focused on “looking good,” Jodie’s weight problem became a family problem. Mom and Dad encouraged Jodie to go on one diet after another, and when she inevitably failed, Dad would yell at her and become violent.
As I silently observed what was happening to Jodie, a worry grew in me that I might gain weight too and experience her same pain and shame. So at the age of 12, I started limiting how much I ate and started exercising. When I couldn’t match up to the effortless beauty of the models and actresses I admired, I started starving myself and exercising excessively. A few years later, I learned about bulimia. That sounded like an easier shortcut to staying thin, so I tried it—and walked into a dungeon that I would not get out of until my final year of college.
By my junior year of high school, I was miserable. I was trapped in an eating disorder, and I was sick of the charade I was living to stay in the party crowd. I hungered for something more real. But what?
One night, as I shuffled through college applications, I heard God speak to me for the first time in my life. God? The One I’d walked away from? The One I had occasionally mumbled prayers to on a Saturday night after partying? Surely He was angry at me after all my rebellion. But His words didn’t sound angry. They sounded like a concerned Father cautioning someone He loved. He said: “You’re coming to a fork in the road. You can continue on this path that you’ve been on and go to a Virginia college—and things will get worse and worse. Or you can take a different path by going to college in Oklahoma and get a new start—turn over a new leaf. You’re coming to a fork in the road.”
Much as I was prone to doubt myself, I knew that I had just heard God and that what He had said was true. That week, I filled out one and only one application for college—to Oklahoma State University. When I received my letter of acceptance in the mail a few months later, I began to feel something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. It was hope.
So I’m walking away, I’m out of the game and I’m leaving the charade…
FRAGILE FLOWER
Catching my first glimpse of freedom, peace blowing like a gentle breeze on me…
My senior year of high school flew by, and thoughts of starting a new life in Oklahoma made it easier for me to leave behind the familiar and step into the unknown. I knew no one on the 20,000-student campus of OSU, but I started attending weekly meetings at the Christian Student Union and met friends who helped me in my walk with God.
I had the unexpected boon of a dorm room all to myself. This was a godsend, because, although I didn’t know it, I was an introvert. Coming home to a room of my own after a busy day around lots of people was exactly what I needed. Not only that, but I could sing or pray out loud and not worry about anyone overhearing me.
I began to feel God’s nearness again, like I had as a child in my backyard in Germany. Bit by bit, I felt the real Laura come to life again. I dropped the bad habits I’d picked up in high school, and I didn’t struggle with the eating disorder for the entire first semester. Instead, I poured my energy into studying for a counseling degree in the school of Family Relations and Childhood Development.
That first semester was a long breath of fresh air. I wish it could have gone on and on that way. But although I was making good choices, the underlying wounds and lies from my childhood were not being addressed. So when stress piled up, I cracked.
The stress came in a variety of ways. When I stayed with my family over Christmas break, I felt a subtle but firm pressure to act like none of the problems from our past had ever happened. Even though I didn’t understand that what we had suffered was abuse, being around my family and trying to act like things were fine left me literally feeling sick.
To make matters worse, I was forced to get a roommate, and so my quiet haven was taken away. I came back to OSU in January with a pile of Christmas gifts but also with a heavy weight in my stomach—the accumulation of stress, sadness, anger, and tears I had never been able to process. Now that I had a roommate, I didn’t have a space of my own to talk to God. I tried going on long country drives to blow off the stress, but it didn’t work.
Eventually I felt the urge to resort to my old way of coping with stress—overeating and then making myself sick. One day I gave in, and I felt devastated afterwards. I thought I had left all that behind. I resolved never to do it again, but in the following months, I failed over and over again.
I’m like a fragile flower, closing her petals to the sky. I gave it everything I had, but the past would not remain behind me.
TRYING HARD
I’m trying to make You happy, but time and again I’m failing…
For the next three years, it was the same routine: I’d do well for a month or so, and then I’d crash and burn. I tried everything I knew to “get better”—I prayed, talked to friends, read books, went to counselors. Nothing worked. And that’s because I never got to the root of the problem: the deep wounds and the sense of worthlessness from years of abuse.
As kids, when we did something stupid, my dad would smack us in the head and say, “Get your act together.” That’s how I believed God felt about me, too. I thought that the goal of Christianity was to be good and make God happy with me. To do this, I believed I had to follow the rules, and if I succeeded, I could expect God to bless me. But if I failed, the answer was to try harder. Surely I couldn’t expect much compassion or help from God until I “got my act together,” right?
But this view of my heavenly Father was totally wrong. I didn’t understand that God never intended me to live this Christian life in my own strength. Jesus knew we needed power from above in order to truly live well, and that is why He sent His Holy Spirit as a gift to every believer. Life with the Holy Spirit is about relationship, not about a list of rules. But I knew next to nothing about this Holy Spirit or how His power could help me to overcome.
TRANSITIONAL CHARACTERS
Looking back over my family tree, I wonder does it always have to be
That the heartache of one generation is passed on to the next generation to go on endlessly?
My choice to major in Family Relations and Childhood Development was in part driven by a desire to become a counselor. But even more, my choice stemmed from a desire to find the broken place inside of me and fix it. The idea that destructive behaviors tend to pass from one generation to the next was more than familiar after so many FRCD classes. Children born to alcoholics have a higher chance of becoming alcoholics themselves. Children from homes where there is violence have a greater likelihood of being violent themselves or of marrying someone who is violent. Children whose parents divorce have a higher likelihood of divorcing.
To me these were depressing facts. Slowly, I was beginning to understand that the very same storm I’d seen tearing my dad and my family apart had somehow gotten inside of me, and now that tempest was wreaking havoc in my life. My dad had coped with stress by exploding outwardly in rage, but my explosions turned inward, with a self-destructive eating disorder. FRCD classes helped in diagnosing the problem, but my heart cried out for solutions.
And then one day I stumbled across this paragraph in my Family Systems textbook:
“A transitional character is one who, in a single generation, changes the entire course of a lineage. The changes might be for good or ill, but the most noteworthy examples are those individuals who grow up in an abusive, emotionally destructive environment and who somehow find a way to metabolize the poison and refuse to pass it on to their children. They break the mold. They refute the observation that abused children become abusive parents, that the children of alcoholics become alcoholic adults.… Their contribution to humanity is to filter the destructiveness out of their own lineage so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives.”
—Carl Broderick, 1993.
I read the paragraph a second and third time. So it really was possible. Some people really do break out of the downward cycle.
Then and there in my chair, I whispered a prayer, “God, let that be me…”
THE VINEYARD SONG
I didn’t deserve it, and I didn’t earn it, but You poured Your love out over me like a torrent…
It was 1995 now, my senior year of college. Years of failing to conquer my eating disorder had convinced me that I needed a power greater than my own to overcome my addiction. But where to find it? Jodie told me about a church where people were experiencing the power of God and asked me if I wanted to check it out with her. She warned me that some of the things going on at that church might look weird—like people shaking, crying, or falling to the floor—but that didn’t faze me. “I don’t care what it looks like,” I answered her. “I want to go. I need God.”
That’s how on a Friday night, kneeling on the floor of a tiny Vineyard Church, I encountered God. I didn’t know the people. I didn’t know the songs they sang. All I knew was that when the pastor prayed, “Holy Spirit, come and do what you want to do here,” I heard a gentle whisper in my spirit: “Get down on your knees.”
I knew that voice…. It was the same one I’d heard as a junior in high school while sitting on my bedroom floor sifting through college applications. I only questioned for a second whether I should obey or not. Without looking at Jodie or anyone around me, I sank to my knees silently, but inside I was crying out, God, I don’t know these people here, and I honestly don’t care if I look foolish doing this. I am desperate, God…. I need You.
I had been kneeling for only a few minutes when I began to feel something I’d never felt before. The best way I can describe it is that I sensed a presence drawing close to me, and that presence was Love. It was God’s presence, and it radiated love like heat and light and weightiness all at once. As He drew nearer, the warmth and weightiness of His presence grew stronger, and I began to weep softly. God, You are so pure and holy, and I am so dirty. How can You come near to me? Before then, I’d always thought of holiness as a kind of haughty and proud cleanliness. But now I understood that His holiness was beautiful and radiant and warm. His holiness is 100% life and 100% love, undiminished by sin.
Those first soft tears that I cried were like a little crack in a dam—a dam of stored-up sorrow—and the small crack became a stream, and the stream became a surging river. I cried until it felt like my heart was literally going to break, the sorrow was so intense. This weeping bent me low to the ground, and finally I lay on my side, not worrying what anyone around me thought. I just wanted to let God do what He needed to do.
It would take pages to describe all that God did that night. At times His presence was like a waterfall of light, power, and love pouring down over me. At other times He spoke with breathtaking precision to the wounds, lies, and obstacles buried in my heart. By turns I cried, lay in awestruck wonder, and at times even laughed because He was just so much more kind and loving and full of life than I’d ever known.
For an hour and a half, I was engulfed in God’s presence, like a cloud around me that I drank in thirstily. This feast of God’s presence left me convinced that everything else I had ever tried to fill my soul with was sawdust. No approval of man, no success in personal ambitions, and no self-made security would ever come close to making me feel as alive as I felt in His presence.
At first, when I got up off that church floor, I didn’t know how to live differently. For the first few weeks, as I stumbled about seeking to live free from my addiction, I had more successes than failures, and that was encouraging. But the most significant difference was this: I wasn’t alone. After my encounter with God, I had a deep and unshakeable understanding that He was always right there with me. Always. What’s more, I was convinced beyond a doubt that He was good—kind, merciful, powerful, loving, and absolutely trustworthy.
Day by day, situation by situation, I learned to transfer my trust to Him. Instead of trusting in my ways, my family’s ways, or the ways of American culture, I regularly turned to God with my questions, my stress, my fears, and my needs. I finally realized that God never intended for me to walk through this life alone, depending on my own strength. He created me to walk with Him daily, depending on Him, learning from Him. It began to dawn on me that no matter what life threw at me, I didn’t have to fear, because God would always be enough.
That truth became the wrecking ball to the prison of the eating disorder I’d been trapped in. The fear of gaining weight and being rejected had created my prison; the love of God shattered it. God showed me that my worst fear was that I might experience what my sister Jodie had gone through: gaining weight and being rejected. The connection seems obvious now, but I had never seen it until He showed me. That fear kept me bound for years. But now that I had tasted the love of God, I realized that even if somehow I did gain weight and experience rejection—He would be right there with me. And His kindness, love, and power would get me through anything.
All the weary struggling was over. Instead of trying to put the broken pieces of my life together, God simply asked me to bring the broken mess of my life to Him and let Him transform it.
God’s love gave me the courage to let go of fear, put my hand in His hand, and walk forward with Him. Addiction had no hold on me anymore. I walked out of the dungeon that had held me for nearly ten years. I was like Lazarus who had walked out of the grave and into new life; it was beautiful.
SOMETIMES SOMEONE
Sometimes someone shines their light into the darkened room that you have been stumbling through…
If I ended my testimony at my deliverance from addiction, I would only be giving you half of the story. Yes, Jesus delivered me out of the grip of an eating disorder, and that was astonishing and wonderful. But just as amazingly, He has helped me walk out of the wrong mindsets, habits, and beliefs that made fertile soil for that eating disorder in the first place. This inner healing that He’s done in me stretches far beyond the boundaries of the eating disorder—it reaches into how I view life, how I view myself and others, how I handle my anger and fears and hopes, and how I understand my past.
One of the ways God helped me along the journey of healing was by providing me with an amazing husband who was committed to God and committed to becoming more whole. Later God provided people to help us both in our journey of healing.
My husband and I attended a church that had an inner healing ministry simply called “Group.” The ministry was twofold: 1) Through teaching and through prayer they made room for Jesus to heal wounds from the past, and 2) they taught healthy relationship skills that prevented the abuse from carrying on into future generations. Through a two-year process, we learned to recognize the lies we learned to believe as children and to renew our minds with God’s truth. We learned to forgive those who had abused us and to forgive ourselves for our destructive choices. We learned healthier ways to communicate, resolve conflict, and care for ourselves. We learned to stop negative self-talk and to set boundaries in unhealthy relationships to prevent re-abuse. In a very real sense, the leaders of this group re-parented us. They filled the gaps and healed the wounds our parents had left us with, and this transformed my husband, me, and the family we built together.
YOU WERE THERE ALL ALONG
I can see that I was wrong all those years ago, losing myself and my song, believing there was no safe place, when You were there all along…
For a lot of people, going back to see their childhood home is as easy as driving across town. But for a kid who grew up in a military family, seeing your childhood home is a rare treat. In 2012, my husband gave me the gift of going back to my childhood home in Germany. I was doubly surprised to be able to actually walk through the house and to peek into the backyard where the tree swing and family of rabbits had once been. Standing there looking down at my childhood haven somehow brought closure. As this last puzzle piece slid into place, I could see the full picture of my life thus far and God’s work in it.
What I realized is that God hadn’t just been with me when I was a child singing on that swing in the backyard. He’d been with me every moment, all of my life. In the moments when my dad's kindness warmed me and in the moments when his rage terrified me. In the days when I tried to do what was right and in the days I gave up and did wrong. In the days I tried to look beautiful on the outside while falling apart inside and in the nights I cried out for something more real. He’d been there through it all, never letting go. He never pushed me. He drew me with love. He was never harsh, but He was firm—His words were full of truth and love and life. It was my choice to make—life or death—but when I grew hopeless, He breathed hope into my heart again. And He won. Despite all the odds stacked against me and all the flaws within me, He won me back to life. He was there all along.
HOW FAR DO YOU WANT TO GO
Dark yesterdays are rolling away. The morning light dawns on a new day.
Have you ever tried something new like carpentry, or painting, or growing a garden, and it turned out far greater than you expected it to? That’s how I feel after almost 30 years of following the Lord. In 1995 when I took Jesus’ hand and began walking this new path with Him, it was really an experiment of sorts. I had tried doing life my own way and had utterly failed. Now I was asking the question: Can Jesus be enough? Will simply listening to and obeying Him daily be enough to get me through this life? After the encounters I’d had with the Lord, I was willing to take the risk.
A betting person wouldn’t have put much hope in my experiment succeeding, though. I was still a very broken girl when I began this journey, and I had very little encouragement from my parents or sisters when I took my first fledgling steps. The garden of my life was full of stones and weeds—wreckage from my own bad choices and the effects of growing up in an abusive home. But that wreck of a garden had one good thing going for it: Jesus was in it. And in His patient, loving way, month by month, year by year, Jesus dug out the stones, pulled out the weeds, and tenderly cared for the new life He’d planted in my heart.
I can remember when I celebrated five years of this new life with Jesus. I was amazed at how much He had done and how sweet life had become under His guidance. Then it was 10 years, then 15, 20, and now almost 30. With each passing year, I have seen the good fruit from following Him multiply beyond anything I expected. He truly has been enough.
The path I began walking with Jesus in 1995 has had unexpected twists and turns. At times the climb has been hard, like ascending a mountain. Other times it has been like basking in the sun by a stream in a mountain meadow. All along the way, there’s been beauty. Jesus really is the Good Shepherd—He has carried me when my strength failed and He has lovingly provided places of rest and refreshment just when I needed them.
Looking back over the path I’ve traveled leaves me in awe of God’s goodness toward me. But when I look forward on the path into the future, I have to admit that sometimes I wonder: With a past like mine, surely there’s a limit to what God can do, right? I mean, just how far can I really go? I asked God about that one day, and His response to me was simply, “How far do you want to go?”
That’s the wonder of God, isn’t it? He doesn’t see things the way we do, and He is passionate about restoring the broken. Just when I think it’s time to settle down and count the blessings that I have, He invites me to new heights, new places. I was so touched by what God spoke to me that day that I put the conversation into song. It’s His message to you, too.
FORGIVENESS
I’ve taken time to let the memories break their silence. Now I’m moving toward a place of forgiveness.
Hands down, the toughest part of my healing journey has been the way my family of origin reacted to the changes happening in me. The reality is, there was a lot of unresolved hurt on both sides that made the process incredibly hard.
For years my parents had watched me slowly throw my life away as I struggled with the eating disorder. I had lied to them. I had disappointed them. They lived daily with the reality that this addiction might ultimately kill me. To go from being nearly certain I would die to seeing me ablaze with passion for my new life in Jesus was tough on my parents. A bit like if you’d had an uncle who was an alcoholic for a decade, and then all of a sudden he showed up at your house telling you he was a changed man. You might be slow to believe him.
On the other hand, the silence and denial surrounding the abuse my sisters and I experienced growing up remained firm as an iron wall. Whenever I tried to be honest with my sisters or my parents about those painful memories, I was shamed into silence again or told that “it wasn’t that bad.” When I tried to tell my parents that I needed to work through painful things from my childhood, my dad was defiant: “I was never abusive.” My mom and sisters agreed. I learned that I at least had to be honest with myself about the abuse, even if no one else in my family would be. It was a lonely journey, because the farther I moved forward in healing from my past, the more tension and distance there was between me and my family of origin.
My dad became verbally abusive toward me in those years, and my sisters encouraged me to just stop rocking the boat. Thankfully our mentors helped me and my husband. When my dad would rage at me over the phone, my mentor helped us learn to set firm boundaries. This kept my dad’s anger and his desire to control from constantly disturbing and hurting my young marriage and family.
The toughest lesson I learned at this time was that if I was going to move forward, I had to let go of the goal that my parents and sisters understand me and value me. That’s tough because our families are supposed to be the place where we feel most understood and valued. But when a family is determined to deny abuse and to tear down anyone who speaks the truth about the abuse, you have to choose: what’s most important, the truth or belonging? I chose to speak the truth, and so I was on the outs with my family for many years. We kept in touch distantly, but we had no real relationship for years.
In 2020, the reality of the problem of abuse in my family finally broke through the iron wall of silence and was honestly addressed. Although I had chosen to forgive my parents many years before, hearing my dad and mom admit the abuse and express their genuine regret and sorrow over it brought a healing I never expected to experience until heaven. God did a miracle. Now I’m getting to enjoy a relationship with my parents in their last years, and that is truly a gift.
AFTER ALL
After all, is my story so different from yours?
You’d be amazed how many people are carrying secret pain inside. Our stories are not so different from each other’s. Each of us has been touched by the Fall—the human choice to trust ourselves rather than trust God. Human love and wisdom runs out, and that leads to us hurting each other. But we always have the choice to turn back to Him—back to the source of all love and wisdom.
YOU WERE WORTH PROTECTING
You were worth protecting, and someone should’ve said so. They should have put their foot down a long time ago.
This is a song for all those who have known the pain of abuse. You are of far more worth than you know. God loves you. He grieves for the ways you’ve been hurt, and He alone has the power to heal you. Jesus willingly suffered the brutality of violent men to the point of death, so that when He conquered death, He could lift us all up with Him and make our broken lives whole. The path to wholeness starts when you receive His love. It continues as you daily put your hand in His hand, learn from Him, and walk forward with Him.
LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE
You raise up from ashes the souls who are wounded… Your grace is displayed on the wings You have mended…
In the years when I was trapped in an eating disorder, I had the misguided notion that I was the only person with struggles and that everyone else’s lives were pretty great. I’ve learned since then that everyone’s life is touched by pain in one way or another and that we all need God’s healing and restoration. That’s what God is so good at doing: making masterpieces from the broken fragments of our lives. And when you see it—when you see God take a person from the wreckage of their lives and transform them into the person they were meant to be—it's like watching a once-wounded bird catching the wind under her wings, rising higher with each stroke, until she wheels among the clouds. It is breathtaking. And the most natural response is praise: “Oh, look what You’ve done!”