I don’t think I have ever met a trauma survivor of SRA who hasn’t asked one or more of the following: Why did God abandon me? Where was He when all of this was happening to me? Why did God allow this to happen to me? If He is God why didn’t He stop this horror? Does He hate me – is that why he didn’t stop it? Well, I didn’t have an answer to any of these questions, and the Lord was strangely silent when I looked for the right words to share. I discovered there were no words that would satisfy those questions. What I discovered in time, was the answer goes back to the foundation of love.
Creating that foundation of love is equivalent to remaining with survivors through their great sorrows and fears and pushes and pulls of relationship. It is brutal and it is heart breaking. It is wonderful and glorious. It is the worst of times and the best of times. It is long-suffering and worth it during the journey of watching them grow. As the survivor matures both can look back and see that, somehow, God answered those questions through the experience of relationship together. The consistent love demonstrated over the years by the caregiver profoundly defies the lie that God forsook the survivor or He would not have sent the caregiver as an example of His love to them.
The caregiver’s consistent love decries the notion that the survivor was never worthy of love because he or she has tested that in every way with her caregiver and friend, and her friend has stayed true to love. The two have put in their time together and have lived was it means when Jesus said to His disciples, “that no man has a greater love than this: to lay down his life for a friend.” Through the human example of Christ’s love, we become the bridge for the survivor to learn what it means to be loved by our Lord. The Lord does not change, and He hasn’t changed His design for us to grow and mature in love through relationship. When human beings have been a part of the destruction of another, the Lord will require human beings to be part of the solution. It takes extraordinary relationships like the ones the Lord intends to form in all of us – relationships that are in His likeness. Love one another as I have loved you.
Divine Design pp 67-68
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