She told me she had been molested.
Real People.
Real Stories.
Real Changed Lives.
It happened back when she was a little girl and she had never really talked to anyone about it.
Healing.
She was in her late 30s. She came up to me just as I was finishing the meeting and asked if she could talk to me about something alone.
I could see in her eyes it was serious. Of course we can talk.
We found a quiet spot outside out of earshot of everyone else and standing there together she told me about how when she was a child she had been molested.
It had happened on several occasions. She was having a hard time talking about it.
She told me how she was still hurt and angry about it. She was upset about how unfair it was. The ones she should have been able to trust the most were the very ones who hurt her.
She held back tears as she talked and every once in a while she would stop mid-sentence.
Finally she couldn’t hold the tears back any longer. They were sort of angry and sad tears all at the same time. That’s okay.
Tears cleanse the vision of the soul.
I hugged her and told her that it wasn’t her fault. When I said that she sort of let out a laugh and and a cry all at once. After we hugged I looked again and a glow had appeared on her face.
It was hope.
Healing. Peace was coming.
We prayed together. A lot of healing starts just like this.
Use your wounds to heal others.
Help us keep teaching people how to do that.
Hope.
He was sitting on the back rows of chairs at the meeting. He had gray hair. 60s or 70s.
We were talking about forgiveness and how powerful it can be. It was a small room but there was something special about the meeting. People were really entering into the spirit of what was being said.
Towards the end I was talking about certain things that people go through in life and how they really can heal from them. How they don’t have to carry any of that mess forward. How it’s never too late to forgive it and let it go. I mentioned one very specific thing that happens to some people and how deeply it hurts them and how it really was possible to heal from it.
The moment I said it, the man with the gray hair in the back row began to weep. It was that ugly cry. You know the one I’m talking about? It was coming from some very deep place and at the same time he was sort of holding it in because he didn’t want anyone else to see, but somehow at the same time he was letting it out.
No one else in the room saw him. But I saw him.
For a few moments he didn’t look like an old man anymore. Somehow I saw a little boy who got hurt inside many years ago. I could see he was quietly letting go of something deep inside that had been haunting him for many years. Decades. Decades he had been carrying it around.
Afterwards he had this peaceful smile on his face and walked out of the meetings with a spring in his step almost like a great weight had finally been lifted from him. I praise God that it’s never too late to heal. Never too late to forgive and be forgiven.
Growth.
‘You don’t know how much it means to talk to you. It’s so hard in here. And it’s so hard to be surrounded by so many broken people and try to heal at the same time. They do drugs in the dorms and stomp people. It’s brutal and awful and selfish and ignorant and cruel. These people are so broken. I had to fight so many times in the county and in here too and it’s so hard to not just fight when I’m angry like I always did before. Especially when I know I could beat someone up.
The other day I had a guy run up in my cell and get in my face and try to start a fight. The old me would have hit him so fast. So fast. I could have. I could have crushed him. I know I could have. And I felt that for a second. But there’s something changed in me deeply. I can’t exactly explain it, but I wasn’t angry like I would have been before. I just felt sort of sorry for him.’
‘Sorry?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, sorry that he was like that. Sorry that he was so broken like that. I felt bad. I felt sorry for him that he was so ignorant, so angry, so out of control. I felt sorry for him. I thought about what his childhood must have been like to make him that way.’
‘That’s compassion’, I said, ‘that’s the voice of God.’
‘I know. And it feels so good to listen to it’.
‘I’m proud of you…..Remember, true strength is not measured by what you have the strength do, but by what you have the strength not to do.’
‘Amen.’