Dear Fellow Survivor Blog: Moving On

Dear fellow survivor,

A little over a year and a half ago, I began writing these blog posts to you. In the intervening months, I’ve shared a lot with you. I’ve laid bare my fears, my struggles, my sorrows, and my joys. I’ve explained the lies by which Satan held me captive for decades and the steps God has allowed me to take to overcome those lies. I’ve described the crucial role my wife, friends, and therapists have played as they’ve accompanied me on my healing journey. I’ve shared the Scriptural promises by which God has held me close to him and given me hope.

I pray that these blog posts have been a blessing to you. I know that they have been a blessing to me. I had forty years of spiritual and emotional poison stored up in me that needed to get out. These blog posts helped me get that poison out. I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed the experience any more than someone enjoys vomiting when they have the stomach flu. But my experience is that I usually feel better after vomiting, and getting all that spiritual and emotional poison out has helped me tremendously.

I want to thank each of you for accompanying me on this journey. You and I have never met in person. Yet, through these blog posts, we have been able to make a connection. We fellow survivors of something we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies were able to know that we were not alone. Someone else was out there who had experienced something similar. Someone else had similar fears, similar struggles, similar sorrows. Another hurting child of God was out there relying on the loving promises of God to keep them going. I pray that I have been a fraction of the blessing to you that you have been to me.

This is my last blog post in this series. It’s not that I don’t have more to say. However, several things have convinced me that it’s time to move on. First, my work responsibilities have increased in a way that will make it difficult for me to write blog posts like this for a while. But the main reason I feel a need to move on is that I can sense that I’ve entered a new phase of my healing journey.

I’ve been on my healing journey for about four years. During all that time, I needed to come to terms with a lot of things. I needed to come to terms with the fact that what happened to me was sexual abuse. I had to dig deeply in my mind and unearth all the false beliefs and lies on which I had built my entire worldview. I worked really hard to build new beliefs based on reality through repeated positive experiences. Throughout that time, I needed to talk with others about a lot of things that people don’t normally talk about. As I mentioned earlier, I had four decades of spiritual and emotional poison that needed to get out.

Now, finally, I feel as if that poison is mostly out. I clearly see the lies when they enter my mind. I’m more practiced at dismissing those lies and redirecting my mind toward the truth. Things that used to send me into an uncontrolled emotional spiral no longer do. It’s clear that God has brought me out of that very difficult early phase of my healing journey into something new.

It’s not that I’m completely healed. That won’t happen until the Lord takes me to heaven. Every morning when I wake up, the first thoughts in my head still are intrusive thoughts born out of the abuse I experienced. I still don’t feel entirely comfortable around some men. I still need to be vigilant every time I go into a locker room. But instead of drowning in all that, I am, as one of my friends expressed it, “wading through.” The puddles are still there. Sometimes the rain still pours. But like Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain,” I can keep going despite it all and often even find joy.

With the help of my wife, my therapists, and my friends, I have analyzed everything that I can analyze when it comes to the abuse I experienced and the effects it has had on me. In fact, as my therapist kindly pointed out, because of my obsessive-compulsive disorder, I have effectively over-analyzed everything to death. There’s nothing more for me to analyze. There’s only dismissing the lies when they enter my mind uninvited and clinging to the truth, no matter how I feel.

For the past four years, I’ve seen myself as a sexual abuse survivor who also happened to be a child of God, husband, father, pastor, and friend. That’s changing. Now, I see myself as a child of God, husband, father, pastor, and friend…who also happens to be a survivor of sexual abuse.

God has brought me to the point where I no longer allow the experience of abuse to define who I am and how I see myself. Yes, the abuse I experienced will always be a part of my story. It always will affect who I am. But it does not define who I am. It never really did. I can see that now.

For all these reasons, it’s clear that it’s time for me to move on. I’m not leaving you behind, dear fellow survivor. You will continue to be in my prayers, just as you have always been. I will be praying that God will continue to carry you as you continue your healing journey, that he will strengthen you, comfort you, build you up, and provide you with everything you need. I also am looking forward to new opportunities that God is opening for me to help both survivors of abuse and those who love and minister to them.

God redeems all things. He has kept that promise by redeeming my experience through our time together this past year and a half. I am confident that he will continue to keep his promise to me as I follow him into the next portion of my journey.

Know that this promise from God is for you as well, dear fellow survivor. No matter what you have experienced, no matter how hard your struggle is, no matter what lies Satan is using to try to enslave you, no matter how you’re feeling, God redeems all things.

He works all things for the good of his people. He never abandons those who are his. You are never alone.

God be with you always.

In Christ,

Your Brother Survivor