YESTERDAY, WHEN I WAS TWELVE … (The Paralysis of a Human Soul)
We were invited to the lady’s home for afternoon tea. We’d known her for more than fifty years and it was going to be a great reunion, Her home was tasteful and elegant and she too, was beautifully groomed. It was sad to hear of her failed marriage and then she began to tell us the harrowing story of her life and why it had spiralled out of control.
When she was twelve she had been “groomed” by a Youth Leader in the church we all attended and eager to please this charismatic leader, she succumbed totally to his advances and for years was sexually abused.
The frightening aspect of her dark and torturous life was, that as she told us the horrendous misdeeds that she had to submit to, her voice changed and she became, as it were a twelve year old child … she spoke in the past tense but was reliving every aspect of her tortured existence.
Sexual abuse of a child paralyses the soul … and though the body and intellect develops and is educated there remains an aspect of the emotions and personality that doesn’t move beyond the initial moments of shock and “assault”.
Thirty years ago we took a twenty-one year old into our home he was unusual to say the least. After being with us for a few weeks Eunice and I questioned each other at what age he was emotionally: thirteen or fourteen was our estimation. Later I asked him “what happened to you when you were thirteen or fourteen?” Instantly and without hesitation he told me it was the time his Father abandoned him and the whole family. Today in his fifties when seeking to please, or gain some attention or favour, he reverts to the voice, the phrases in speech of a young teen paralysed by abuse.
The Abuse Victim is “murdered” in their soul … the source and seat of their emotional being, remaining dependent, vulnerable … Devastated and almost destroyed.
Jesus in Matthew 18 has much to say about the violations of a soul … the blatant statement by Jesus is that the “victim”, a “little one” is “caused to sin” … It’s undeniable that many victims of child sexual abuse become abusers themselves and certainly are aroused to the passions of sexual lust without the necessary prohibitions that wisdom and morality gives, abnormal sexual fascination addiction and activity among the young, usually points to the fact of being either exposed to pornography, or abuse which creates, if not a wound, certainly a warp.
1 Corinthians 6;9-11 is a powerful statement that the most degraded of life styles can be transformed … “washed, sanctified and justified, in the Name of the Lord Jesus and by The Spirit of God”
Washed … The impurity, the stain is cleansed and washed away as Isaiah 1 says “though your sin/stains be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow”
Sanctified … Separated and distanced from the trauma, bondage and inclination to the past.
Justified … From a huge gulf “fixed” … separated from God because of the darkness of depravity and given a dignity and grace Romans 5;17 … Amazing Grace … (the tendency of so many defiled and debased victims is to live in perpetual shame and guilt, or at the least, “inferiority” that you either fight against or succumb to it. There is no need to be wracked with shame … you’ve been “justified”
Only the Gospel of God can transport you from the Kingdom of Darkness into the Light and Glory of the Kingdom of God and His Christ.
