You Have A Sacred Story

Assault is aggressive and withdrawal is passive, but both are harmful. “We assault others,” Dallas Willard writes, “when we act against what is good for them and cause harm or pain. We withdraw from someone when we regard their well-being as matters of indifference.” Aggressive assault can be verbal or physical. And it comes in varying levels of severity, and causes varying levels of trauma. Physical attack and violence are common in our world. My sister, Vicki, has worked many years for the Child Abuse Prevention program in her city. She hears and sees the evidence of children being physically and sexually harmed. These kinds of assaults, sadly, typically come from within families and create scars hat last lifetimes.

Withdrawal is a form of social evil that is subtle, but causes great harm. If assault is an active form of harm, withdrawal is felt in the absences, the lack of interest, the neglect, the unspoken sense that we do not matter. It is seen in not getting picked, being overlooked or passed over. In some ways, withdrawal can be more painful than assault. In situations of assault, there is a sense that we are a threat to someone. In situations of withdrawal, we are treated as though we do not matter at all. Whether someone says or does something hurtful to us, or whether they say or do nothing at all, the message is the same: no one is for us.

If we experience a deep sense of welcome, love, reception, and value in our early years by our parents and siblings, it will likely create a sense of rootedness that will enable us to withstand the many forms of rejection we will experience in our lifetimes. And we will experience rejections; they come in active and passive, direct and indirect, forms each day. They shape the story we find ourselves in. But it is not only the story we find ourselves in that shapes us, it is also how we narrate the story. A million little things have happened to you, and you have shaped them into a story. There is our actual story, and there is also our perception of that story.

The question is: Is the story we are telling about ourselves true or false?

There are two false narratives that are common when it comes to the impact of the social and historical dimension of our lives. The first narrative develops when we “ultimize” (make ultimate or most important) the parts of our story; the second emerges when we minimize or deny our story.

The first false narrative gives too much power to our stories, to the things that have happened to us—the assaults and withdrawals. It develops when we ultimize our story by believing that our story (real or perceived) is all that we are. Believing that we are our story and that our story is us, we make our sociohistorical narrative ultimate—we allow it to define us. We begin to believe that we are the things that have happened to us, the things people have said about us, and the things we have done in response. We ultimize our story when we think, I am my story, rather than I have a story.

Can you name a part of your story that you have “ultimized”?

The second false narrative gives too little power to our stories, when we try to escape our stories or play down their role in our formation. This common error we can make is to minimize our story. Sometimes the things that have happened to us are too painful for us to face, or sometimes we deny their effect on us. I have come to believe that God graciously allows us not to have to face all of our brokenness in its fullness; to do so might destroy us.

Can you name a part of your story that you have minimized?

A friend of mine spent many years denying the impact of a stepmother who abused her verbally whenever her father was not around. On one occasion she tried to tell her father about the abuse, but her father did not believe her. The pain was so deep that she could not face it. Unconsciously, she began doing everything in her power to please her father to make up for the deficit she felt; perfectionism was a way of soothing her pain.

It was not until she was in her forties that she experienced a transcendence crisis that led her to seek help. She had lived for over three decades in a kind of denial about her childhood pain. Her therapy allowed her to explore the impact of her circle of insufficiency. Her relationship with Jesus would also play a large part in her healing. She told me, “For years, if someone asked about my parents or my upbringing, I would tell people I had a great home life, and that my parents were great. I just didn’t want to face how it all affected me. The pain was too great. But at a certain point, I could no longer live with it or the pain I was causing others.”

There is a Jesuit maxim that says, “Give me a boy until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” A British documentary, 56 Up, tried to see if that maxim contained any truth. In 1964, director Michael Apted began filming the lives of eight children who were all seven years old. He then filmed the same children seven more times, every seven years, until they reached the age of fifty-six. The maxim proved largely true. The different socioeconomic, religious, and familial dimensions of each of these seven-year-old kids were determinative of much of their adult behavior. The kids from broken homes, for example, spent much of their lives trying to create stable families for their children, searching for it but often failing at it.

Columnist and author David Brooks notes,

We are the beneficiaries of our ancestors. The dead show up in our lives. We are formed by the places we grew up in. When we form our identity, we are telling a story about ourselves. And the story is the emerging of all the things we understand and don’t understand. And that story then becomes our identity, and it becomes the way we see the world. And if you change the story you tell about yourself, you can change the way you see the world.

Our families and cultures, our parents and teachers and friends, shape us a great deal. But we are not our stories—we are something more, something far greater and more wonderful than the things that people have done or said to us. As Van Kaam writes, “It is a lifelong task of formation to help people become the subject instead of only the object of their history.” We are not what has happened to us, but what has happened to us matters. However, we are the subjects of a much better story than the one most of us are telling ourselves.

In his book A Grace Disguised, Gerald Sittser tells the story of how he lost three generations of his family—his mother, his wife, and his daughter—on a lonely Idaho road in a tragic auto accident. “The experience of loss,” he explains, “does not have to be the defining moment of our lives. Instead, the defining moment can be our response to the loss. It is not what happens to us so much as what happened in us.” This in no way assuages the pain and the grief of our losses. Dr. Sittser is stating the truth that it is not only what happens to us, but more so our response to what happens to us that matters. It is what God can do in us that makes healing possible.

For many of us, our stories produce either gratitude or shame. We can be glad, for example, that we had good parents, that we lived relatively pain-free lives. Or we can feel shame for what has happened to us, for the neglect as well as the assaults that we have endured. But we, as well as our parents, family, and friends, are not the authors of our story. The author of our story is God.

You are not merely a story. You are an unceasing spiritual being, a divinely designed gift from God. You are not a story, but you have a story and that story matters. If you neither ultimize nor minimize your story, you can see your story in the right light. And the only person who can tell your story and mine is Jesus. And his word to us goes something like this:

You were uniquely incarnated into a specific family, culture, and time. God planned it for you; you cannot change this. It has a large influence on you, but it does not define or limit you. It has not only happened to you, it has happened for you. The sooner you embrace this dimension of who you are, the sooner you can become who you were created to be. This is your story.

You have a family, but you are not your family. You were raised in a culture and time and it has shaped you, but you are not merely a product of them. What has happened to you has influenced you and shaped you in deeper ways than any of us can know, but you are not defined or limited by them.

Does this narrative cause you comfort or distress? Reflect on why you might be feeling this way.

For many this narrative is comforting; for others it causes great distress. And it may be a source of contention for those who push back, saying, “How could a good God have allowed me to be harmed or abused or neglected?” That is a fair and legitimate question. The step from God allowed to God caused is a short one, and one that is easy to make. If God is all powerful, and all good but bad things have happened to me, then God is either not all powerful or not all good, or so it seems and feels. I understand, I relate to, and I sympathize with this position.

I believe that God can, and desires to, use what has happened to us for an ultimate good, though perhaps we will not know it in this life. Paul boldly claims, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28 NIV). I know that God has worked a lot of good out of the death of our daughter Madeline. But in truth, there is much I do not understand.

Our stories are so vast, I believe, it will take thousands of years to fully comprehend the complexity of our historical and social influences. Susan Muto and Rebecca Letterman explain how our families, cultures, and communities form a massive matrix which “bestows on us rich historical resources of formative wisdom that extend far beyond what would be possible for one person to attain.” Our stories are vast, and far beyond our comprehension. But ultimately, we are God’s stories, not our own. And our healing and our growth potential come when we turn to God and allow God to write us into a larger, more beautiful story.

Our story is really not our story. It started long before we were born, in the mind of God. That truth, that reality, does not minimize the pain we feel. Losses, rejection, neglect, verbal and physical assault affect us—but they do not get the last word. Our circles of origin form us in ways we carry for the rest of our lives. And our circles of sufficiency, no matter how strong, will ultimately fail to provide the deep needs of our soul. That is why true healing comes only from the One who is truly sufficient, the One whose love never fails. As Willard writes, “Love comes to us from God. That must be our unshakable circle of sufficiency.”

When have you seen healing happen in the light among trusting relationships?

In order for healing to happen, we have to stop hiding our story by keeping it all to ourselves. Letting others into our pain helps us process what has happened to us. This does not mean we must be an open book before all people with no healthy boundaries, but it does mean that we find trusted people with whom we can share our pains. Shame and guilt grow in the dark of secrecy, but they die in the healing light of trusting relationships.

Hope’s first transcendence crisis happened two years before her therapy, at a Christian camp one summer. She did not want to go because she had, in her words, “lost her faith” after the assault, though we were not aware of that. But a persistent friend talked her into going. While she was there, she began developing close relationships with a few friends she would later call her “camp family.” During a worship time she said she “could see the Holy Spirit pouring out of them.”

Toward the end of the camp, one of the speakers encouraged the campers to put all their trust in Jesus to help them overcome their fears. The next day they rode on a zipline, and Hope was shaking in fear as she climbed the ladder. When she reached the platform, she prayed, “Jesus, I put all my trust in you. If you are here with me, then take away my fear.” The fear vanished, and she leaped off the platform and slid down to the end with a smile. When she got to the end, she said, “I think I am a total Jesus freak.”

A few years after her therapy and healing, at that same camp, during some tender times of deep sharing, Hope felt safe enough to talk about her assault with these trusted friends. She shared what had happened to her, the pain she had endured. She was met with understanding, acceptance, and compassion. The Holy Spirit can work through people and, apparently, through ziplines. A new circle of sufficiency had formed through her Christian friends and Jesus himself. What is important to note is that Hope was no longer defining herself by what happened to her, nor denying what happened to her. She was open to letting God create a new story. We must surrender authorship to God. Jesus is not only the author and perfecter of our faith, but also the author and perfecter of our stories.

A few years after sharing her story at camp, Hope felt she would benefit from doing some more therapy work. I asked if she would be interested in doing a similar program to the one I had done—a weeklong intensive program. She thought that would be helpful, so I took her to Denver, to Restoring the Soul, where she worked with a therapist, Kelley, who specializes in working with young female survivors of assault.

During the third day of therapy, Kelley asked her if she would be willing to pray and invite Jesus into her story of trauma; Hope agreed. The following is Hope’s account of what happened during this time of prayer:

I felt anxious, but I agreed. In silent prayer, I asked Jesus my question: “Where were you during my assault?” After a few minutes, I felt a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. I heard a voice in my heart whisper, “I was with you, my dear, but what happened to you was not my doing. And because of your shame, you did not want me there.” I wept. I told Kelley what Jesus said, and we talked through the response. Kelley asked my younger self to come forward—the younger self who was in the midst of my trauma. My middle school self said that after the assault, I stopped believing in Jesus. After the assault, the abuse that I was enduring made me question what kind of God would let his precious child go through that. I believe Jesus was telling me that he wanted to be with me, but that I would not let him in because of my shame. While it will take a long time to fully grasp this, it was so freeing to know that Jesus was there. He was with me even when I didn’t want him to be.

This prayer experience, Hope said, was a breakthrough in her healing journey.

Hope’s journey is not over. Indeed, each of our journeys of healing last a lifetime. Van Kaam wisely reminds us, “The reversal of traumas may take a lifetime. The therapy that enables us to cope does not work like magic; it proceeds according to the pace of grace. What counts is not so much our success as our striving for wellness with Christ at our side.”

A few years later when Hope was in college, she attended a conference I was speaking at along with William Paul Young, the author of The Shack, a book that meant a lot to Hope. Paul was kind enough to spend some time with Hope and me and learn about her story. Paul’s own story contains many years of pain and abuse, and he has found true healing through the Trinity.

Hope shared the story of how she got her name, and how after her assault and bullying she felt the burden of her name, because, as she said, “I never felt I could be enough.” Paul smiled at her, looked right into her eyes, and said, “Hope, you have always been enough.”

What name do you imagine God might have for you on your white stone?

Brené Brown wrote, “When we have the courage to walk into our story and own it, we get to write the ending.” I would modify this slightly: “we get to write the ending, with God’s help.” We have so little control over our lives. We are not born with a clean slate, but into an ongoing story, one that began long before we were born. We do not pick our parents or the names they give us. And in a sense, even the names our parents give us are not our true names; according to Revelation 2:17, we will one day be given a white stone with a new name given by God written on it.

The world we live in is an act of grace. We are only here by an act of grace. The party would not have been the same without us, and beautiful and terrible things will certainly happen to us. But we are never alone. And because of that, we do not need to be afraid. There is only one thing for us to do: receive life as a gift.