Finding God In The RuinsSample

Holding It In

I want to take a moment to encourage you about something. So often there is one thing holding us back from telling our stories – loyalty. Parents struggle to join their children in the fight for the truth because it is too painful for them to hear what happened on their watch. They agonize over what they did wrong, allowed to happen, didn’t address, or covered up. 

But what they may not realize is their sons and daughters have been carrying wounds, some for fifty or sixty years, and are losing their marriages, drinking themselves to death, abusing prescription drugs, road raging, addicted to porn, food, shopping or control because the secrets and lies have been left unaddressed.

It would be too painful for my family if I told the truth, we’ve thought to ourselves. But not nearly as painful as it has been holding it in all these years. We must never let another person’s protection come before our own journey toward healing. God is in charge of protecting them, not us.

In the book “Bird by Bird,” Anne Lamott says, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”  Living our lives to protect others is a burden we ought not to carry.  It increases our shame, blurs reality, and will cause us to stumble through life without the sure footing we need to take ourselves up the mountain.

You don’t have to name names, and you may want to consider whether or not telling your story to certain family members will bring injury or insult upon yourself.  If it could, tell a therapist or close friend instead.

Telling our stories is how we authenticate who we really are.  When we deny them and keep the lies hidden away – lies we’ve been asked (or expected) to keep, we find ourselves living someone else’s story.  And living someone else’s story is like putting on their underwear.  It's foul.  Not only do you have their stink on you but also you carry a toxic shame that will cripple your effectiveness as a child of God.

When we live inside of a lie for years, that lie becomes our reality and so it may take some time to unravel things – to dig things up and find the truth. Maybe it feels as if this thing is over so why dredge it back up? After all, it’s not as if the images are even clear anymore – they’re fuzzy at best. Listen, you need to know that what’s on the other side of that window has the power to dismember your life as you know it. It does. And if you doubt what happened, wondering if it really mattered, let the pain be your litmus test.  Where pain is present, a wound exists.