victory
-
Wherever I go, I am not alone. I have walked through fire, through the wreckage of love that wasn’t love, through shadows that whispered my name like a curse. I have stood in rooms where the air was thick with the ghosts of all the things I could not save. And yet, I am here.…
-
There are two rather foolish ways of raising a child in a dangerous world. The first is to tell him that there is no danger. The second is to tell him that danger is everywhere. The first produces innocence without wisdom. The second produces fear without peace. Neither is particularly useful. We have become strangely…
-
The Small Permissions Most life-shattering failures do not arrive like lightning. They seep in like water through the foundation. They begin with tiny permissions no one else can see. Just this once. I deserve this. It helps me cope. For the child who grew up in safety, these permissions may remain small. But for the…
-
I see it everywhere—in my own life and out in the world….men in collapse. Not just tired, not just distracted, but completely surrendered. No fire. No vitality. It breaks my heart… I want to fix it but I’m not even sure how to diagnose it. I think about it a lot as I’m raising my…
-
What exhilarates me about Christianity is not that it comforts me. It does. But more than that, it challenges me. Exposes me. The scale is so high of what Christ demands. God does not come to me like a therapist with a clipboard or a consultant asking for my preferences. He comes as the one…
-
Don’t you cry. I never heard those words as a child and I’m pretty sure I didn’t give those words very often to my children. I gave the comfort I could, but was it enough? I’m sure it was not. Comfort in trauma is an elusive thing. We can learn calming techniques and that helps.…
-
Posting the pictures of Dad and Craig yesterday, or telling my story time and time again, I feel a slight tug of fear. I also fear their old regime where I had to listen to them, and be loyal to them at all costs to myself. That is not my reality today, only because I…
-
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” genesis 3:12 My mother was both an accomplice and a dictator. Often, abusive mother’s go unnoticed in the world of sexual crimes. That should not be so. Sometimes they are silent witnesses, sometimes they…
-
One didn’t exist for me. The longer the abuse lasted in my life, the more I would try to detail what an escape from my parents would look like. A bullet in my mother’s head? That would stop her. I fantasized about tying my dad up, bringing him into his bathroom and placing him on…
-
I have been waiting for God’s intervention in a demonstrative way for so many years I cannot recall the exact number. Maybe since I was born. I feel physically ill sometimes waiting and longing in hope for the vile ways of evil people to be exposed, for them to reap even a little bit; something…