Cries that Reach Heaven

“God, are you listening?” I called from the depths of my soul.

“Where are You? If You aren’t going to answer my prayers, maybe there isn’t a God. Take this hurt from my heart,” I begged.

This was my cry in my early twenties. I had endured a hurtful background of physical and sexual abuse. I grew up thinking everything was okay and my life was just fine. When my daughter was born, the trauma began to manifest itself in a thousand different ways.

I started having flashbacks of the abuse. I was horrified. I had pushed the memories so far from my mind that the experience no longer existed to me. I had no recollection of what happened. Every time a new memory would come, I would try to put the puzzle together.

“What happened to me?” I thought. How can somebody automatically forget something this big? I felt like I was crazy. I did not see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Every time I was ready to put the past behind me, another memory would come. Once I had a new memory, it would take me several weeks to get back on track. I went to counseling and was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The counselor told me that I had to get all my memories back in order to be healed. I was constantly in a trap, looking at the past, digging things up, and trying to make sense of what I now believe – God wanted me to leave alone.

I vividly remember my daughter kicking around in her crib, staring at the mobile above her head, and laughing. She recognized Mama and Daddy with sweet chuckles every time we would hide behind her crib to play peek-a-boo. Then, out of nowhere, all the hurt would come rushing back to me like water over a dam.

“How can someone hurt something so innocent?” I asked. “Where were you, Lord, when all this was taking place? I cried out to You, but they never stopped hurting me. Why didn’t You make them stop?”

“Why?” I screamed.

I didn’t want to live anymore. If this is how things were going to be, then maybe God didn’t exist? At this point, I sank lower than I have ever sunk in my life. I had always believed in God since I was a little girl, and now I was open to this idea that this loving God did not exist because my prayers went unanswered. This was the emptiest feeling I had ever experienced in my life. I had no hope at all.

For years, like many victims of physical and sexual abuse, I silently blamed God for something that was not His fault. Rather, it was sin that caused others to hurt me. God was there the whole time. He tried shouting into deaf ears. He tried telling them to change their ways, but they were too busy with selfish pleasures. God was drying my eyes and helping me sleep well at night. Most importantly, God was there helping me forget the memories because they were not worth remembering.

The secular world tried to tell me to remember the past, but one day Jesus spoke to my heart and told me something differently.

“Forget about it,” He said gently.

From that moment on, I knew I couldn’t remember what happened because this was God’s way of protecting me. He loved me enough that He didn’t want me to remember anything bad. He had taken all those horrible memories and buried them deep in His awesome sea of forgetfulness and grace. God took the pieces of the puzzle and destroyed them, never to be put back together again.