Love Bears All Things

Photo by Bgrace

Sometimes the hardest things to look at are those which most need to be seen.  

Last week, the girls and I were coming out of a restaurant in Lancaster, and as we crossed the parking lot, a very large and intimidating man stormed out of another restaurant with a little girl in tow.  By that I mean he was holding her up off the ground by her arms which were stretched above her head.  He was screaming at her and alternately shaking her and squeezing and pulling her wrists.  When she cried out he smacked her and which only made her cry more.  His response to her tears was to scream at her and threaten her that if she didn’t stop crying he would do something worse. 

It was a horrible thing for me to see, but much more traumatic for my children.  I hurried them into the van and grabbed my cell and called the police.  Every protective instinct in me wanted to throw myself in between that man and the girl who looked to be no  older than Sarah.  But I knew if I did that I could be placing my children in danger, myself in danger, and I would risk the possibility that he might leave before the police could get there.  So we stayed in the car, me on the phone with 911 narrating what was going on across the parking lot and my girls too upset to look and yet too upset not to. 

It took the police too long to get there.  After they arrived  I gave my statement, identified the man,  then left as they questioned him. My girls were a  mess, as was I.  They were so worried about the little girl.  What would happen to her?  What would happen to the man?  I didn’t have many answers. As we drove home,  I asked each of the girls to take a turn and pray for the little girl’s safety and for the man to never be allowed to treat her like that again.  When it was my turn to pray I found I could not keep the tears out of my voice.

 “Mom, are you crying?”  Emily was upset all the more at my crying.

 “Yes, honey, I’m feeling very sad for the little girl.” 

I reassured the girls as best as I could that the police would take care of the little girl, that they would tell her Daddy he couldn’t treat her like that anymore.  But honestly I wondered at what would happen.  What if the police didn’t believe it was severe enough to take the man into custody that night.  Would the Dad go home and punish her and blame her for the police questioning him?  All sorts of possibilities ran through my head.  All I could do was pray. 

Emily started having panic attacks a few days later.  She has started to associate everything with what she saw and cannot get the thoughts out of her head.  She cannot differentiate between what is real and what is not.  She is doing everything she can NOT to think about what she saw.  The result is that it is what she most thinks about.  Since she doesn’t know what to do with those thoughts, and how they make her feel, she begins to panic.

But what really threw me was her reaction when she was very upset and I started to pray for her.  She became very angry and yelled at me, “Stop praying!  You always bring God into everything. What does He have to do with this? I don’t even know if I believe in Him anymore anyway!”  She ran to her room, threw herself onto her bed and sobbed. 

Slowly I followed her upstairs, taken aback at her reaction.  I prayed for wisdom as I went. 

“Em,” I said gently.

“Mom,” she was barely able to get the words out, “I’m so confused.”  “If God is real, how come when I pray He doesn’t answer my prayers?  I don’t even know if I believe He’s real.  I didn’t want to tell you because I thought maybe you wouldn’t love me anymore.” 

I wrapped my arms around her and said, “Emily, I will always love you.  There is nothing you could ever do that will change that.  And it’s OK if you have doubts about God.  I sometimes struggle with that too.  When I do, I ask God to show me that He is real.”

“But I’m so confused! I don’t know what to believe.”  She began to panic again and I calmed her with my voice.

“There is no hurry honey.  God is very patient.”

We spoke more and I decided to keep her home from school the next day.  We spent a lot of time processing together what had happened, how it made her feel.  We talked about thoughts she was struggling with and how to handle them.  We talked about how things that were causing her to panic were like the situation she witnessed and how they weren’t alike.  We talked about how afraid she was feeling now, and how it made her question what she believes.

“The good thing , Em, is that no matter how lost we are, God is never lost.  There is a story in the Bible that tells us about what God does when we are lost.  Do you remember it?”  She shook her head.   “It’s the story of the lost coin.” 

Emily asked me if I would tell it to her.  So I explained that the woman in the story kept sweeping and sweeping and sweeping in the dirt until she finally found her lost coin.  Even though the coin was lost, the woman wasn’t.  “God will never stop sweeping until you aren’t lost anymore Em.”  “He’ll always be sweeping for us.”  She was comforted by the thought.

 I must admit, there was a thought in the back of my mind that wished Emily had never witnessed the situation in the parking lot.  But the fact that Emily is so sensitive to it all also tells me that she might just care enough about these things to do something about them.  The fact that all of this shakes her concept of God so deeply tells me that she understands that there is a dissonance in her spirit about a God who loves and a God who allows a little girl to be abused.   My prayer is that I can help her to move toward the God who doesn’t always explain, doesn’t always intervene, and be used by Him to help her bring about change.  In order to do that, she will have to learn to bear up under the burden of witnessing the pain and the darkness in the lives of others.  But isn’t this asking of her more than she should have to bear? 

I know the next bend in my journey will call all of these emotions out in me.  It will be hard to keep my eyes open.  To SEE.  Because I know I will feel compelled to help and yet feel all the more helpless.  I know that it will mess with me.  I realize that it will unsettle my spirit and break my heart. 

Dear God help me to bear all things.   Keep my eyes and ears open.  Don’t let them close at the sight of pain and darkness and despair.  God help me to move toward you with the questions.  Help me to keep looking at what You see, and hearing what You say in the midst of so many needs.  Don’t let me be unaffected or unchanged.  May I be moved to be used.  Put such a deep well of love and compassion in me that it will flow out of me and bring refreshment to the thirsty.  And keep sweeping, until none of us are lost anymore.