The Process of Healing… Part 2

Winter has given way to spring, which has given way to summer. It seems the passage of time just keeps going faster and faster the older I get! I used to hear my parents and grandparents talk about this phenomenon, and think they were crazy! A year seemed like a lifetime!!! Now, my kids make fun of me, and the wheel just keeps turning. The bible says that a thousand years is like a day to God… I guess when you’re eternal, time goes by even faster! Still, waiting for His timing can seem like an eternity when you’re in an in-between phase.

I wrote in March about how I thought it was time to deal with some of my pain and tear down some walls that were protecting my heart. Little did I know how thick those walls had become, or even how long I had been building them. The revelations that have occurred have been profound and unexpected, but again, I feel like I need to share them. Maybe someone else can benefit from what I’ve gone through? Maybe someone else has some words of wisdom to speak into my crazy life?

When I decided to really start this process of introspection, I completely expected to have to go down the same worn out path that leads me to my troubled relationship with my dad, and while there were some aspects that have come to light, the majority have nothing to do with him. How refreshing!

Most of you know that Joe and I have 3 daughters. Our oldest is 21 currently, and has always had a flare for the dramatic (nothing she’s not aware of). We also have twins who are 19. They’re fraternal, and couldn’t be more different from each other, both in appearance and personality! Raising them has been an experience, to say the least! As they’re all in varying phases of getting ready to leave the nest, it’s fun being able to move into a different relationship with them that’s more akin to friendship than parental. My job as their mother has always been to make my job obsolete so that they can be productive and independent individuals in their own right. As we’re nearing the end of that process, I’m enjoying seeing my girls come into their own sense of who they are as adults.

I give you all that because most of what I’ve been discovering revolves around a 2-week span of time that happened almost 11 years ago involving our oldest daughter, God and a demon.

We had just moved into our new house in Connecticut after a rather tumultuous summer of transition from Ohio, and we were exhausted to say the least. Everything seemed to be working out, though, and we were making good progress on the unpacking phase. Needless to say, by the time my head hit the pillow at night, I was down for the count! It was during these first couple of weeks that our oldest started coming into our bedroom telling me there was a ghost in her room, and she was scared. I remember thinking that she was just scaring herself with her over-active imagination, and being very comfortable sending her back to her room. I didn’t want to wake Joe up, because he was doing just as much work in the house as we were on top of working a new job. I had no comprehension of what my little girl was actually experiencing, or how much of an impact it would have on the trajectory of her life. Why didn’t I wake myself fully to comfort her?! Why didn’t I go up to her room and pray with her?! If not in my own power, why didn’t God prompt me to do this to protect our little girl?!!! She had just accepted Christ as her Savior and been baptized before we moved, but she was just a baby! Both physically and spiritually, she was a baby, and she was scared. And I didn’t get up to help her. And when I told her to pray, she kept seeing the “ghost”, but not God.

In my world, this was nothing more than a childhood nightmare that was no more real than the boogeyman. I quickly forgot about it and went about the business of settling into a new home and trying to find a church that fit. As the years went by, I noticed that our daughter seemed to lose her interest in learning about Christianity. I blamed this on our initial inability to find a good church, and therefore, an interruption in her spiritual growth. There was also the fact that she was smack dab in the middle of her “tween” years which, anyone with any kind of experience with girls in this age can confirm, are horrible for all involved. When I was saved at age 12, I didn’t have anyone there to mentor me into spiritual maturity, and so, I was distant from God until well into my 20’s. I was hoping my daughters would fare better, but was also mentally prepared for them to be as independent and stubborn as I was and resist being brought into the fold, so to speak. Whenever I would try to fill the role of mentor myself, I was met with rolled eyes and an impatient “Ok, Mom”. None of my children would see spiritual growth at my teaching, so I eventually stopped being overt about my messaging and just looked for opportunities where I could point God out to them in their lives. To this day, I still don’t know if that had any effect.

Back to our oldest… In the 11 years since this fateful event, she’s chosen a path as far away from God as possible. No amount of leading, lecturing or praying has changed that. She’s an amazing person with a talent for illustration that is going to take her far in life. Her laughter is infectious, and when she goes into “stand-up” mode, I defy anyone not to laugh with her. I love my daughter unconditionally, and will always be there for her, no matter where her choices take her. No matter how painful it may be to watch.

She recently reminded me about those 2 weeks (for her, it was more like 2 months, but she just stopped coming to me). It wasn’t to condemn me, it was more like a reminiscence of that weird thing that happened a long time ago. This time, I listened. I paid close attention to every detail she described, and at the end of the conversation she even showed me the picture she drew of her “ghost”.

She also described another entity who was there with her… A little old grandma spirit who would stay with her. This entity didn’t make the “ghost” (I think we can all agree that this was a full-blown demon in my daughter’s bedroom) go away, but gave my little girl a sense that she was there to protect her. The demon couldn’t hurt her while the “Grandma Ghost” was there. This wasn’t anyone who was familiar to her, but just a peaceful presence I can recognize as angelic. This realization was lost on our daughter, however, and all she took from her terrifying first months in our new home was that Mom and Dad were too tired for her and God didn’t seem to answer her prayers. Thus began the distancing from Him that continues to this day.

There are more details to this story that I may feel free to share with you at a later time, but needless to say, what I’ve presented as a cut and dried cause and effect is a bit more delicate and nuanced. But what, you may ask, does any of this have to do with why I’m too angry and hurt to live my God-given purpose right now? Good question, and one I didn’t have an answer for until very recently when I spent the better part of a week in tears realizing that all of the things I thought were the target of my anger were way off the mark. I was absolutely pissed off at God.

It may shock you to read that last line. How can a good Christian woman be mad at God?! It’s pretty easy, actually. He allowed Satan to mess with my kid.

Through all this time, I’ve been trying to dodge all the spears and arrows thrown my way. I expected them, you see… I was in God’s service, and that makes me a target. Some of the blows landed and weakened me, but I stuck with God. I trusted Him to get me through, but I wasn’t ready for the combo punch that took me out. My church became a danger zone when it was supposed to be a sanctuary, and my daughter’s life turned upside down. I can take a lot, but seeing my kid in pain isn’t one of them. Just when I needed a healthy church family to support me as I was trying to support our daughter, I had nothing. All I could do was watch helplessly as my little girl (now an adult) informed us about the painful, irreparable decisions she was making. The only way to come close to how I feel right now is that I’m in mourning.

There’s so much that I once thought was solid that has disintegrated even as I tried to hold on. Even the worship music that I loved to listen to has mostly become trite and commercial, and I’ve become much too jaded to trust that the artists/labels are genuine. And, there’s no biblical way to interpret what happened to my daughter other than as something that God allowed. (Job chapter 1 teaches us that Satan can’t touch a child of God without God’s permission.) With all that in mind, I know that it’s within God’s power to restore my daughter to His side and heal her spiritual pain. My faith in Him being able to do that is just as strong as my faith in my own salvation, which has never wavered once during this whole ordeal. My dilemma,, and thus, the source of my distrust, comes with the knowledge that doing that for her may not be His will. His ways not being our ways, and all that. So, I can’t trust anything right now, and that’s as painful to live as it sounds. “I believe! Lord, help my unbelief.” Answered quickly with, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.”.

I have to come to a place of acceptance that while He gave me this precious gift to raise, she was His all along. What He does with her life is between Him and her now, and that’s a tough pill to swallow for a mama who sees her baby in pain. The other side of that coin is that there’s still a lot left of my life, and He’s not done with me yet. He let me sit and pout on the sidelines for quite some time, but He’s recently tapped me on the shoulder to get back into the fight. No matter how I may feel about the General right now, I know that He is good and worthy of our praise. In the end, He’s still my Father, and I know He loves me and my daughter. So, while I still have some things to work out between us, I’m taking my first tentative steps back out on the battlefield trusting nothing other than this is where He wants me to be. This story is still not finished…