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Do you ever have trouble praying? Is it ever a struggle to use a journal or a silent prayer to focus your mind on a conversation with God? Many times when I sit down alone and in silence to have a conversation with God, I feel like a failure. Plenty of times I’ll find myself wondering about my schedule for the day or planning dinner, or wandering around doing some task I don’t remember starting because my mind unintentionally went somewhere besides prayer.
Prayer is a spiritual discipline, so the more we do it the deeper our relationship with God becomes because we’re training our mind and heart to lean in to time with him. Spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, sabbath, and more should give us life.
So why are the spiritual disciplines so hard for some of us? Many of us want to grow in our relationship with God, so why can it feel so unnatural to stare at a blank prayer journal page or have a private “quiet time” to read God’s word, or to memorize Bible verses by ourselves?
I don’t think it’s only a handful of us who struggle this way. The spiritual disciplines do still require discipline, but God created us to love him and worship him in these ways, so they shouldn’t feel so unnatural to us. I think part of the problem may be that we think spiritual disciplines have to be tied to books and solitary silent meditation, because that’s what works for some people.
But other people, who are neurodivergent with ADHD or learning differences, or people who learn better from a person than from a book and from practice better than from a lecture—for us, the spiritual disciplines may need to look different. Maybe we need to do them in groups, or out loud, or use our bodies as much or more than we use our minds. That may seem incompatible with the spiritual disciplines to you, but hear me out. There is a rich tradition of spiritual practices for people like us to harness our wandering minds and prompt our memories with all five senses instead of just pages in a book.
God first gave the Israelites instructions for spiritual disciplines or practices through Moses, and what he said sounds a lot like the practices I crave. Right before they crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land for the first time, Moses gathers the Israelites and speaks most of Deuteronomy to them. Here are a few pieces of what he said:
So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul— then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors…
Dt 11:13-21, NIV
These people waiting to enter their new home would have been both physically and spiritually transformed by their journey to get to this point. Their desert wanderings defined their calf muscles, softened their leather sandals that never wore out, tarnished their tools, stained their tents, and sanded down their heirlooms brought from Egypt. And Moses encourages them to continue these physical and sensory reminders of discipleship. The feel of rain and smell of harvest, grass thick in the field beneath their toes, the rich tastes of new wine and olive oil, symbols that caught their eyes on doorframes and gates, a brush against their skin from reminders they wore, and words echoing through bedrooms and main streets—all were to call them to remember God and his works. These could all be reminders to love and obey him so they could experience his blessing and abundant life.
These are the types of full-bodied spiritual practices that mark up our shoes, ring in our ears, make our muscles sore, blur our vision with tears, and leave sweet tastes in our mouths. They use the five senses God created in us to help us meditate on him with our whole being. Prayer like this wouldn’t just contemplate God’s omnipotence and sovereignty. It watches and hears roaring rapids in awe of their Creator who has unimaginably more power. Scripture meditation like this would feel like Jesus’ teachings that use drama and situation and relationships to brand God’s words into our memory.
These spiritual practices do exist, but if you’re like me, you didn’t necessarily grow up familiar with them. They can be church celebrations every year like Advent and Lent before Christmas and Easter. They can be Stations of the Cross, physical postures of prayer that involve our bodies, unison group prayers or liturgies, or a written calendar of prayers that we pray like generations before us. They can be bells or cell phone alarms to remind us to pray throughout the day or at meals. They can be prayer labyrinths, or memorials, or images of heroes of the faith or scripture passages. They can be ceremonies or relationships or habits—a ring we twist when we pray, a person who hears our confessed sin and keeps us accountable, an exercise routine paired with a habit of praying through our week or awe at God’s creation. Dance or baking or knitting or gardening can be just as reverent a way to enter into the Lord’s presence.
Two of my favorite of these new-to-me spiritual disciplines are lectio divina and visio divina. The first means “divine reading” or “sacred reading” and it’s a way to meditate on scripture in a group or alone. It guides your meditation like tree blazes on a hike or traffic signals so you don’t get lost in other thoughts. Visio divina is divine or sacred “seeing” and it uses God’s creation or art in the same way to guide a conversation with God, to give us space to admire him with awe.
Learning these new ways to practice spiritual disciplines sparked my own creativity too. Many people pray while washing dishes or changing diapers or taking walks because mundane activities can help our bodies go on autopilot and leave our minds free for things like prayer. But for me sometimes, creative activities can feel the most prayerful. I recently taught about lament, which is a special type of prayer you can find in Psalms and Lamentations. It brings our emotions of grief and loss to God and asks for his help or comfort. Often lament ends by clinging to our faith in God in the hard times, even when our emotions may not feel that faith very strongly.
I taught a group how to lament and gave them the option of writing or speaking a prayer, or creating a poem or song or artwork to express their lament to God. Later, I considered that baking is my favorite form of art and wondered if I could use some time baking to express a lament. The result was an incredibly moving prayer time that brought me to tears and helped me work out a lament with my hands when I hadn’t been able to with only my mind.
Visio divina and lectio divina both use components of observation, meditative listening, prayerful response, and silence to guide our thoughts in conversation with God. This “donut lament” wasn’t exactly either of them, but it did use a similar process to focus my mind in prayer. So perhaps I’ll call it creatio divina, or sacred making. May you all try out creative or new-to-you spiritual discipline practices and grow deeper in your relationship with God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
A Donut Lament
The sparse palmful of yeast released like tears into the waiting bowl. Quickly hidden in the flour, it became undetectable until it combined with the warm milk and butter and its tang suffused the kitchen. Like grief, the yeast multiplied unseen, its only evidence pungent byproducts and the ballooning space they occupied. A cascading reaction proved the potency of that first transformative ingredient: one traumatic event can reshape the course of a life. Prayerfully, meditatively, the yeast was mixed with the other ingredients until it incorporated into every part of the dough. Ingredients began to react and what once were separate components fused and changed on molecular and cellular levels as something new was created.
In the dark of early morning, the ragged dough was poured out and it collapsed against the countertop. Two hands tenderly scooped it back together and, with the insistence of lament, began to knead. Frustration and force went into the pushing and pulling motions, spinning the dough in circles by stops and starts with each repetition. A heavy heart and heavy hands imprinted sorrow and loss into the dough. Scattered proteins linked together under the influence of shaping repetition, and strands of gluten—like faith—began to grow. They lengthened and wrapped throughout the dough, slowly binding it together with their strength and resilient elasticity. And then, the shaping work done, the dough was left to rest, in the dark.
With time, the sun rose. Hands that had shaped the ball of dough in hope returned to find it grown and mature. It was ready to be shaped and cooked, then shared as a sweet gift to sustain others. The dough was a prayer, and the process a lament. The making was meditative, contemplative, and repetitive in ways that allowed the soul to rest in God and express sorrow seasoned in faith with hope.
I wish I could bring you all with me when I go to the mountains, so you could see what I see and hear what I hear. But this time someone joined our group with a photographer’s eye and a camera to channel it. I’ll throw in some of his pictures below, but I wanted to give you some “mental snapshots” to go with them—thoughts and moments I’d always want to remember if I never saw this place or these people again.
Another day of teaching through until dusk blurs the words in our Bibles. I walk slowly back to the room I share with my teammate and pause at the foot of my bed, my mind too numbed from the long day to make a decision quickly. I glance toward the concrete room with the drain where we take our evening bucket baths, and I’m too tired to begin that process at the moment. Instead I just pull off my headscarf since I’ve finished teaching for the day. I walk back outside intending to find a chair to drop into. I hope to enjoy a still and quiet moment, with the rising evening wind cooling my (finally) bare head and neck while I think through the day we’ve almost finished.
I scan the clean-swept yard for a chair near enough a group that no one will assume I’m alone and need company, but at enough distance I can absent myself from the conversation I have no energy for. My eyes land on a perfect spot and I make a bee-line for it, but before I reach my destination one of our friends and workshop participants crosses my path. A smile springs to my face automatically, followed by the traditional greeting and hand-grasp. This friend speaks no English, and I often have a harder time understanding him through his quiet tone and slightly different accent. My selfish desires still have my eyes cutting toward that chair and its promised moment of tranquility as we continue through the socially required greeting process. But then I take a moment to actually look at his face in the gathering dusk. He never smiles, but there it is, unmistakable on his face. And he’s often quiet in groups, yet he chose to initiate this conversation with me.
Something feels different about this interaction, and about him, so I shake myself mentally, check my selfishness, and redirect my mind and heart to genuinely engage with him. He is a respected and capable farmer and herdsman, so I ask about his home and land. As he continues through the small talk that smile lingers, and he seems almost… joyful. For a man usually grim-faced and close-mouthed he is unusually lively. I have never gotten much response from him before when I ask about the Bible stories that make up our days’ work, but his mood is different than I’ve ever seen it before, so maybe it’s worth trying again.
I ask one of my favorite questions: “What is your favorite story we’ve learned?” The answer speaks so much about personality or spiritual state or personal connections to God and his word. But my friend’s answer halts me mid-conversation. “The story of John’s Vision,” he says, referring to a story we’ve worked on from Revelation. Nearly twice the length of most other Bible stories, this one notoriously gives rise to fatigue and complaints from our groups as they struggle to remember all the details correctly. Just two days ago for our morning devotion we heard the story told and then acted it out together to help our bodies and emotions remember the story as well as our brains. As much as amateur drama usually elicits self-conscious or amused giggles, when we do this story the atmosphere is unusually heavy. With Muslims and Christians in the group, reenacting moments like when those who followed Jesus in life are judged differently from those who didn’t, or when Satan and those who didn’t follow God through Jesus are thrown in the lake of fire remind us of eternal stakes.
Shocked that my usually gloomy Muslim friend would tell me with a broad smile that this is his favorite story, I ask him again, wondering if I misunderstood. “You mean the story about the End, with Satan and the lake of fire?” “Yes,” he reassures me. Still confused, I ask him why that’s his favorite, or what he likes about it so much. “Because everyone who follows Jesus will be with God,” he answers smiling, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. And God himself will wipe away our last tears.
Our conversation was interrupted when someone called him away. But I stood there frozen a few moments longer, my solitary chair forgotten as my own smile grew and I began to consider what his answer might mean about his own thoughts about Jesus. A few days later I learned that new liveliness I saw in him was abundant life, springing up in his soul and overflowing because he’d decided to follow Jesus.
On our last day, we leave before the sun is up. Before we all pile in the same truck that has ferried us back and forth for all our local travel, a crowd gathers in a semicircle. The bags are loaded in the bed and we stand in an awkward silence, loath to say goodbyes. A prayer is said for travel, and then we give the deeper greeting since we won’t see each other again for a while. Extend your right arm and place your palm over the friend’s heart opposite you while they do the same to you. Then drop your arm to grasp their right hand in a goodbye, or wrap that right arm around them first to pull them into a hug depending on your relationship. We look into each others’ sleep-swollen eyes in the gloom as we greet each in turn, and I try not to wonder when I’ll see them next or how long it will be or what hard times they might face in the meantime.
I scrunch up over the gearbox again, angling my hips and legs to give the driver as much room to maneuver the gear shift as possible. It’s still warm from its long trip the night before, taking the first load of everyone home. For the first two hours the talk in the cab is quiet and sporadic. We watch the sun rise over these beautiful mountains and I am careful to take in the images—the ground terraced for farming, the ‘desert baobabs’ that burst with brilliant pink flowers, familiar spots where recognizable trees grow or where we’ve made pit stops before on the road.
After we stop two hours in at a town the sun is fully up, and I decide to move to the truck bed. I’m given the spot over the wheel well, and someone insists on giving me the folded up blanket as a cushion for all the bouncing, even after I insist I have more built-in cushion than all of them put together. It would be a cultural sin not to offer (and receive) hospitality in this way. As we start moving, the three young men in the back with me at first seem nervous I won’t have the balance or strength to manage as we drive over the roads that are sometimes just scraggly rocky mountain faces. But I drape my forward arm along the rim of the truck bed and can maintain a light grip as we bounce along for the next hour. The curve of my back fits snugly around the lip of the rim, further helping to hold me in place, and I ride comfortably and enjoy the cool morning air and chance to stretch out my legs.
We drive so slowly over these roads that we have no problem conversing over the road noise. We talk in spurts, shifting between English and Arabic, but I mostly enjoy taking in all the morning sights and sounds as we drive through villages waking up and beginning work. The children always do a double-take when they see the rare white woman in the back of the truck. Some run behind us, nearly all wave. My teammates and I jokingly call me a princess because of all the attention I get, like that folded up blanket currently saving my tailbone from bruising. But right now I feel like a princess in a parade waving back at all the children every few minutes, watching their faces break into massive smiles.
The kids’ excitement at my obvious other-ness would seem to make me feel I don’t belong. The waving little knots of children overflow with an enthusiastic sing-song repetition of the word for foreigner or white person—kawaja—yelled out to announce to others to come and look. Some days being known known and called by this word instead of my own name grates on my patience and feels like a stiff arm keeping me outside the circle of the community. But today in the light of the golden-pink sunrise I feel a contented sense of belonging as we drive through roads and villages that have become curiously familiar through our repeated trips. As the conversation moves in and out of Arabic, for the most part I am able to follow its thread. I’m even able to interject with some of the history of the place, like a local telling newcomers the gossip about what happened at that bend of the road a year ago, because I drove past and saw it firsthand myself.
The contentment grows as the conversation continues in Arabic, and no one pays me special attention or translates for me. I’ll always be in a middle-place in this community—on the fringe, but welcomed in as a familiar friend. Allowed to ride in the bed of the truck, but given the only blanket to help account for my difference. So the next time the children start a chorus of “ka-WAAA-JA!” I smile and raise my eyebrows at the group. “Do you hear them singing my song?”
I wish I could bring you all with me when I go to the mountains, so you could see what I see and hear what I hear. But this time someone joined our group with a photographer’s eye and a camera to channel it. I’ll throw in some of his pictures below, but I wanted to give you some “mental snapshots” to go with them—thoughts and moments I’d always want to remember if I never saw this place or these people again.
Sundays on these trips are different days. They brim with activity like every other day, but they’re unpredictable and often lead to unexpected adventures. Every “teaching” day I wear a more comfortable dress and headwrap, balancing cultural respect with functionality. But on Sundays I break out the Sudanese cultural dress, a toub. Meant to be worn over a full set of clothing, this long piece of fabric wraps multiple times around the body to cover legs, torso, arms, and hair in one unbroken block of color or vibrant pattern. I don’t have to teach or lead on Sundays, so my decreased maneuverability and comfort in the sometimes 7-layer getup is an acceptable sacrifice to make for all the sweet smiles from strangers who can see my clothes, hear my Arabic, learn my local name, and immediately understand I value them and their culture.
This Sunday I don an all-black under-layer of leggings and a long-sleeved leotard, so nothing will bunch or twist under the layers of toub wrappings. Then I choose the tie-dye purple and green toub that’s more gauzy and breezy than some—a gift from a friend used to wear it herself in hotter desert conditions than this. When everyone is ready for church we cut across a couple fields, tramping on the footpath I could never have picked out for myself while hiking my layers up so I don’t drag half a field of dried grass and stickers into church with me. We arrive and worship with our brothers and sisters through a beautiful service in a simple building decorated with fresh-picked local flowers hanging from the roof supports. A few holes and pockmarks in the walls from the last war’s aerial bombardment makes the building an even more beautiful testament to God’s protection.
As we mingle in the yard after church the typical jokes follow about my positive marriage prospects if I keep wearing a toub, and theatrical surprise played for laughs at my Arabic comprehension when someone suggests a son or a nephew who might be about my age. Laughing, I hold the pumpkin our teammate was given as thanks for sharing the sermon today, and clumsily try to balance it one-handed on my head to demonstrate the poor excuse I’d be for a working Sudanese wife. As we walk back home I unwrap one torso-encumbering layer of the toub and re-wrap it to throw it over my shoulder in a less formal style women wear when they have work to do. I’ll wear it that way for the rest of the day for greater ease of movement. After lunch, a friend calls out “hey Kandaka!” as I pass by. He’s teasingly comparing me and the toub over my shoulder to the iconic 2019 Sudanese Revolution picture of a woman called Kandaka. She herself was named that after the long Sudanese historical tradition of female leaders and cultural nurturers who moved and shaped a people with their stories. You’ve likely read about a Kandaka (or Candace) in Acts 8. A crooked grin immediately splits my face at the flattering comparison, and that I caught the deep cultural reference.
Not long after a relaxed Sunday lunch, we’re given a few minutes’ warning before a trek to go see a building site for a hoped- and prayed-for new Bible college. Unsure of how long the trip will take, I wad up my body and my layers in the half-seat above the gear shift in a truck older than me, sandwiched between the driver and my teammate for what turned out to be a three hour excursion. The bed of the truck is a clown-car of people, and two motorcycles flank us carrying those who couldn’t cram into the truck bed as we drive through gardens and dry river beds up to the crown of a mountain. We clamber around on the mountaintop for a while and pray over the site before we descend to explore the flash flood river bed and the new springs that opened up last rainy season.
It was with pride that I managed almost as well as a Sudanese woman would in her own dress, and only caught my layers once on some fallen acacia thorns. In the dry riverbed valley below the brow of the hill, we see a baobab trunk that was swept down in last season’s flood. I still haven’t gotten over my giddy excitement of seeing these massive, distinctive-looking trees for the first time in my life in this area, so I rush down to feel its smooth, cool bark and branches I could never reach in standing trees. The youngest guys clamber up the side of the massive fallen trunk, and I know instantly I can’t miss this opportunity. With a moment to assess the physics involved, I kick off my flip flops and flex my toes in the sandy pea gravel underneath my feet. I hike up my layers and to accompanying shouts of “Go slow!” and “Don’t let the white woman fall!” I hop up the side of the ancient tree, using gnarled knots in the bark for hand and foot holds, with my skirts gathered in one hand. Everyone nearby swarms back up the tree and poses for a picture with the white girl in the local dress who miraculously avoided face-planting.
Toward the end of the week, I sat again under the same patchy shade of the same scraggly tree with the group of two young men. One has faithfully shown up to work every time we’ve visited. He’s my youngest brother’s age, and he knows me by my Arabic name that means “big sister.” This time we’re listening to the story of the woman caught in adultery from John 8 through translation from their language to Arabic. Every detail is accurate, and spit out in quick succession. Another deep story about how Jesus interacted with women who were publicly shamed, rattled off like a speed recitation.
I take a beat to compose my thoughts and decide where to start to both compliment their good work and encourage them to go deeper and tell the story with more faithfulness to all those layers. But I didn’t have to worry. Perhaps more comfortable after we talked through some taboos earlier, my “little brother” blurts out, “where was the man?” A slow smile grows on my face as he continues. “If she was caught IN adultery, there must have been a man. Why didn’t the religious leaders bring him in too?” He has some theories that he rattles off, and I offer some more. But we dig into the story so he can see the way the religious leaders brought the woman there as bait for a trap for Jesus, to try to get him to say something against Moses and the Old Testament law.
But I go back to some of the details in the story that explain some things between the lines. Miraculously God gives me the Arabic I need to communicate the nuance of this story. But I still don’t have the vocabulary to communicate the complex web of shame in this story that translates directly into these two young men’s culture. I explain that the story begins at sunrise, and how it was possible the woman was caught and brought in some state of undress when she was paraded out in front of everyone there at the temple to worship. I readjust the part of my headscarf hanging down over my torso, matching the unconscious expression of any local woman who feels exposed emotionally or socially. I hope my actions and gestures fill in for some of the nuanced vocabulary I’m missing, but before I know it, I’m up on my feet to explain the story spatially.
When the religious leaders brought her into the temple, they treated her like she was only an object for their trap for Jesus. To answer the original question, they’re obviously thinking about incriminating Jesus more than incriminating the man she was caught with. But in the process, they make her the object of everyone’s attention. I stand in the middle of the circle, pulling my headscarf to cover more of my body. But then they ask Jesus, and not only does he take a long time to answer, he bends down and begins mysteriously writing in the dirt. I grab the shoulders of my American teammate, to use him as a stand-in for Jesus. Jesus could have immediately given them a wise answer, but he delayed. I step out of the circle and stand behind my teammate, with him between me and the young men. Now, everyone at the temple was looking at him and waiting for an answer. He was covering this woman and her shame, even though she had sinned. And not only that, he took some of the shame from her. When he didn’t answer, everyone looked at him and wondered if he could give a wise answer or if the religious leaders would humiliate him.
We continued telling the story with me walking through its paces, showing that Jesus chose to forgive this woman’s sin instead of condemn it, and to cover her shame instead of expose it. At the end, the young men had huge grins on their faces because they saw how Jesus has not fallen in line with heavy cultural shame directed toward women, but turned it on its head in order to protect them. I was glowing inside at the chance to be their big sister and tell them things other women aren’t socially allowed to. I was honored and humbled to help disciple them through the cultural expectations they face, so they can break the mold and be better brothers and fathers and husbands one day.
I wish I could bring you all with me when I go to the mountains, so you could see what I see and hear what I hear. But this time someone joined our group with a photographer’s eye and a camera to channel it. I’ll throw in some of his pictures below, but I wanted to give you some “mental snapshots” to go with them—thoughts and moments I’d always want to remember if I never saw this place or these people again.
The sky slowly starts to sprinkle with stars as the sunset glow dims in the west. We often look for planets or constellations half-remembered from childhood. With no light pollution for miles around except what can be produced by flashlights or anything run from a solar panel, we see more stars here than I’ve seen on all but a few nights of my life.
I briefly sit at a plastic table surrounded by plastic chairs filled with friends from a nearby mountain tribe. I am content to listen to the percussive rhythm of their language, set to a background of night noises: the muted crunch of gravel when anyone walks by, the evening wind blowing gently through the standing grasses of late dry season, the multi-layered soundscape of birds and bats and insects.
One of the men notices me looking at the stars and breaks off his part of the conversation to invite me to participate in English. I lower my eyes and notice his smile glowing bright in the late dusk like the stars overhead. I ask him if the stars look like this at his home. Of course they do. Why would they look any different? To dissolve the confusion I explain about Kampala city lights and smog. I gaze back up, trying to remember the stories of the Greek heroes and which patterns of stars belong to each one. I tell him my people have stories about the stars and ask him about his people’s star stories. But they aren’t about heroes. Their stories are about which stars to use to find home, and which ones tell you when it’s time to plant, or when the rains are coming.
The next time I see his smile glowing that brightly, he’s beaming at me and saying goodbye from the back of a truck bed, where he’s crammed in with at least 10 other people to start their journey home. That mental snapshot was a confused tangle of images in my head, like all the arms and legs squeezed into the back of that truck. A firm grasp that is the cultural equivalent of parting handshake from a calloused farmer’s hand. I don’t see the face it belonged to before the hand disappeared back into the tangled mass of people. Confused goodbyes shouted in English and Arabic and local languages. And that LED smile of his. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was glowing brighter than normal because a few hours before climbing into that truck bed, he’d become a new brother. One of the first of his people to follow Jesus.
Our plastic chairs are arranged in small circle, crunching in the dead remnant stalks from the last harvest we’ve laid flat with our fidgeting feet. The spotty shade from the dry scraggly tree we sit under has rotated a few degrees around the trunk without us, and I can feel my forehead starting to sunburn. I tug at my headscarf to rearrange it to protect my face a little better. The recorder clicks on an off, an off-kilter rhythm of their drumming Darfurian language, an Arabic translation of it, and my stilted clarifying questions in Arabic or English.
The story, about the bleeding woman from Luke 8, falls flat. It’s told accurately, with only a few minor errors to fix or details to clarify. But it has no life to it. I stare at the ground, thinking and praying about how to communicate and motivate them—how to explain to this group the massive weight of this story for women who will hear it, and how formative it can be for the men who should love them like Jesus loved this woman. I look at the shoes that make up the rest of the circle, all men’s shoes, and I feel that familiar separation begin, like one cell splitting into two under a microscope. A complete separation of two things that were once together and whole. My world is not theirs. And as much as I may more easily be able to relate to them as a cultural outsider, an even wider gulf exists between them and their women. Their women have been the target of genocidal war-time rape for two generations. And a woman who suffers like this must keep quiet and hide what she feels to be shame because if it becomes known what was done to her, she is often viewed as unclean. She is commonly seen as unmarriageable to her people and she can be cast out so her ‘defilement’ doesn’t negatively reflect on the community that couldn’t protect her.
I feel my “otherness” in a community that often treats women this way, and second-hand shame and brokenness bubble up inside of me. I gingerly speak to everyone’s shoes, not daring to make eye contact over this taboo topic but desperately wanting them to understand. “In your people, there are women like her. There are women who feel shame, who feel dirty… who have been raped…” I let the statement hang in the air. “They need to hear this story. They need to hear in their own language for the first time that Jesus listened to this woman.”
I keep staring at the shoes and the dry broken stalks. I’ve spoken in simple English because I didn’t trust my Arabic. And the team’s American coach has heard and now chimes in, “Do you personally know women in your town where you live who have been raped during the war?”
In complete shock I look up, eyes wide, and hiss under my breath in quick English I hope they won’t understand, “They can’t talk about it. It’s taboo. It will bring shame to admit that has happened to any woman they know.” But when I look up, I don’t see the separating gulf I felt between the men and me. The two young men aren’t staring away, outside of the circle, in embarrassment. They’re looking at me. And listening. With an effort of will, I pull my mind and heart back into that circle, back between two young men who want to become more like Jesus in the story, and want to do better as they grow up to become spiritual leaders among a tribe with growing numbers of new believers.
My teammate’s pastoral question optimistically crossed a cultural line and prompted them to question assumptions I feared I couldn’t address outright. Ready to let God’s word teach for itself in this vulnerable moment, I review the story: how Jesus made an important man wait while he listened to the woman, how he called her “daughter” like she was welcome in his family, and how he publicly praised her faith to be healed in front of the whole crowd. The next recording of the story I listened to was full of life and hope.
Psalm 91 is all marked up in my Bible. It is a prayer song about God’s protection, and it was a particularly sweet reminder of God’s character in a season when I needed to remember God’s ‘feminine’ side—that God gathers us under wings to protect and shield us like a mother bird.
But I never really thought Ps 91 was a promise for me. After all, it was probably written by David, and we all know David was a man after God’s own heart. He sinned and made mistakes, sure, but I still don’t presume to walk as closely with God or have as much faith as David did. And for crying out loud, Satan quotes this psalm to JESUS when he’s being tempted in the wilderness. In Caroline paraphrase, he says “Jump off this roof and God will catch you, because the Psalm says God will command his angels to catch you and hold you up so you won’t even brush your foot on those rocks below.”
Read Psalm 91 for yourself. It makes these beautiful promises about God’s protection, about how he is our refuge from disease and terrors and violence and other dangers. But the promises are always for whoever lives in God’s shelter or whoever professes God to be their refuge: “Because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him…” That’s all well and good, and of course I would say that God is the one who protects me, but do I really believe and live that with 100% of me? I don’t think I can claim to—I have doubts, and I trust in insurance or people or other things for protection more than I’d like to admit. So I didn’t think these promises would literally apply to my life.
Without putting it into these words, I believed, “If I trust and love God enough, then I earn the kind of loving loyalty he promises in that psalm. And there’s no way I love and trust God enough. So those promises can’t be for me.”
I didn’t think Psalm 91 was useless, I just thought it showed God’s character and the kind of love he shows to people who fully depend on him. I didn’t think I belonged in that category. I belong in the category with the disciples, “You of little faith,” or even, a little more kindly, with the man who comes asking Jesus for a miracle and says, “I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!”
But that’s just what I learned recently. Nowhere does Psalm 91 say we earn God’s kindness with our faith. In fact, that’s contrary to everything the New Testament teaches about how God saves us. I believe that God saved me out of his grace and kindness, but somehow along the line I lost the thread and believed that certain other blessings or kindnesses from the Lord had to be earned by my faith and obedience. And that’s simply not the equation the Bible uses. God is the Father of all good gifts, not all good merited-awards. And when Jesus teaches about prayer, to illustrate the point he asks, ‘if you earthly fathers know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more does your heavenly father?”
God’s protection from the dangers of this world is a gift we do not earn. Like Job says, we know that that sometimes he gives and sometimes he takes away (that protection), but it is not on the basis of how strong our faith in him is. In fact, God’s unearned protection in the midst of those dangers is the very thing that often grows our faith. And God chose to teach me that by way of a very memorable object lesson recently.
On the first Friday of September I was taking a recovery day at home after a week of all-day teaching. I was bouncing back and forth between work on the computer and work around the house and checking in on the repairmen who could finally come by now that I was home for the day. A little after 3:20 I decided to pop my head through the attic access to see if I could find any evidence of termites or some other pests causing the problems with my electrical wiring. I tugged on the ladder the electrician had been using to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere, and then started up. Just after I poked my head through the ceiling 11’ up, I felt the ladder twitch underneath me. I bent my head back down below the level of the ceiling and saw the ladder start slowly making skid marks down the wall, and that’s the last thing I remember.
The ladder fell all the way to the floor, taking me with it, and I must’ve lost consciousness on impact. I bruised several bones and sprained an ankle, and smashed my face diagonally on the ladder rail. I fractured my lower jaw and three teeth, and shattered my upper jaw and chipped, shattered, or dislodged 5 teeth on the top. I sustained a concussion, and may also have caused hairline fractures in my foot and below my left eye.
About 30 or 40 minutes after I climbed the ladder, my memory clicked back on, and I was sitting on my couch next to a friend, with a hand full of blood and some teeth or bone chips. Somehow in my daze after consciousness returned, I called a nurse friend to come and help me. I still have no memory of that call, or her arriving as quickly as she could. She got me to the hospital nearby, and scans confirmed no brain bleeds or skull or spinal fractures. I was transferred to a different hospital for more thorough scans where everything was confirmed a second time, and I had surgery to remove three teeth that were lost causes and stitch up my gums. I was hospitalized just shy of a week, and then came home to recover from a concussion that’s lingered for more than a month and the ongoing dental work that’ll take several months to complete, including time for my broken jaws to heal.
Sometime in Admitting at the hospital, while I was still spitting blood into a cup and we hadn’t done any imaging of my head or moved me to a room yet, it started to dawn on me how much worse the fall could’ve been. Yes, I had several goose-eggs and an impressive set of Gollum teeth, but I hadn’t directly hit my forehead or gashed open any part of my face. My alertness had quickly returned, and my relatively low pain level we knew even then meant it unlikely I had fractured my spine or skull or caused any brain bleeds, which could lead to more permanent neurological damage. And the next day after I transferred hospitals the doctor’s mouth literally dropped open after I was able to explain the fall and injuries in detail, and get up and walk around: “You shouldn’t be able to walk after a fall like that.”
It was then that God reminded me of Psalm 911, and I began to process God’s incredible protection. I remember silently weeping once in the hospital after the lights turned out and I knew I could rest peacefully for the night. “Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” Surgery on my mouth took a few days longer to schedule than I had hoped, but my fear of infection or worse proved groundless. “Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness…” And repeat scans of my brain showed nothing worse than a concussion, even though I had been at home alone with no one to anticipate or help immediately after the accident. “Nor the disaster that strikes at midday.” Eventually I connected the dots and realized that a fall like that could have killed me under different circumstances. “Though a thousand fall at your side, thought ten thousand are dying around you, these evils will not touch you.” And on the third day after the fall, with many of you praying for me, my sprained ankle that should have taken enough force to shatter it could suddenly and miraculously bear weight and I could walk without support. “If you make the LORD your refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you; no plague will come near your home. For he will order his angels to protect you wherever you go. They will hold you up with their hands so you won’t even hurt your foot on a stone.”
Even now as I write I still tear up, overwhelmed by the Lord’s gracious protection that I did not deserve. God took care of me in the initial accident, with the healthcare I could access afterward, and through so many of you far and near. I have been surrounded by love and people checking in. I still smile with gratitude for all of you when I use the body soap someone brought me in the hospital. And I have been dependent on the kindness of strangers and friends who have given me medical care, visited me at home or in the hospital, helped me with errands, and borne with me as I dealt with the ongoing effects of the concussion.
Humor and humility have been the most gracious and necessary ways to accept my limitations as I’ve healed. I’ve joked many times about how I only damaged the breakaway portion of my face, or the dentures and cane I earned myself. I’ve matched my bruises to purple clothes and joked about being Gollum from Lord of the Rings or Toothless from How to Train your Dragon. I had to have patience with a brain that processed emotions like a toddler and couldn’t remember how to handle social interactions. I had to let being a single independent woman go more times than I wanted and ask for help with simple tasks like cleaning my house or preparing food or picking up groceries. I had to humbly accept the massive privilege I have to complain about oatmeal and soup when many of my friends would go hungry if they had to have a special diet, or the privilege I have to immediately access health care many of my friends cannot even consider, without worrying about the price tag. Many times the jokes come easily and the humility has taken more work.
But there again God has shown kindness I did not deserve, and answered my prayers with the humility and strength and endurance I needed. Not long after I returned home from the hospital, I found myself crying again over a minor inconvenience because my concussion hampered me from letting it roll off like I normally would. I sat down at the piano to see if music would come back easier than other things. Soon I found myself playing and singing, lisping praise through broken teeth, and weeping from blackened eyes. Moments like that have only grown my faith—moments when God met me in my brokenness and was sufficient to calm my mind or quiet my heart. God deserves praise in our brokenness because of his unsurpassed kindness, and that same posture of praise can grow our hearts along a trellis of gratitude instead of bitterness.
Say what you want about coincidence or spiritual forces we cannot see, but the teaching I finished just before I fell with the ladder was a Bible-story based mental trauma healing program with Sudanese church leaders here. They were reminded in fresh ways that God cares about their immense suffering and is with them in it. They learned how to support the many freshly traumatized refugees in their communities and their churches who have recently arrived fleeing the war in Sudan. And many of them tearfully praised God for the encouragement and healing they found in his Word. Our first story began with God’s perfect unspoiled creation in the Garden, and our last story finished with the hope that all will be perfected and healed once again in the heavenly garden after Jesus returns. I had been meditating on a beautiful lament song, Garden Hope,2 that reminds us of God’s good plan while we wait here in-between the gardens.
My fall reminded me afresh of those realities. And as long as my body and mind are still bruised, I carry with me physical reminders that though we suffer now, one day we will be healed. I was also reminded afresh to practice what I teach when my injuries forced me into a vulnerability that tied me closer to my community here. When my tribe of Sudanese sisters here finally worked out of me how badly I had been injured, they insisted on visiting me like a shut-in. I cried again because I couldn’t remember much Arabic and didn’t know how mentally stable I would be. But those women, who have been through persecution and famine and war and worse aren’t fazed by much, and they wept over me. They prayed and encouraged and looked me in the eyes to tell me they knew exactly why I fell—because our Enemy was not happy with the life-changing hope they had been reminded of and equipped to share that week. They reminded me that as refugees they know what it feels like to be far from family when you need or miss them most, and repeatedly told me that I am their sister and they are ready to help at a moment’s notice when I need anything. When I mentioned Psalm 91, they smiled and said, “That’s our psalm,” and quoted their favorite parts of it from memory. It sounded even sweeter in Sudanese Arabic from the mouths of friends who have personally known God as their refuge and protection in many hardships through the years.
I’ll be recovering from that kind of love for quite a while too. In the meantime, my concussion seems to be mostly cleared except for the lingering slowness with decisions, communication, and emotional processing. I still have a minor limp that will heal with time, along with the other broken bones in my face. I got some temporary teeth to last me until I can get permanent implants around the end of the year. And I’m still managing some minor pain and fatigue while God continues to heal my body. But God has tattooed Psalm 91 on my heart and I can’t help but praise him for his rescue and protection.
The LORD says, “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them. I will reward them with a long life and give them my salvation.”
Ps 91:14-16
All Psalm 91 quotations here are taken from the NLT. ↩︎
Stories have always helped to give me a picture of something I can’t otherwise understand. A story takes something abstract like a war, and gives it faces, places, names, and feelings. When the people in the stories feel real to you, you can’t help but feel what they feel as your mind’s eye sees what they see. Stories teach our hearts empathy and can shape our emotions into actions—whether they be prayer, lament, protest, or giving.
I’ll continue sharing Sudanese stories with you in this post to let you meet them in their experiences so you can better understand the war they’re living through. The following stories are difficult. They deal with genocide, rape, war violence, and other traumas. Each section has a heading so you can avoid topics that might be too difficult for you, but know that I never give graphic details. My goal is to walk with you as a guide, not to leave you feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. So, like in the last post I’ll share scripture and prayer points that have helped me respond to each story.
My hope is that these stories will help you to remember the Sudanese—with prayer, with visits, with kindness, in whatever ways the Lord prompts. One of the most common fears I’ve encountered with any refugee friends is the fear of being forgotten and left alone. Too often in their times of deepest need they have been met with indifference and neglect, if not cruelty. By the very nature of their situations, they have lost so many relationships through war or displacement that the thought of being ignored or left alone deeply grieves them. They can carry a deep sorrow that people may shrink away from them in their need, or forget them because it’s uncomfortable to face their situations. Of course they need material help, but the emotional gift of sharing in their grief or offering a prayer is also important, and it often lasts longer. So for this reason I share their stories with you, so they will not be forgotten.
Trauma: The Reporters
I met both women over a year apart, but they were alike in many ways. Both were capable women who seemed to be the keystone of their families. And both had to flee Sudan for their lives and to protect their families from further threat. One woman was a highly educated reporter, and her commitment to exposing injustices in a country destabilized by the brewing war landed her in the crosshairs of powerful people. She showed me pictures of her acid burns the first time we met, almost proudly. Her reporting was helping to spread her people’s stories so the world could see and respond with help.
She was now in her second country since she fled, and she left family members behind she hoped no one would targeted now that she was out of the way. She and one of her daughters with her still lived like they were hunted, careful of how loudly they spoke certain things, and fleeing people who still threatened them for what they believed and shared even two countries away.
The other woman had lived in an internally displaced people’s camp within Sudan before she fled years ago. She reported serial rape in the camps to authorities, hoping someone with the power to stop it would intervene. But through corruption, her reports were leaked, and the very people raping to control women and frighten them into silence targeted her and her family. Her story of a chance warning and her harrowing escape even while she could hear her children crying and her husband being beaten was horrific. But she knew that leaving would spare them further abuse. So now she had lived for years separated from her children, the youngest of whom was an infant when she had to flee alone.
Both of these women have been blacklisted, and cannot return to their homes for the foreseeable future for the safety of their families. Both are among the strongest and most resilient women I know, but the human mind and body have their limits. Mental trauma of this magnitude is debilitating, especially if you experience it in a foreign country without a support system or access to counseling. The second woman was finally reunited with her children who fled the most recent wave of violence. But she suffered from memory loss, crippling anxiety, and debilitating chronic physical issues that were the product of years of extreme cumulative stress from the mental trauma she had endured.
I recently spoke with a South African eye surgeon after she served for two weeks giving vision-restoring cataract surgery to Sudanese. She was confused at how little response they gave when suddenly they could see again, especially compared to some of her regular patients who would dance or sing. We discussed their mental trauma, and the self-preservation of low expectations and not daring to believe change for good can really last. But many Sudanese I know also carry with them a “sideways hope.” Outwardly they expect the worst case scenarios, but inwardly they bravely keep hope kindled in their heart. As a favorite writer of mine so well described it, “For people habitually up against it… hope is something too sacred to be spoken. It belongs in the heart, not in the mouth.”[1] The mental trauma Sudanese carry may be disabling, but many still cherish hope when they have every reason not to. They may try to hide the effects of their trauma because they have a distorted sense of what every person should be able to carry without complaining, but hidden or not, their resilience is radiant.
Genesis 16; 21:1-21
Hagar’s story of trauma, abuse, and shame can feel too heavy for the cursory treatment the Bible seems to give it. But what Scripture doesn’t do is hide the shameful treatment she received at the hands of Abraham and Sarah. The account of her story does not excuse those parents of our faith of their behavior or explain it away. As Muslims, many of the Sudanese are Hagar’s spiritual descendants. Like her, their very presence is too often considered a shameful testament to someone else’s sin we would rather forget. They are often expected to cover or hide themselves to protect their communities from the shame of exposure—of domestic abuse their bodies would show, of the brutal control their female genital cutting testifies to, of the rape cowardly men forced on them and shameful men ignored. But the Bible does not ignore Hagar’s story. In fact, it takes care not to hide the sin of powerful men like Bathsheba’s king, and the dynasty-founding families of Dinah and both Tamars. Genesis takes care to call Hagar Abraham’s wife, to show in even more disgraceful detail the treatment she deserved but was denied. And at the climax of Hagar’s reprehensibly traumatic story, when Abraham and Sarah send her away rather than face their sin and its consequences, God SEES her. And HEARS her child’s suffering. God drew near to the broken-hearted Hagar just like he does to traumatized Sudanese women whose depth of pain no one else truly sees or hears.
Pray for Sudanese dealing with mental trauma.
Pray for God to provide families and communities they can safely share their experiences with so they can be comforted.
Pray for mental health professionals and therapy options to help Sudanese process their traumatic experiences.
Ask God to comfort them with his love and be near them with his Spirit so they do not feel alone or abandoned in their suffering and its aftermath.
Pray that Sudanese men and women would not carry the shame of what has been done to them and would be able to clearly see that their value is not diminished by the cruelty they have been shown.
Pray that like the Biblical authors, we who are not Sudanese would not cover or ignore their suffering, but instead would respond with respect and compassion.
War: The Village School
We drove three hours from the nearest hub town across sometimes indiscernible roads to reach their village. “Out in the middle of nowhere” was an understatement. We traveled with friends of ours as they were returning home. Their grins in the back of the car were the biggest I’ve ever seen them, as they chatted with excitement for us to meet their people and see their home.
We shared their excitement to get to see their homeplace, but that wasn’t the only reason we were going. This village, out in the middle of nowhere, with no military base anywhere nearby, had recently been bombed from the air. One bomb fell harmlessly up in the mountains where no one lived. Another fell down a well and only property was damaged. But the third was dropped on a school while it was in session. Around fifteen children and teachers died on site, and dozens more were injured. We were traveling out with our friends to offer our condolences and sit with the village in its grief.
I experienced a disorienting emotional whiplash as we finally rounded the last bend and caught our first glimpse of the village through the scraggly bushland surrounding it. The lively chatter in the car fell deadly silent as we caught sight of the school partially in rubble. A subdued voice asked if we wanted to stop there first and see it, but someone told the driver to go ahead and take us to the gathering point where we planned to meet everyone. I tried not to think of the sound of the plane overhead, or the chaos that would have ensued as this peaceful village frantically rushed to dig children out of the rubble.
We sat with the village leaders and some of the fathers who had lost family members. They showed us kind hospitality and eagerly welcomed us. We offered prayers and some encouragement from God’s Word. But our words and presence with their grief felt so small in the shadow of that school, under the gaze of those fathers’ hollow eyes. There were not strategic resources the military could have gained here. This village and its people weren’t even active in the war that was taking place farther north. The bombing was completely senseless, and could have no other purpose than fear and destruction. But in every story I’ve heard, that’s how this war is. It’s senseless violence that will consume you if you try to understand the why behind it.
As we left I experienced that emotional whiplash again. I was still mulling over the experience when my friend stood on tiptoe to poke his grizzled head through the car window and talk to me as I was climbing in. “You didn’t have time to come to my house this time!” he said. The engine was turning over and we were seconds from pulling out. “Next time you come you are welcome! You’ll have to meet my son! He’s the one your age, and he could use another wife!” he joked, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. As we pulled out past the school that I barely even noticed after that proposal, I realized that was how they did it. This village lived under the looming war balancing sorrow when it struck with laughter and kindness when they could find it.
Job
The book of Job isn’t a comfortable one. The conversations between Job and his ‘friends’ seems like a maze of the accepted wisdom of his age and ours, which God discounts by the end anyway. We can be tempted to see the final point of Job as, “Suffering doesn’t make sense. Period.” But in the end of the book, what Job learns when God speaks is that we may not understand God’s long-term plans or the big picture or how he enacts justice. But suffering isn’t senseless. Even if we don’t understand, God sees and plans so much more than we can. And not only that, God heard Job every step of the way. God knew Job’s suffering and grief, his faithfulness and his despair. God knew Job and honored him—both when he proudly pointed Job’s faithfulness out to Satan and when he blessed Job after the suffering passed.
We cannot understand the senseless suffering in Sudan, but by wisdom so much higher than ours, God does. He knows and feels each broken heart and cherishes each soul that faithfully clings to him in the suffering as Job did. But Job saw God’s plan only imperfectly. When he begged for a helper, someone to take the suffering in his place and advocate for him to God, it was the wish of a broken man who thought it impossible. But after Jesus, we and the Sudanese who suffer can see that wish realized. The Holy Spirit is our advocate to God and can bring us near to him. And Jesus not only took God’s punishment in our place, but physically shared in the same kinds of suffering we may face and empathizes with us as we endure.
Pray for Sudanese impacted by the war and its violence.
Pray for those who have lost loved ones, that God would be near to them in their grief.
Pray for Sudanese who believe God only expects them to endure suffering. Ask that they would understand our God is a suffering servant who can join them in their pain and sorrow.
Pray that through this war, God would draw many Sudanese to himself as they search for someone to save and protect them.
And pray for Sudanese to come to know Jesus personally as the same redeemer and helper Job hoped for.
Image generated by Gencraft LLC. Text from the NLT.
Genocide: The College Student
I sat across the supper table from him after a discussion about his potential. He had just finished high school—late because of the years of interruption from the war—and he was considering where he might be able to get an IT degree. He was by most measures a fairly normal college-aged guy. He held his smartphone and his attention drifted to it during lulls in the conversation. He had just teased me like my own brother his age about how much shorter I was than him. But in a few important ways, he wasn’t any normal college guy. He is part of the Masalit tribe, a target of the quickly spreading genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region and of what was widely known as “the first genocide of the 21st century.” That first genocide began in 2003, just in time for the circumstances of his birth to be wrapped up in its horror. He had been displaced from his home for years and I’d never heard him talk about his family before, if they were even still living.
After a break in conversation I broached the subject of the current genocide happening under the cover of the war, and asked him if other Darfurian tribes besides his were targeted as well. Contrary to the hesitance I expected, his eyes lit up. “That’s actually a very good question,” he said, eager to explain to someone who cared to know. He launched into a welcome history lesson, quick to share about his people’s dignity and strength and their difficult past. “My country,” he would say, as he proudly showed pictures of the flag, or political borders, or the beautiful landscape. He radiated a fierce sense of national identity and autonomy as he shared about the many and complicated reasons others are willing to commit genocide and martial rape. Many want control of his people’s land and its bountiful resources, and there are generations of tensions between Arabized tribes who consider the Masalit and other Darfurians inferior and want to rid the world of them. Some in Darfur want to split from Sudan entirely to be their own nation. But as things are now, many Masalit like my friend are displaced in many different countries, and some even as far as Europe.
I mentioned the international news coverage, and how more people around the world are starting to hear about his people and what they’re suffering. He said, “What you see in the news is not real. What I have seen with my own eyes, the killing and the raping, you cannot understand that from the news.” He sat quietly for a while, leaving unsaid many more atrocities than any 23-year-old should have to experience.
And then just like that, he flipped his phone around again to show me a picture of two hyena cubs he had caught and raised. He explained how abundant they were in Masalit land and how people caught or raised them for meat. But with a crooked grin he told me how he’d managed far from his homeland to catch and raise these two—Biter and Scratcher in his language—like security dogs, and later sold them to help support his schooling. He was carrying on as normal a life as any 23-year-old could despite the genocide: trying to make ends meet, enjoying a thrill of danger and the shock value of his adventures, wanting to travel the world and get an IT degree to get a stable job and have a future.
Habakkuk
On the year anniversary of the coup, I sat with three Sudanese pastors around a table and they shared what they thought about the war and the future of Sudan. They lamented how many were suffering without cause. Some said they thought God was using the war to root out wicked men in power. They discussed how the instability exposed false gods or faith in the wrong deity and gave people maybe their first real prospect of turning to God. They agreed that only God could deliver the people of Sudan from this war and save them. One said, “God is still doing his work in the middle of this war.”
These observations are exactly the same as Habakkuk’s in his small book. He considers the wickedness of his own people, and then regards God’s plan first with horror when he hears that a nation will bring war to them. Like Habakkuk’s people in his time, the Sudanese face unimaginable cruelty and violence. But also like Habakkuk’s people, they are having a chance to see God’s work that is hard to believe without seeing it for yourself. Muslims from tribes that cannot remember a time before Islam are uprooted and questioning for the first time if their faith is true, and if it can sustain them. At the end of his book, Habakkuk comes to an acceptance born only of his faith in a powerful but loving and merciful God. Though devastation surrounds him, Habakkuk chooses to depend on the Lord to be his strength. Even in famine, violence, and disaster, the God who saves him inspires joy in Habakkuk’s spirit. This same God calls to the Sudanese and offers them the same hope.
Pray for the Sudanese facing genocide.
Pray that God would provide a way for them to get to safety.
Pray that their homes and cultures and livelihoods would be preserved through the upheaval as they flee.
Pray for God to protect especially the defenseless among the targeted Darfurian tribes.
Pray for those committing the genocide—that God would help them to see clearly through their generations of hatred and the battle fever so that they cannot murder another man, woman, or child without feeling the eternal weight of their actions.
Ask God for the justice only he can give, and for ultimate reconciliation and peace.
Go read Benjamin Myers’ post, “Advent in Oklahoma,” on the Front Porch Republic site. He wrote a beautifully expressive reflection of a waiting hope particular to Oklahoma Plains people. As an Oklahoman myself working with Sudanese, I found a sort of kinship in the way we both persistently, stubbornly wait and silently hope. https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/12/advent-in-oklahoma/↩︎
The uneasy, unsettled surface of relative peace in Sudan cracked to reveal unresolved conflict that may continue for a long time to come. After genocidal dictator Bashir was ousted in 2019, Sudan’s military leaders took temporary control of the country under internationally brokered plans to hand the country back to civilian rule according to a set timeline.
In the past weeks, deadlines were not met, and two military factions began all-out war to secure sole rule over the country. The fighting has been centered in Khartoum, the capital. And Sudanese there and around the world have watched in horror as the heart of their country and culture has spiraled into chaos. Infrastructure has broken down—water, food, and electricity are inconsistent at best, as well as phone and Wi-Fi communication networks and basic travel routes.
Hospitals were first overflowing, then running out of supplies because of looting or inability to restock, and many had to finally close their doors because staff and patients couldn’t get there through the crossfire in the streets. The international airport is bombed and smoldering. People are escaping on foot if they have to, across any borders they can access. Dead bodies lie decaying in the streets because there are no relatives left to bury them, or no way to retrieve them and find a place to put them to rest. As the war has dragged on, wartime atrocities have increased in the chaos, including armed robbery and rape even of young girls. Most Sudanese are in shock. The civilians want nothing to do with this war, and they feel powerless to protect their own families.
A few of my friends are there. Exponentially more of my friends’ families are there. My heart is heavy and I grieve with many of them as they deal with everything from survivor’s guilt to waiting interminably to hear from family members if they’ve survived the last few days. We’ve lamented and cried and prayed. But mostly, we wait. And we try to handle the worry and the fear the best we can from afar. I have turned to stories from the Exile in the Old Testament. They feel so very alive under the shadow of the war.
Studying scripture within a different culture gives different eyes to see it with. When I lived and worked with people who experienced oppression and racism because of their ethnicity, it highlighted new realities in the Bible for me. I personally knew teenaged boys who had both a secret name from their culture, and a separate name in the language and culture they interacted with at school and in daily life outside their homes. The stories about Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah took on a whole new meaning. As those young boys learned to operate in a culture that penalized them for being Hebrews, they had to take on the names and culture and learning of a different people to survive. They walked a difficult tightrope of preserving their culture and their faith in God, while still trying to build a life and a home in a foreign culture. They became Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Living myself in a few different places over the past years, the opening stories in the book of Ezekiel gained fresh life for me as well. God appears to his people exiled to a foreign land in the bizarre shape of a holy throne room that roves the earth attended by angels with many faces, and wheels that can travel vast distances in any direction. Feeling country-less and uprooted myself, I felt with fresh warmth the love of a God whose presence is everywhere with his people, not limited by the geography of a church or a tabernacle. He is not constrained by borders on a map or languages, or even a particular culture’s understanding of what God should look or be like. He can be both foreign and familiar to me when I feel both my new home and my own heart to be a shifting mixture of foreign and familiar. When I feel like I have many different faces in the cultures I travel between, God shows himself and his servants to be all things to all people as well, and to carry many faces looking in many different directions too.
And now that I live in Uganda and rub shoulders with people who daily live the realities of refugees exiled unwillingly from their homeland, the stories from Israel’s exile come alive in whole new ways as well. I returned to Ezekiel again, as I told a friend, “like snuggling into warm blankets.” This book was written by someone freshly grappling with living the rest of his life in a land that felt unfamiliar and hostile. And though he speaks difficult truths to his own people about the depth of their sin and the extent God would go to in order to break them from their self-destructive habits, Ezekiel also shared perfect jewels of hope specifically tailored to comfort these same people. As I watched Sudanese friends here begin to grapple with the effects of the war, I knew I needed to dig deep into these exile stories to better understand their experiences. And I hoped to find answers for my own aching spirit about what possible good the Lord could bring to Sudan and her people out of such abominations.
Many verses and themes in Ezekiel have felt particularly “present” in connection to the war. The vision of God’s four-faced cherubim and the wheels covered in eyes the roam the earth has been a comfort again. It’s a reminder that God is never far from his people, and that his eyes see all the atrocities and his justice will not ignore them. It has been a comfort too, to know that just as God called Ezekiel to be a prophet to his people, so God continues to raise up believing Sudanese to share his Word and his message of salvation with their own people.
It is also a bitter truth that Ezekiel saw God’s Glory, or presence, leaving the temple. He ‘left’ the people of Israel after they repeatedly ignored and disobeyed the very God who had protected them. But even this was a mercy, to show the people that without him, they can only be lost and scattered—fearful, unprotected, unable to fend for themselves. An overwhelming majority of Sudanese are Muslims. One of my recurring prayers has been for this war to help them see their need for God, and to drive them into his embrace where they will experience his sufficiency to meet their needs, peace that passes understanding, and personal, motherly love.
But some of Ezekiel has read like looking in a mirror. As he taught about the siege of Jerusalem, he ate small, measured amounts of food, and sipped his allotment of water anxiously to show the desperation people would feel when they would not be able to find enough food and water to live on. He also graphically demonstrated the fear of violence the people would live under, the city streets scattered with bodies, and the overwhelming amount of death from starvation, disease, and brutality. I’ve heard those same feelings of desperation almost every time someone shares an update from relatives still in Sudan, and some of the exact Biblical words and phrases in the mouths of my friends have sent a chill down my spine.
Those in Jerusalem couldn’t believe Ezekiel when he told them war would come to their city, that their pride and joy, the heart of their country, would be under attack. I have heard that same shock as people here have talked about the war, about the smoke rising and the rockets exploding in their capital. One friend turned to me spoke like an Old Testament prophet herself when she said, “In Khartoum people closed their eyes to the war in Darfur [the genocide in western Sudan for nearly the past twenty years]. They said, ‘nothing will happen to us. We are safe here.’ Khartoum slept and now the war has come for them.”
Like Ezekiel when he fell down and cried out to the Lord to ask if he would destroy the entire remnant of his people, my friends and I have wondered and asked God what will be left of Khartoum, of Sudan when or if this fighting finally stops. The second time Ezekiel falls on his face and asks this question (11:13), the Lord’s answer froze me, and I held my breath as I read:
“… the people of Jerusalem have said of your fellow exiles and all the other Israelites, ‘They are far away from the Lord; this land was given to us as our possession.’
Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet for a little while I have been a sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone.’
Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again.’
They will return to it and remove all its vile images and detestable idols. I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God. But as for those whose hearts are devoted to their vile images and detestable idols, I will bring down on their own heads what they have done, declares the Sovereign Lord.”
Then the cherubim, with the wheels beside them, spread their wings, and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. The glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it. The Spirit lifted me up and brought me to the exiles in Babylonia in the vision given by the Spirit of God.”
Ezekiel 11:15-24
Wow. The Sudanese refugees mourn their land. It is their family heritage, their possession. I have seen the extra grief of loved ones buried in Ugandan soil, and the burden of knowing they will be left behind if their family can ever return to Sudan. Their ‘exile’ as refugees feels like a punishment, like a sign that God is far from them. But God says otherwise.
The Sudanese are not the same as the Israelites, and they don’t have the same promises and covenant that God gave to them. But God is the same God. And his heart toward his children holds the same loving care and desire to heal and reconcile them to himself. So, like the Israelites, God has sent many Sudanese away from their homeland. And as they have been scattered in Egypt and South Sudan and Uganda and Chad and elsewhere, he has been a sanctuary for them.
God has protected many Sudanese displaced from their homes over these long years of war. He has been a place of comfort and safety for them even if, like the Israelites Ezekiel spoke to, they did not even acknowledge him as their God. But we hope and pray that, like God has done for many of the Jews, he will gently gather back the Sudanese and give them back their homeland.
As I lament and pray, will you pray with me? Will you pray that through this painful and horrific process, when the Sudanese do return home, it will not be with worship and devotion to ancestors or evil spirits or any other false gods in their hearts—that they will return with an undivided heart and a new spirit.
Just as God has done throughout all history for those who have believed and followed him, he can take away the Sudanese’s hearts of stone that are dead and numb and enslaved to sin. And he can give them soft hearts that turn toward him. We pray it may be so, Holy Spirit. May the Sudanese be your people, and you their God. Let those who have begun this war, who continue to hunger for violence, bring down their own punishment on their heads.
Lord, may your glory and your presence still hover near to the Sudanese, and may those still waiting in exile find comfort in your words and in your heart for restoration.
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Liminal: an adjective to describe a transitional stage or something on a boundary ‘Liminal’ has long been a favorite word of mine. It always reminds me of the colored bands … Continue reading
When I was little, I had a fluffy, white, stuffed animal cat named Crystal. She was a favorite toy and a constant companion. I traveled with her, made up stories about her, and no matter where I was I could drift easily off to sleep if she was with me.
To this day, I vividly remember a nightmare I had about Crystal years ago. As I held her to my chest, she transformed into a hideous cartoonish villain. Her round blue eyes narrowed to red slits. Her sewn mouth opened to a jeering grin filled with venomous pointed teeth. Her soft white fur bristled and darkened, and her huggable body was all angles and arches as she took in a breath to hiss evilly at me.
I woke with a fright and kicked her from my bed. Gasping with fear, I struggled to disentangle dream from reality. It took a long time of suspiciously watching Crystal out of the corner of my eye—in the light of day, of course—before I trusted her enough to let her back onto my bed. That one frightening image was burned into my mind. It over-wrote years of happy memories, and my unquestioning trust that my favorite stuffed animal would always be gentle and comforting.
For some of us, our relationship with the Lord can have frightening parallels to my *melodramatic* childhood experience. We know that God’s character never changes,1 but for various reasons our understanding of God can undergo frightening or even traumatic change.
Unfortunately, a changed view of God can be forced on us—like a horrific nightmare we didn’t choose. In Scripture, God compares himself to a king, a father, a mother, a shepherd, a husband, and other roles present in our daily lives. If those types of people have harmed us in the past through abuse, neglect, or other distortions of their God-given relationships and leadership, they have changed our fundamental understanding of that role. And in turn, our understanding of who God tells us he is can be broken.
With enough time and repetition, our body and minds can be ‘rewired’ to hold that trauma. If we have been spiritually abused by a mentor or spiritual leader ‘in the name of God,’ the experience can traumatically alter our relationship with God himself. It can take a long time to heal—to sort out the truth of who God is from how he’s been falsely portrayed to us, to understand and believe that God is not dangerous.
I have recently walked through a dark valley of spiritual abuse. I worked in ministry under a boss and mentor I trusted with vulnerable parts of my spirit, and that trust was abused to take far-reaching control of many areas of my life—mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, occupational, social—all of it. No area of my life felt safe or untouched.
With some time and space after leaving the situation, my heart, soul, and body dropped out of the high-adrenaline survival mode I had been in, and the full impact of my experience shattered my spiritual life. This fallout is common to those who’ve survived spiritual abuse. In the same way that that one nightmarish image of a trusted comfort from my childhood over-wrote what my mind knew to be true, one experience with a bad shepherd can deeply damage a person’s faith in the Lord.
Victims of spiritual abuse experience the same repetitive cycle of abuse that a beaten wife or a rape survivor experience.2 They can struggle to sort out whether their experience was their own fault, and they can feel deeply grieved and violated, as well as immense shame and disorientation. The difference with spiritual abuse, is that what the survivor has experienced has been done to them in the name and under the ‘authority’ of God.
In cases of spiritual abuse, Scripture can be twisted to falsely condemn or control. The victims can feel strong guilt for disappointing their spiritual leader and breaking his or her rules, and often have been groomed to believe that such conduct is sinful even if scripture confirms no such thing. Victims of spiritual abuse fear leaving or speaking out against the abusive treatment because they’ve been manipulated to assume that no one will believe them. They fear that speaking out will lead to spiritual exile and rejection from their faith community. And they have to sort through all of these feelings often while they still can’t shake the internal and external accusations that control and keep them in fear.
At the beginning of my journey towards healing from spiritual abuse, my faith was shattered. Many times I was physically unable to open my Bible to seek comfort and truth in the Word of God that had so often been my most trusted anchor. I shook violently with anxiety in church settings and other religious gatherings. Prayer felt impossible because God felt dangerous. I couldn’t erase the angry, unsympathetic, vengeful, domineering, oppressive image of God that my abuser had modeled for me. Instead of the Good Shepherd I knew I would find in Scripture, all I could feel, believe, or imagine was a hired hand who looked after the sheep under his care only secondafter his own image and well-being.3
Whatever life experiences may have led you to feel this way, try as we might, the faith that we long to catch us, and the Good Shepherd we long to cradle us in our brokenness feels dangerous and unapproachable. Often no amount of logic or Scripture reading can enable us to muscle through what our nervous system screams at us is unsafe. When we try to pray or read our Bible, our bodies and minds can viscerally refuse, and we long to kick the danger away, just like I did after that childhood nightmare.
In all of our pain as we walk through spiritual abuse and the healing on its other side, we struggle to shake off the twisted ferocity of the ‘god’ our abusers have taught us relate to. This can be further complicated by God’s sense of justice that we see throughout Scripture. We know that his anger towards sin is fierce, and often our abuse has habituated us to assume that anger is directed at us. We struggle to reconcile those oppressive feelings with the mercy and goodness of God. What we cannot see, feel, or believe is that God is a good shepherd toward us—that he cares for our health and healing and rejoices when we turn to him.4
Though it can be hard to see the light at the end of that tunnel, it is faith in what we hope for5 that can slowly pull us through. We must desperately hold onto our memories of a good God who was a good shepherd to us, and pray it to be true.
And like the Good Shepherd that he is, the Lord will provide for our needs. He longs for us to draw near. He longs to bind up our wounds.6 He longs to sing and rejoice over us.7 We who have been spiritually abused fear a distorted image of God’s sense of justice. But the direction of that justice can be part of our healing: God cares most fiercely for the oppressed, the ‘lost sheep,’8 and the vulnerable.
The meekness of Jesus has been the greatest drive behind my healing: in his strength, he chooses to be gentle, and with his power, he chooses to protect. With all the power in the universe at his command, and all the needs and desires of the crowds clamoring for his attention, he chose to welcome humble children.9 His fierceness is often directed at spiritual leaders who mislead or complicated access to God for those under their care.10 At his angriest, when he flipped tables in the temple, he was furious that anyone would hinder those who wished to come to God in prayer.11 And he says that the consequences for anyone who causes someone young in their faith to stumble are worse than having a millstone tied around their neck and being thrown into the sea.12
If the spiritually abused are sheep who have been spooked and fear their Good Shepherd as a result, our God does not abandon us until we can return to the flock on our own. As a Good Shepherd, he responds to us with tender care. He comes to seek us out and restore us.13
And as he heals us and restores our faith, we often can look back as the Israelites did14 on our greatest stories of rescue. It is when we are lost and most desperately in need of a savior that our God acts in ways that teach us most to know and trust his good character. He gives us new memories that prove his goodness and trustworthiness.
If you are struggling through a season when God feels dangerous, I deeply sympathize, and I sit with you, brother or sister, in the grief and brokenness. I am immeasurably sorry for the harm you have experienced in the name of the Lord, and I pray that he will slowly and gently embrace you with his true character as you heal.
There is hope and help for your healing. If you are able, I encourage you to spend time reading the Gospels to learn how Jesus responds with gentleness and care to the people around him. Relearn his character.
A Christian counselor, especially a trauma-informed one, can help you immensely in your healing process. There is also much to be read and listened to that can help you understand your experience with spiritual abuse. Diane Langberg, K. J. Ramsey, and others are such trauma-informed counselors, and their writings and discussions in any media are helpful on these issues. Plenty of podcasts dive into these experiences as well, ranging from The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, which dissects a prominent instance of spiritual abuse, to episodes of the Allender Center Podcast, which discuss the mechanics, progression, and healing of spiritual abuse. The Common Hymnal and Porter’s Gate produce worshipful music that speaks specifically into these types of brokenness.
But even stories or books that obliquely reference gospel truths are helpful in your healing. The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and plenty of others can be instrumental in your healing as they can slowly walk you back to the divine realities of redemption, hope, and restoration through their reflections in the world and literature wholly separate from the Scriptures and contexts in which you were wounded.
Great healing can also come from Christian community around you. People who can speak these scriptural truths into your life, who gently share verses or stories with you when you can’t take them in on your own; brothers and sisters to walk with you and carry you to Jesus when you can’t move on your own—this is the Body of Christ that can surround you and be the hands and feet of Jesus to you as you slowly relearn that your Good Shepherd is not dangerous.
Content warning: This post addresses endemic sexual and spiritual abuse within Southern Baptist churches. No graphic descriptions are given, but please care for yourself if this content could be triggering.
Many of you have at least seen this week’s headlines about the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Southern Baptist churches are loosely autonomous, but united under the SBC and the same understanding of doctrine. The SBC and its organizations range from church planters in the States (North American Mission Board—NAMB), to missionaries and church planters overseas (the International Mission Board—IMB) to the Southern Baptist Seminaries and State conventions of cooperating churches in most of the 50 States.
If you have read the news this week, you have learned of the horrific extent to which spiritual leaders have abused those under their care. Those who were meant to be shepherds, instead of caring for their people have directly abused them or covered up for those who did. Not every pastor or every church has been implicated, but the shocking numbers from a third party report indicate that many more of us have been touched by this egregious sin that we would like to believe. If you would like to read the full report, you can find it here, as well as the actions proposed by the investigation team.
My Experience
I have a particular stake in this endemic abuse. While I have not been sexually assaulted by a Baptist leader, I have been in the petri dish that provides a nurturing environment for abusers. I have both experienced great abuse and brokenness within the SBC, and great healing and care. If you are tempted to breeze past these headlines, to wonder why they’re important to you beyond this week, I want to tell you. If you have experienced abuse and lived in the dark with it, I am so very sorry. I want to speak up with you and stand by your side when you cannot speak.
Too often, to our shame, abuse survivors are pushed to the side. Their stories are silenced or muffled, or worse, discredited and ignored because their words are ‘divisive’ or ‘hyperbole,’ or perhaps because they’re seen as a radical whose beliefs do not align with most Baptists. If my experiences and my history mean anything to you, if they help you sympathize with abuse survivors or recognize the lifelong consequences of abuse, I will share them. If the platform I stand on helps you listen or understand, I will use it.
I was born to Southern Baptist parents, and even after multiple moves I have only ever been a member of Southern Baptist churches. SBC summer mission camps led me to follow the Lord to the mission field overseas and in the States. I have faithfully attended, volunteered at, spoken, and taught in these churches, and worked for nearly 6 years overseas with the IMB. But more than those facts can show, Baptists have been home for me. They have prayed for me, fed me, paid my salary, and been my family. They have discipled me and held me while I healed. I have come to know the Lord and follow him in obedience through a Southern Baptist lens.
But I have experienced sexual harassment and mild assault while performing my job with the SBC, and many of my claims were ignored or handled poorly. I was asked not to speak openly about these experiences for a variety of reasons. I have experienced specific instances of discrimination from IMB leadership, both as a woman and as an unmarried person. I suffered sustained emotional and spiritual abuse from IMB leadership, and experienced retaliation and reprisal as a result of reporting this abuse. And while some of my concerns were heard and responded to in the end, the hurt and trauma are not erased.
I bear these emotional scars, and they run deep enough to affect the rest of my life. Like Paul when he ‘foolishly boasted’ to the Corinthians, I share these facts not out of pride or desire for respect or notoriety. I foolishly speak of these things to this end: I wish for you who read this to understand that my words are written here not out of a spirit of malice or a desire to sow disunity. I want you to know that my eyes see the decaying roots in the SBC, my experiences help me to understand it, and my memories still feel the rot.
I still have tremors in my hands when I walk into a church. The part of me before who could speak freely and movingly to a congregation has been quieted and replaced by a dry-mouthed and fumbling speaker, unsure and shrunken under the gaze of men and women whom my mind will no longer allow me to instinctually trust. I have questioned many times whether I should leave my work in the hands of others and abandon what feels like a sinking ship. I have fought with my conscience time and again over the ethics of my paycheck. And I have stood my ground with the support of other Southern Baptists to leverage my experiences for the sake of repairing that sinking ship.
What This Means for Survivors
To any of you who have left the SBC denomination because it is no longer safe for you, to any who have stepped aside from churches at wide because they have not healed from damage and hurts, to any who see the apostasy, hypocrisy, or corruption of the SBC and their consciences will no longer allow them to stay: I understand and stand with you. I sympathize and empathize. The Lord will give us all convictions, and obedience and self-protection can look different for each of us.
But to those of you who stay, you need to understand what an abuse survivor may have experienced. Unfortunately, sexual abuse is part and parcel of power abuse at large. Believers still sin, and those far from the Lord and walking in sin can fall into patterns of abusing whatever influence or control they hold. This love for power is the same root underneath racism, sexism, discrimination, spiritual abuse, and emotional abuse in our churches. And if any of you are completely shocked that such abuse could happen here—in our fellowship halls or youth rooms—you have not been listening to the voices of your brothers and sisters with different shades of skin who have cried out about the mistreatment they’ve experienced from behind our pulpits. You’ve chosen to look aside from the smaller paycheck the women or divorcees on church staff receive compared to others. You’ve failed to recognize when singles are understood to be less spiritually mature than married individuals on principle.
If you have missed these signs of abuse or neglect, there is plenty of time to open your eyes to them and recognize that they are not accidental or isolated incidents. You have plenty of time to turn your eyes to your wounded brother on the side of the road instead of walking by. These reports show clear patterns of abuse across our denomination, and the safe assumption right now is that you know other church members who’ve been abused, and that your church could do better in preventing or caring for abuse victims.
To let these headlines pass you by without evaluating your actions is tantamount to what David did for Tamar. After David’s illicit sex with Bathsheba (arguably rape), it took him some time to see his sin. When he did, he repented and married her, but that was not enough to bring her husband back from the dead, or to save their baby from death. Later on in David’s life, his greater love for his sons, or his own hesitancy to hold others accountable for mistakes he felt capable of making himself, kept him from caring for his own daughter Tamar when she had been raped by his son. That sin festered all the days of their lives. Tamar lived alone and abandoned. Her rapist was murdered by a half-brother who’d fruitlessly urged David to take action. And the half-brother murderer soon claimed David’s throne for his own and exiled his father, before the son’s tragic death and David’s overwhelming grief. Abuse festers. When we are tempted to ignore it, only exponential hurt can come from that path.
Because of the manipulation inherent to abuse, many survivors like myself still struggle to tell their story without still wondering, in their heart of hearts, if it wasn’t their fault. And telling their story can be painful, often because in the SBC environment we live in, the risk of not being believed and the consequences that would follow are just too great. Will they be fired from their jobs? Lose their standing in the church or community? Will they be blamed for disrupting peace? Will they lose their church family altogether and be looked on with mistrust until they finally leave the church voluntarily?
Those are all fears and consequences we have in our hands to change. By denouncing abuse openly, we set minds at ease who fear revealing it. By aligning ourselves more with the kingdom of God than any political or administrative kingdom, gender or skin color here on earth, survivors can trust us more to treat them with the compassion and healing Jesus would. By openly expressing support for abuse survivors, over the SBC or a particular leader or ideology, we show our value for people made in the image of God. If we truly value each person made in the image of God the same, we owe abuse victims the dignity of valuing them with urgency when they have suffered so great a spiritual, physical, and psychological blow.
Many abuse victims, myself included, have been answered with the subtly destructive phrase, “let’s keep the main thing the main thing,” or its variation of “We need to put the gospel first.” But recognize with me, church, that the gospel is not just a message of Jesus on a cross and heaven eternal. The gospel message was embodied in Jesus, whose kingdom values compelled him to welcome women as well as men in his closest circle of followers. The gospel compelled Jesus to provide care for his marginalized mother even as he was dying on the cross. The gospel compelled Jesus to stop his teaching and welcome little children to him. The gospel compelled Jesus to stand between a woman accused of adultery and to take on her case and shame in the eyes of her accusers. Jesus himself said he came to call out good news to the poor, to release prisoners, give sight to the blind, and set free the oppressed. And those weren’t metaphors or solely spiritual realities. Who else are victims of abuse but the poor in spirit, those blinded in the dark by their isolation, prisoners of lies, oppressed by their abusers?
Church, the gospel IS the main thing, and it compels us with every fiber of our being to be a balm to the hurting. And that includes those abused in our church buildings and by our pastors and leaders.
Where I Stand
So how am I with all of this? This week has been a hard one. With every next piece of news, both my mind and body have to process through tension, grief, anger, humiliation, helplessness, devastation, and so many more emotions. The grief is so fresh and deep that some days I feel like I’m right back in the middle of what I experienced. Many others who have suffered church abuse are experiencing the same things. Plenty of you have reached out to listen and encourage, and I have been more than happy to talk with many of you as you process and understand what this means to and for you. I still have plenty to learn myself. But for now, I feel convicted to stay with the dumpster fire and help put out the flames. Having been burned a few times myself, maybe I’ve learned how to help suffocate the fire in the process.
This very Sunday as I stood trembling in church, praying for the Spirit to overpower my anxiety and help me to worship and learn, the congregation started to sing “He Leadeth me.” In the few churches or groups I’ve spoken to since I’ve been stateside, the ones who’ve reacted most powerfully to what they have heard were the ones I told my personal story to. When I revealed some of my deeper hurts and how the Lord sustained me, others connected to stories of their own and the Spirit connecting us was a strong encouragement. As I sang that song in church, I sank into my seat and fell into a silent prayer. I recognized that the Lord had led me to and through my experiences. He led me out the other side not quite the same Caroline who went in, but with a story to tell and a burning desire to see the church comfort her abused and broken brothers and sisters.
Later that same Sunday the news broke about the SBC investigation, and the Lord had already answered my questions for me. I will stay and be a safe person for others to come to. I will keep in dialogue with those with IMB and SBC already hard at work to help things change. For now and until I hear otherwise from the Spirit. I’ll be the man Jesus healed who was told to stay and tell his story to his village. I’ll be the woman at the well who took a risk and shared her shame so that others could come to know the Lord.
I do not believe that our southern Baptist theology and beliefs necessarily end in abuse. Many Baptists on my path toward healing have proved otherwise. But I do believe that our cultural identity at this point does lend itself to abuse. We have to roll up our sleeves and return to the Word to see how Jesus honors the dignity of the vulnerable and oppressed. We have to keep pressing our doctrines and theology until they meet our practice and show through in all the ways we interact with women, men, and sexuality in our churches; until the pages in our Bible reflect the pages of our lives as leaders humbly shepherd, and use their influence to protect and nurture instead of tear down or feed their own egos.
What this Means for You
Those are my convictions for now, and I plan to continue evaluating to make sure I obey the Lord. You might not land in the same place I do, and that’s okay. But for what it’s worth, my opinion is that further involvement with the SBC should be a choice instead of inaction. If you stay, if you move past this news, please do so with the knowledge of the hurting around you. Do not turn your eyes away from them. If you stay, stay with a task and a calling to learn, to rebuild, to comfort, and to change.
If you have caught yourself wondering if this affects you, it does. If your body is diseased, the whole system is compromised. Even a small infection can multiply and damage the whole body. In the same way, a disease in your church, however subtle, affects whether or not your body of believers worships in spirit and in truth. If your church’s handling of this causes even one of the little ones who would come to faith to stumble, it would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck before you’re thrown into the ocean. Jesus is SERIOUS about protecting his sheep, and he is serious about those in power who could cause them to stumble, or mislead them, or even make the gospel unwelcoming and turn away those who could become little children in the faith.
If you believe this sin is only at higher levels in your church or organization, the same applies: a pattern of sin unchecked at any level is dangerous. As Paul says, an eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you,’ and the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you.’ God put the whole body together, and there should be no division within it. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If we Southern Baptists align ourselves together and understand each other to be a part of the same body of Christ, we cannot ignore a destructive habit in one part of the body and assume it has not manifested in the DNA or cellular level elsewhere.
If you don’t believe that you are contributing to these problematic abusive patterns, you are most certainly enabling them. I say that not to condemn, but to point out that these patterns that allow abuse are ingrained even at the smallest levels. If you are not knowingly and actively working against them, they will continue on, unchanged. If you are not advocating for transparency and safety in your church, if you aren’t praying for the integrity of your leaders, or advocating for their accountability, you are contributing to a pattern in the same way that the religious leaders left the wounded man on the side of the road because they assumed he wasn’t their problem and would be more trouble than he was worth.
If you are one who wants to give grace in situations like these, please recognize the nature of grace. In Ephesians 3 and 4, Paul writes about how we are all united by the same faith and the same baptism. If we believe that, we believe that any Christian is united with any other through the same Spirit of God who lives in them. Paul says that he became a servant of the gospel by God’s grace, so that he could make the gospel known to others and it would unite them. Grace unites and makes whole.
God’s grace isn’t something that spares us from judgment: our judgment still exists, and Jesus suffered it in our place. Grace from God is that Jesus suffered to redeem us to live rightly before God. Grace redeems and restores; it does not turn a blind eye to sin. Grace in the case of abuse holds an abuser accountable so that their sin has consequences and they can learn to live more fully like Christ. And grace for an abuse survivor restores them and treats them with the dignity they have as an eternal bearer of the image of God. As Paul says to the Ephesians, “Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.” To truly show grace, we must speak truth both to abused and abuser. We must recognize that if sparing a legal consequence of pain for one member causes ungracious suffering for an another in the present or future, it is not grace we show.
The emotional scars that I bear most likely will not go away in this lifetime, before I see my redeemer face to face. Be mindful that there are similar scars in your congregation. Whatever his reason, the Lord has given me the privilege to see many of my own scars begin to heal. He has given me a community of faith that supports me and reminds me through their own actions how the Lord loves and restores. So as often as I can, I intend to wear my scars as a badge of honor to glorify the Lord. Jesus proudly showed his scars to his followers to testify to the Lord’s power over death. Let my own scars show that, as deeply as sin can wound, the Lord can heal even deeper. As much as my scars may ‘disfigure’ my experiences in church or with spiritual leaders, their dull ache will always remind me of the hope I have in a Lord who will heal all wounds and dry all tears.
If you have experienced sexual abuse, please reach out to safe people around you for help, or go to this website for resources or to file a report. You can also call the national sexual assault hotline 24/7 at 800.656.4673. If you have experienced abuse of any kind connected to the IMB, you can call the confidential hotline at 855.420.0003 or email advocate@imb.org .
Practical steps: A few simple actions to take in response
Talk with your church to clarify how to report abuse.
Confirm your church’s procedure on what to do in the instance of an abuse report.
Develop a plan or procedure if your church does not already have one.
If you work for a faith-based company, educate yourself on their HR procedures and policies.
Urge your church or workplace to develop a more formal HR department or procedure to ensure that complaints and accusations are taken seriously.
Encourage your church to vet ministers they hire by following up on their references.
Help your church plan a service where they address abuse and make their commitment to stand with survivors clear. Your congregation should hear loud and clear that your church is committed not to make it more painful for them to speak up than to stay silent.
If an abuse victim should speak with you about their ordeal, do not treat their confidence lightly. Believe, support, and report.
Give survivors safe time and spaces in which to process and to have holes in their faith.
Educate yourself on spiritual abuse so you can understand how an abuse survivor has been made to believe that God himself sees and treats them the way their abuser did.
If someone in your life has been vocal with his or her story of abuse, listen to them and hear their perspectives and experiences.
Verify that your faith-based workplace has HR policies for responding not just to sexual abuse, but also to spiritual, physical, and emotional abuse, and advocate for policies if there aren’t any.
— By Miss Cellanea 