When I think back to my childhood I had a strong faith for many years.  My grandparents were very, very religious and they encouraged my faith, my prayer, my relationship with God.  And I prayed.  I used to get down on my knees, kneeling in front of the very bed where he would hurt me, and I would pray.  I would kneel there, shaking and hurting and crying, begging for forgiveness from my sins, and pleading with god to show me the light, show me the way, and help me be a good girl.   But no matter how hard I prayed, no matter how desperate the prayers, it didn’t stop.  He didn’t stop hurting me, she didn’t stop hating me.  Had God abandoned me?   After a few years of near nightly abuse and neglect I began to lessen my grip on faith.  How could God be good when all of this bad was happening in this world, in my family, to me? Or maybe it wasn’t God, maybe it was me…maybe I was so evil that not even God could love me. 

This morning I was listening to a podcast given by a woman with terminal cancer.  She was 37 and the cancer, which originated in her breast, had since spread to her liver, her bones, and her skull.  She was given less than 6 months to live.  She seemed to have accepted her fate, and her acceptance seemed to lie solely on her faith in her God. When her friends would tell her that they couldn’t understand why she was dying at 37, and leaving behind her husband, and two young children.  Why would God take such a good person when rapists and murderers get to live long lives?  And she would tell them that she was not a good person and she did not deserve better.   She said that she does not get offended if someone tells her they think poorly of her, because she knows that she is worse, and she knows she deserves much harsher criticism but she avoided it because God took all of our sins and put them on Jesus. 

For we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God – Romans 3:23.

“God is not punitive, God is loving and kind.  But we live in a sinful world and bad things happen.  But God made a way for sinful people to be with him in a perfect world”,  she said.  And knowing this allows her to forgive those who slight her or treat her unkindly because she was already forgiven by God.  Because Jesus loved you when you were unlovable, you can love that difficult co-worker and that person who abused you.  

She believed that she was suffering to save someone else, to show them the loving kindness of God.  She believed this because she said that is the only way to make sense of her suffering.  Because to believe that God could see her suffering but was unable, or unwilling, to spare her, or allows her to suffer without a purpose or hope?  That was not an option because god could save her.  And the only way to heaven, where there is eternal peace, is to believe, because God allows in his wisdom that which he could easily prevent with his power. 

This brave woman, full of passion and faith, passed away about 6 weeks after the broadcast.  I applaud her faith in God. I applaud her faith because her faith got her through the months of pain and suffering, and allowed her to find peace and acceptance with her diagnosis and death from cancer. 

I don’t have that kind of faith.

I don’t believe that people who abuse kids in horrid and unspeakable ways can be forgiven.   Maybe I don’t realize how much of a sinner I was at five years old, and how altruistic God is to be able to forgive me for my sins, but I do not forgive either of them.  I was not that strong, I guess. 

I am not that strong.  I don’t have that kind of faith.   The nights I am in pain, writhing on the bathroom floor, reliving what he said, I don’t have that kind of faith.  I don’t know why God would allow that to happen.  Not to me, not to you, not to any other child.  God can forgive them but I will never forgive them for what they did.  I don’t have that kind of faith.