Laugh Your Ashes Off

Sometimes, life just gets to be too serious. This week, I want to encourage you to laugh your ashes off.

Humor is great therapy for the lingering depression that often accompanies childhood sexual abuse or trauma. Laughter is good medicine, and Lord knows we all need mega doses of it.

Here are a few short anecdotes to keep you laughing today:

A little girl and her mother came to the doctor's office. Following the little girl was a little dog.

"Does your dog bite?" asked the doctor.

The girl shook her head.

As the doctor bent down to pet the dog, the dog sank his teeth deep into the doctor's hand. The doctor yelled, "I thought you said your dog doesn't bite!"

The little girl said, "This one ain't mine."

Here's another story:

Two competitor manufacturers were attending an industry association outing at a mountain resort. They were roommates in the same small cabin when they heard scratching outside the door. One went to look, came back and started to put on his running shoes.

"What's the trouble?" asked his roommate.

"There's a giant bear outside," the man said. "And he's so hungry, he's gonna smash his way right into this room.

"Why put on sneakers?" asked the roommate. "You can't outrun a bear."

"I know," said the man, "but all I need to do is outrun you."

And finally:

When we talk to God, people say we're praying. But when God talks to us, they say we're schizophrenic.

Are you chuckling yet? If not, take time today and every day to find something to laugh about. Get online and look up jokes. Watch a laugh-out-loud comedy on TV. Stand in front of the mirror and make stupid faces. Or just take turns yelling out funny words with a friend....words like enema, Winnebago, and buck teeth. Eventually, you'll find yourself laughing again, and you'll wonder how you ever got through a day without it.

And remember, we're only young once. But with humor, we can be immature forever.

By Their Fruit, You Will Recognize Them

After my father's arrest, he hired a lawyer from his church to bail him out of jail and defend him against the charges he is facing for criminal sexual conduct. Even though Dad already confessed to some of the charges to the police, this lawyer has instructed him to deny any responsibility for his actions. What kind of a Christian tells a fellow believer to lie?

My brother urged Dad to turn from this lying and repent completely. Dad told him he has implicit trust in this attorney to save him. The family all gave a corporate groan over this statement. No man can save us from God's wrath if we live so deeply entrenched in sin.

My father is now considered a fugitive, because he refused to go to the state where the charges have been brought against him. He and his lawyer will appear in court next week to try to convince a judge that he should not have to travel anywhere to be tried for his crimes. He hopes that lying will get him off the hook. His goal: to stay out of jail for as long as possible.

This course of action is costing him dearly in this life; the legal fees are crushing. The price it will cost him in the next life, though, is what concerns us the most.

When my father's crimes were brought to light, my siblings rushed to him to point out his need for repentance. They felt confident that Dad would turn his life around if they just loved him enough and prayed for him. I told them that this might backfire on them, and I stood back to watch what would happen next.

I got a call from my brother yesterday. He felt completely discouraged by Dad's refusal to face his punishment, his relationship with this attorney, and his willingness to lie in court. After years of thinking that Dad would suddenly change, my brother said, "You were right. He's just doing what he always has."

My brother's statement made me think about what Jesus said in Matthew 7:18 and 20, "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit....Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them." We can discern the condition of a man's heart by observing the kind of spiritual fruit he produces.

During this conversation with my brother, I also learned that my parents are angry with Joe and me, saying that if we were real Christians, we would have forgiven Dad already and patched up the family feud. Dad said to my brother, who has continued to visit my parents, "I'm glad you're standing behind me." My brother was shocked by this statement. He thought, I'm not standing behind you. I'm just walking beside you! Now he understands my wisdom in watching from a distance.

We must be very, very careful when dealing with people whose lives are steeped in this much sin. As Christians, we believe it is our duty to show our love to all people. Some people, like my father, get the mistaken belief when we love them in overt ways, they are forgiven. In their minds, if we're part of their lives, they're okay with God. This is very far from the truth.

It is much wiser to love people like this from a distance, praying for their salvation. The pain of being separated from us may lead them to turn to God. Joining them where they are often sends the message that we are letting them off the hook. By standing too close to them, they may never come to a point of repentance. Holding their hand may cause us to experience spiritual confusion and tremendous heartache.

Since I have stepped back from this situation and looked at it as God does, I feel a surprising sense of peace. As my brother put it yesterday, "We've all done everything we could to help Dad see what he needs to do. The rest is up to him." We will all continue to pray, the Holy Spirit will do his work, and my dad will have to make a choice. Let's pray that he chooses more than just temporary relief from earthly punishment. God's prison is a whole lot worse than any that man has ever devised.

Has your life become enmeshed with someone who is sinning, lying about it, and running from God? What do you think is your best course of action for protecting your spirit and leading this person to salvation?

Freely You Have Received, Freely Give

I awoke one day with Matthew 10:8 running through my head: "Freely you have received, freely give." Give what? I asked. As the day progressed, God gave me an answer to that question.

I received an email from a friend who is in her early forties. When I was a child, I found refuge in this girl's home, where her mother frequently claimed to have adopted both of us. My adoption was one of the heart; my friend had been legally adopted by my heart mother.

To my surprise, my friend wrote that she was struggling with her own unhappiness from her past. It seems that while my beloved heart mother had provided a safe haven for me, she had smothered my friend with too much love and the hyper-vigilant protection that is typical of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

I began to realize that just because a mother fails to meet her own child's needs, it doesn't mean that God can't use her to meet the needs of someone else's child. My heart mother failed to give her own daughter wings to chase after her dreams. And yet, she succeeded in making me feel safe whenever I was with her. It made me wonder if my own mother had failed to protect me from my father's sexual abuse while succeeding to make another girl feel special.

My thoughts turned to my children and how I had failed to protect them from the hurt of abuse and divorce. Marrying my second husband, Joe, brought me great joy. It frequently brought my children incredible pain, as they struggled to adjust to having a strange man telling them what to do. I know that my teenage sons often found solace at the kitchen tables of their friends' mothers.

All of my children could blame me for failing to protect them from the fallout of my father's sexual abuse. Fortunately, not one of them does. How was this possible, I wondered, when I felt nothing but anger for my own mother's failings? God's Word came back to me: "Freely you have received, freely give." That's when I knew what he was calling me to give: grace. He was asking me to freely extend grace to my mother, just as my own children had freely extended grace to me.

I began to look at life as a stage, where a monumental production needs to be acted out. I imagined something as complex as the movie, The Sound of Music. The Swiss Alps are breathtaking, the actors are tremendously talented as singers, and the costuming and staging are impeccable. I tried to think of my mother or my heart mother cast in the role of Fraulein Maria. I realized that the production would be a bust, and critics would trash their performances, because neither woman had the skills to play the part.

Unlike movie critics, God would never condemn either of these women for their poor performances. He looks on their lives with grace, understanding that each one has bravely done the best things possible, given their circumstances. Suddenly, I could see these women through God's eyes, and I felt ashamed of myself for having judged my mother so harshly.

My mother grew up during World War II on a farm, where her father regularly beat her mother. From behind a locked bedroom door, my mother and her brothers clung to one another, hoping that their mother would survive the brutal abuse. My heart mother was only 10 years old when her parents sent her into the German countryside, as far as possible from the dangers of war. She lived in a gardener's shed with her two younger brothers, stealing vegetables from nearby gardens so that they would have something to eat.

When we experience trauma of this magnitude over a long period of time while we are young, we can become stuck at an early level of development. Neither my mother nor my heart mother had an opportunity to grow up emotionally, since both of them went straight from the trauma of their young lives into early marriages. Their generation never spoke to others about the pain of abuse or trauma, and they viewed counseling as something for weaklings. Instead, they painted on pretty smiles and did what they thought was best. For my heart mother, this took the form of over-protecting her children. For my mother, it meant leaving the farm and always, always exhibiting nothing but perfection in her new life in the city. These were the coping mechanisms that these women with PTSD adopted...coping skills which, unfortunately, did not bring about perfect results for their children.

How can my friend and I extend grace to our mothers? Before we do so, we must take note of two important matters. First of all, extending grace does not mean that we cover up the truth. It's okay for us to say that our childhood needs were not met. As Christians, we are called to speak the truth in love.

Secondly, if our mothers turned to sinning as a means of coping, we must understand that they are accountable to God for the wrong things they did. While it was not a sin for my mother to arrive at parenthood without the prerequisite skills, it was a sin for her to turn to alcohol to numb her pain. I must separate my mother's lack of parenting skills from the sins she committed. I can only extend grace for my mother's inadequacies. It is God's job to extend forgiveness for her sins.

Why should I extend grace to a person who doesn't deserve it? you may ask. That's what is so unique about grace. None of us deserves it. But God extends it to us anyway, just because he loves us so much. (See Romans 3:23-24) Love is what allowed me to overlook my heart mother's shortcomings. It was also love that allowed my children to grant me the grace I needed for my inadequacies. I began to see that a lack of love was preventing me from extending grace to my mother.

It used to be easy for me to believe that Christ's blood was shed for my forgiveness, but not for my mother. I know now that Jesus wants to offer all of us forgiveness. In Matthew 11:28, Jesus said, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." This doesn't say, "Come to me, all you except for Cheryl's mother, and I will give you rest." His forgiveness is extended to each of us.

While it is true that Christ's forgiveness is extended to all people, each one of us must respond appropriately to receive it. Just as someone may give us a gift-wrapped present, we cannot fully enjoy it unless we open it. Acts 20:21 tells us how to receive God's forgiveness: "...turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus." Forgiveness comes as a result of turning away from sin and placing our faith in Jesus' ability to lead us in the way he wants us to go. Faith means that we quit using Jesus like a genie in a bottle who grants all of our requests so that we can maintain control over our own destinies.

Mere belief in Jesus is not enough. Even Satan believes that Jesus is Lord. It's the submission of our will to God's that turns away his punishment and replaces it with grace. If we have fallen into sin as a result of our abuse, we must make peace with God over our own failings. In the same way, our mothers must take up their issues with the Lord.

God's Word opened my heart to the fact that I needed to adopt an attitude of love and to extend grace to my mother. This means that I am willing to see her as God does and to make concessions for her inadequacies which resulted from her childhood trauma. As soon as we apply grace to another person's actions, our forgiveness for the hurt that he or she caused us eventually follows. It is difficult to hang on to resentment for someone who has hurt us when we see them through God's eyes.

Grace is the key that unlocks the door to forgiveness. God's grace through his Word prompted me to acknowledge my sin of resentment against my mother. As soon as I confessed this sin to God, he looked at my broken life with tremendous compassion and understanding (grace), and then extended his forgiveness to me. Immediately, peace flowed in.

Freely you have received grace. Freely give it to someone who desperately needs it. It's a priceless gift that benefits the recipient. But the giver usually comes away with the much greater gift: peace.

Georgia on My Mind

Yesterday, Joe carted home an old record player from a garage sale. My sweet husband knows how much I have missed playing my old albums since our turntable quit spinning after a recent move. With eager anticipation, I selected Willie Nelson's Stardust album.

As Willie thrummed his guitar and sang "Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind," I lay back on my bed and closed my eyes. I remembered the night my uncle gave me Willie's album. It was my 19th birthday, and I had gone home from college for the weekend. My uncle's gift touched me, because he had never given me a birthday gift before. This was the kind of present that came as a complete surprise.

Music has always been my native language. It can move me in a way that words cannot. Unfortunately, music can also serve as a trigger for me. A trigger can be anything that takes us away from the present and back to our moment of trauma. When a trigger causes us to lose our perception of what is currently going on around us and makes us feel as if we are re-living a moment in the past, we are experiencing a flashback.

Triggers can be smells that remind us of the place where we were abused, or of our perpetrator's scent. The smell of freshly-cut hay takes one survivor back to a moment when she was raped in a barn. Another woman whose perpetrator smoked cigars remembers her childhood molestation whenever her neighbor walks past her house today with a cigar in hand.

For some survivors, visual images bring back the moment. The sight of men's hands used to send me into a panic that I couldn't understand.

For others, the trigger involves touch, such as a caress or a kiss. This can become problematic in current relationships, where loving touches from our partners evoke confusing fears. Even the sense of taste can catapult us backward in time.

Triggers can come from sounds in the environment during our moment of trauma. Last night, when Willie's voice gave way to his distinctive, twangy harmonica, I suddenly found myself back in my parents' house during that summer when I was 19. I was instantly experiencing the moment when my father approached me for the last time. He came to my bed one summer morning, where I lay sleeping under a sheet without a stitch on, because it was miserably hot outside. I awoke to find my father leaning over me. Alarms began going off in my head as I realized I had abandoned my pajamas in the night. Dad told me it was time to get up, and I told him I would when he left the room. With a devilish smile, he urged me to push back the covers while he watched. I clung tightly to the sheets and insisted that he leave.

After Dad walked out, I got up and dressed for breakfast. In the kitchen, I found my father sitting at the table with my mother, acting as if nothing unusual had occurred just moments before. An unbearably heavy sense of depression settled on me like a damp, moldy blanket. I was not safe in my own home. My father was a sexual predator, and my mother was oblivious to the fact that I was his prey. After choking down my breakfast, I went back to my room and locked the door. The stereo was my source of comfort, where Willie sang many tunes, including Georgia on My Mind.

The click of the record player shutting off drew me back to the present, where I found myself lying on my bed. I sat up, and that odious depression clung to me. Remembering the cognitive restructuring skills I had recently learned, I told myself that the depression belonged to the past, not the present. If I kept that in mind, I could listen to Willie and appreciate his talents in playing both the harmonica and the guitar. Just because my father chose to do something evil does not make Willie Nelson a partner in that crime. Instead of dwelling on the sadness that my father brought into my world, I can remember the tender moment when my uncle expressed love in an appropriate way with the gift of music to a teen who needed some reassurance.

I always find comfort in God's Word, and he frequently leads me to passages that speak to my pain. Psalm 77:4-6 reads, "You kept my eyes from closing; I was too troubled to speak. I thought about the former days, the years of long ago; I remembered my songs in the night..." God is telling me that during those moments when Willie's old, sweet songs spoke to my troubled heart, my Savior was there with me, aching for me. He is with me today as I fight to free myself from the ugly memories of my past.

What are your triggers? If you are struggling with images, sounds, tastes, smells, or sensations that keep dragging you into the past, ask God to help you replace those old memories with beautiful new ones. As members of a church family where we are dearly loved, this task is much easier to do than if we remain isolated. I pray that, with God's love and his Word, you will find a way to replace those painful thoughts with comforting ones.