A Boy, A Cat and a Disconnected Heart

He rang the doorbell. It was winter, and with his thick gloves he could barely feel the button.

No answer.

He waited. A cat, caught like him on this cold night outside, walked along the porch rail. Toward him. He watched it.

In the street behind them a solitary car passed. Like urban sleigh bells, the chains on its tires chimed rhythmically into the pounded street snow.

No one was home. The cat. Was rubbing against his leg.

He set the candy down and picked it up. It purred. And purred more when he tucked it under his warm arm. Like a football. Against his thick coat.

He could see into its eyes. Up close. He liked it that way.

When he wrapped his thick fingers round its tiny neck...

Pinning its legs against his side, he slowly squeezed, watching the eyes widen in alarm. Feeling it push against him. Desperately struggle. For a long time struggle.

Watching.

The lids droop slowly down. The light passes from the eyes.

He let go. Another car rattled metal links by in the snow.

Watching the light return. The animal terror that followed. Flooding the look in those helpless eyes. It pierced his soul.

A shock wave of remorse flamed hot. In all his cells he could feel it.

Guilt.

Or was it love? Yes, warm love for this tiny being.

But...

I want to do it. Again. Now.

Yes, I want to know what it's like once more.

He squeezed the cat's thin neck. And when it has succumbed, he felt the same pity again warm flooding him.

And only horror at himself. As he did it once more.

And when it was over he...

But this time the cat mustered the last of its tiny animal ferocity and writhed free.

He felt...watching it streak away...he felt jarred awake somehow...as it ran from him...yes, he was awake now...

And terrified

Had anyone seen him? Would they know?

In a panic he ran

Home to his father's house...

Back at my father’s house when I was seven years old we had two beagle dogs. Male and female my father named them Ahab and Jezebel. I did not understand this as a young boy. In fact it took me years to begin to have any understanding. Already by age seven I had watched my father beat my mother many times. And I had received many beatings from my father. And I had been humiliated and shamed by my father. And I had witnessed my father beating my brothers and sisters. And he slapped them and hit them and knocked them around . . . at will. And I had been terrified by my father to the point where I did not ever want to say another word the rest of my life.

I could not understand the fascination I had watching the way Ahab treated Jezebel when I would do what I would do, but one thing was certain . . . I was fascinated.

We had a good sized yard which we called the back yard, side yard and front yard. In the back yard we had the dog house for Ahab and Jezebel. In our back yard we also had a couple of picnic tables and several large trees.

When I was about seven years old I would stand on the picnic table so I could feel safe. Then I would throw rocks at the top of the dog house where Ahab and Jezebel would retreat for peace and rest. I did this many times over a period of a couple of years around this time of my life. I felt safe standing on the picnic table thinking that Ahab would not attack me when he got mad.

What made Ahab mad was my throwing rocks against the top and side of the dog house. I don’t know why it made him mad, but it most certainly did. After a few minutes of hitting the dog house with rocks Ahab would begin to growl. If I continued to throw rocks before very long Ahab would begin attacking Jezebel. Apparently he blamed Jezebel for the noise and he would light into her and she would yelp with hurt and pain.

The only fear I felt doing this was thinking Ahab might attack me if he got too mad. It never crossed my mind that what I was doing was wrong. And it fascinated me to the point of distraction. I had no idea why at the time. I would continue to throw rocks for as long as I had nerve until I would get too scared that Ahab might run out of the dog house after me.

My throwing rocks at the dog house and making Ahab mad, and Ahab attacking Jezebel because of it, represented the same dynamics I was living with inside my own house. Except I was not the one getting mad and attacking others. It was my father doing the attacking and the growling and barking and the hurting of others.

It was very upsetting to me to realize what I had done, and why, as I got older and left my father’s house. For years I simply felt guilty and never mentioned what I had done to anyone. There must have been a part of me that knew it was wrong or I guess I would have said something. My younger brothers and sisters playing nearby didn’t seem to notice what I was doing and were not bothered by it. I never asked them, but as far as I know they did not notice what I was doing. Or if they did the last thing they were going to do was to stop abuse. In my household we had enough energy to take care of ourselves and ourselves only. To come up with the energy to intervene in someone else’s bad behavior is just more energy than any of us had.

And I never talked about what I had done to the cat when I was selling candy door to door for my father’s church. I was old enough by then to feel guilt, but I could not help myself at the time. I had a compulsion to explore and try to understand what I was feeling inside, but felt too guilty to talk with others about it, so I guess I must have experimented on my own from time to time to try to figure out what I was feeling.

What I was feeling was fear and rage and hurt from living with my father. I had to do a lot of work to undo the damage caused by my father’s raging and violence. I now understand a little bit about what was going on in my behavior as a young child.

I felt different as a child from other children because I was suffering chronic abuse. It was like I was on the outside looking in while others were living. Psychologists would call this “dissociation” and it has to do with not being able to integrate all of what is going on in your life into one person or one self. This is very common for children of abuse and especially those children who suffered abuse at a very early age. Dissociative identity disorder is a DSM V diagnosis that involves a serious post-traumatic stress response to the level of trauma the child experiences. The other children in my school seemed to be involved in their lives and had freedom and opportunity to do all types of activities and have an entire world of experiences. But I was living in quiet desperation knowing that my father was beating me and my brothers and sisters and beating my mother and raging around the house throwing anything he could get his hands on and putting holes in the walls.

My life felt strange and dark and so utterly different from the lives I observed others living. But nothing could change our circumstances. Nothing ever did. Things only got worse and worse. The beatings got more violent. My loneliness got more filled with despair. And there was no reason to hope for anything else. So I accepted the way things were. I just accepted it. But in my soul the darkness got darker and the fear got more fearful. And the hopelessness multiplied.

I honestly did not know any different or understand that life could be other than what it was. I thought the other children in my classes at school were just faking it and going along with the show like I was. Just playing their part and going through the motions and that when the school day ended and we all went home that it was the same for them. How could I know differently? How do you know what you have not experienced or seen or felt or heard? How could I know other kids were going home to a “Hey, how was your day?” and a hug and being looked in the eyes when they answered. Or that other kids got to throw a football with their dad or have their homework checked by their mom or could have normal sibling interactions that including laughter and fun and connection. How was I to know that for many of them what was on the outside of their lives indeed matched what was on the inside . . . or perhaps even surpassed it because they were truly loved and valued at home by their families.

But me? I felt sick inside. Hopeless! Yet somehow I kept going and going and going through the motions. Every day! Putting one foot after the other. Like a little soldier. When the storms of my father’s rage would hit I would hold on the best I could. When my mother asked me to run down to the store I felt a little bit of life getting to see the people and be around people. Normal. Just a few minutes of normal human interchange. It helped.

Finally when we had to start selling candy the times away from home increased and yet the terror and darkness remained in my soul because I knew when I was at home the fear would always be there. So, sadly, it stayed with me when I was away. I just didn’t have to face it head on for the few hours I was away.

I had no idea why I felt the way I felt about the cat. It was spontaneous and thrilling and enthralling and all consuming, this feeling I would get when I had control of the cat and could let it have hope again after I would make it go unconscious. Then I felt such sadness and pity and remorse and I would want to love the cat and comfort the cat. But like a burning surge in my heart I would want to choke the cat again. Then the sadness and pity and remorse and compassion would flood me again. I did not know enough at the time to be concerned. I was simply experiencing it. And felt so guilty.

I believe I was experiencing what I was seeing enacted at home. And for some reason it helped me process what I was experiencing to reenact it. But I also believe the level of cruelty I was using toward the cat and towards my own dogs was something that was corrosive to my soul. It may be explained by a diagnosis such as dissociative identity disorder but I would have many years before I would understand much less begin to heal from what I was doing to my own soul in recreating cruel experiences in smaller more helpless beings.

After I had left my family I was with my girlfriend one time after we had gotten to know one another quite well. Out of nowhere, as we were sitting quietly in the car, I slapped her face. I was not mad. I was not upset. We had not been fighting. I did not slap her hard. Only hard enough to be uncomfortable and shocking to her. Then this horrible sick feeling came over me as she started to cry. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and asked me why. Why had I slapped her? She got out of the car and went into her home. I was shocked. I was scared. I was sick to my stomach. Suddenly I began to cry.

I didn’t really understand why I was crying but the crying got harder and harder. I sat in the car outside her house at the curb and cried for an hour. At the time I had no idea why I was crying. I don’t believe I even yet connected the horrible sick feeling I felt when I saw her cry with my own wrongdoing in hitting her. I now think I didn’t even understand that there could be a normal cause and effect between an abusive wrong behavior and the victim’s response of crying or sadness or anger. Those normal responses were not allowed in my house and I think I didn’t understand I was in the presence of completely normal and healthy in this beautiful and strong young woman I was dating!

Her mother told her ‘the first time a boy hits you it is his fault; the second time a boy hits you it is your fault!’ My girlfriend told me it was never to happen again. And it never did. It never happened again, not to this very second. A few months later she asked me why I had hit her. I still had no answer but I told her it would never happen again. It was not even because of anger or some difficulty. It was very much like what I had done with the cat. I did it because of something that was happening inside me. Not for any other reason. The slap had nothing to do with my girlfriend and everything to do with the poison that was inside of my soul. This poison came from what I witnessed daily in my home in the form of cruel abuse perpetrated against me and my family members.

If you have read my blog you know the years I spent and the hard work I had to put into understanding and healing from all the years of abuse at my father’s hand. The best I have ever been able to understand about these aspects of my behavior is simply I was trying to figure out, at some level, why the world was the way it was and why my family was the way it was, and why there was such a difference. And I was trying to comprehend the conflict of rage and love I felt for my father and my mother, trying to reconcile these deep conflicting feelings.

At some level I had learned if you love another living being you hurt them. Of course this was not conscious but it was deep within me as a conflict and came out in bizarre ways that were hurtful. I wanted to see if another living being could hurt like I hurt and if hurting another being was the way it had to be to make sense of life. I also wonder if I did indeed have dissociative identity disorder. It is often a diagnosis that is not made for years, but it stems from early, ongoing and extreme physical or sexual abuse. It can manifest itself on a spectrum of passive disengagement and withdrawal from the active, present environment all the way to multiple personality disorder. I think it helps me to see why I always felt like others were living and I was watching. I was truly disengaging from my own life to protect myself emotionally from it…

Some of you may be confused by the emotional detachment that many of us from abuse have experienced. In my view, this is actually a gift God gave us in the way He made our minds. We have the ability if we are in the middle of war, car accidents, abuse or other horrific circumstances to shut down our normal emotions to deal with what we must deal with right in front of us. I see that as a tremendous gift. But what we have to do if our abuse was ongoing is often to get help to reconnect with those emotions we shut down. To not have a normal connect between present circumstances and emotions can do us and our families great harm. We must work to reconnect with that little boy or girl or woman or man who got hurt and give ourselves a chance to be whole again.

I have no idea if this resonates with any of you who came from chronic, early abuse. Boys are more likely to be involved in abuse of animals and certainly each child is different. If you know of a child who is abusing animals don’t take it as just “curiosity” of a child. See it for the huge cry for help it is. There is a very strong correlation between abusing animals and future domestic violence. For those of us who were around repeated and terrorizing violence it hurt us tremendously but it also set us up for behaviors down the road. If you have struggled with behaviors or actions that seem way out of proportion to what the circumstances seem to call for, know that the person exhibiting these behaviors may have unresolved trauma in their lives. And we trauma victims often wall off our emotions so that we can’t even feel what a victim is going through.

There is hope in the process of healing in this. Please take my experiences and use them as a jumping off point for yourselves. And even if what you have experienced is different from my life story, please contact me if you want to talk this through. I am available and I encourage you to take the step to talk to someone about what you think is unspeakable. Remember, shame has such power over us unless we bring it out of the dark and out of our isolation and get help in an affirming environment.

I know, I know. This seems so unfair. Your perpetrator hurt you so badly and “trained” you to think abuse is normal. And then made it far easier for you to do. And you may have been disconnected from the normal emotions you should have felt from doing wrong towards an animal or person. Well it is unfair! But let’s take that unfairness, examine it in the light of day and detoxify its power over us. And let’s begin healing so we make sure this doesn’t happen again. We can help each other in this!

Sincerely,

Mark Phelps

Repent Without Regret

Ever think about how often perfectionism gets people into trouble? It’s the impossible standard you put on yourself and others that makes you at best a schoolmarm or at worst a tyrant. Neither of which is easy to live with. And the perfectionist is never satisfied. And that lack of satisfaction haunts our lives.

Do you know what I think? Perfectionists deep down have a desire to please. Ourselves, others and even God. So we put an unhealthy standard on ourselves and then get busy flogging ourselves every time we don’t live up to those standards. Am I saying it is wrong to have standards of excellence and to work hard? I am not! The Bible speaks plainly about the importance of excellence in our work. Hard work brings some amazing results, and we are often proud of those results.

But how do we actually deal with God’s standards and ours? God’s standards are that we are to be holy. Just the way He is. The funny thing about God is at the same time He sets this very high bar knowing it will be so good for us if we live up to it. He knows if we try to be loving, just, kind, honest and act in integrity the way He is it will profoundly change our lives. But….do you know what the rub is? We can’t live up to His standards and He knows it. Oh great. Those of you who have lived under an impossibly high standard of parents or bosses are already cringing.

But… God builds in an amazing and creative solution to His high, really impossible standards. He asks us to be holy and not sin but lets us know He has a Son who can stand in for us when it’s our turn to be punished for our sin and wrongdoing. Jesus Christ steps in FOR us and pays for our mistakes and sins with His own life. We’re rescued from this mess because Jesus did everything perfectly that we couldn’t. And we’ve chosen to receive the gift He gives us by believing that it is true. It’s an act of faith. We were shown amazing mercy by God. And the best part is He offers this gift to everybody on the planet. We have the choice to turn away from the way we have been living our lives and turn to Him to receive this amazing gift.

God does two big things when we turn the rudder of our lives toward Him. He forgives us of our sin. That is showing us mercy. But then He does something more. He gives us the grace to live our lives as His sons and daughters. With our heads held high and in freedom. We are similar to death row prisoners deserving punishment but the great news is Jesus takes our place on death row. And then He helps us walk out of the prison we’ve made of our lives in a really different way. He lets us walk out as sons and daughters.

Do you know what sons and daughters of God get to do? We get to spend time with Him and talk to Him. This ability we have to connect with God is His gift of love to us. Part of His love allows us to talk with God; we can talk with Him out loud or in our hearts when we are alone. The exciting reality for us is He hears each word, even our unspoken thoughts. Once we belong to His family we are never alone again.

When I begin to worry or am distressed I start talking out loud (if I am alone!) to God as if He is right in the room with me. I try to divert my worry immediately into prayer. Even if I am not alone I try to do that same thing, taking my worry into prayer, within my own mind. I start by rehearsing the circumstances, describing them to the Lord and then continuing on with prayer about the circumstances I’m concerned about. Even with the feelings of fear or upset still in my chest or stomach I try to start right away into conversation with the Lord. This has taken me some time to make this a habit but it has been a wonderful one to develop.

For me, even harder than worries I find myself struggling with, are the feelings I get when I have made a mistake. Especially if it seems like a big mistake! When I make a mistake I feel an immense amount of guilt. I feel like a failure. When I feel like I have let my daughters down or my wife down I also am upset because I feel like I have let God down. My heart sinks within me. Sometimes I actually lose physical strength. As soon as I am able I rush to my wife or my daughter and apologize and they are always willing to forgive me.

One thing I have been working on is to have compassion for myself when I do make a mistake. I have learned I have a lot of compassion for other people and often very little for myself. Sometimes I say things to myself I would never let someone say about my wife or daughters. I can be very harsh with myself. Maybe you find yourself doing the same thing. Somehow thinking it will help. What I find it does for me is tend to slow me down from the things God has given me to do in this life. Lacking compassion for myself and beating myself up has never produced much other than anxiety! So, going to ones I love and telling them what has happened, asking forgiveness and MOVING ON to what is next in my life has taken discipline. I have to remind myself to have compassion and kindness toward me like I would toward anyone else. And doing that has made my life more productive and I think has allowed me to have even more compassion for others who are struggling when I’m compassionate with myself.

So while going directly to the person I’ve hurt has worked with people in my life for years it was always harder for me to do this in my relationship with God when I thought I had failed Him. I always assumed He was disappointed in me. I always felt a distance in my relationship with Him. Instead of running to the Lord immediately I would wrestle with my feelings until I was able to finally tell Him I was sorry. Even then I still felt a distance from Him, for a while at least. Then I would resolve not to make any mistakes again especially if it is a mistake that I have made more than once. Do you hear the perfectionism in that? I believed I had to do most of the work to get things right between me and God. Forgetting that He had a God sized heart and was tremendously open to forgiving me! Always! But the bottom line is mistake making is a very painful business for many of us and we think if we could just avoid mistakes altogether we would be alright. (Oh the pain of perfectionism! Who could imagine not making any more mistakes? Um…maybe a perfectionist?!)

Over the years it has become less agonizing for me as I have learned in my heart (not just intellectually assenting to this truth) that God made me right with Him when I accepted the gift that Jesus gave me when He died. Made me right forever! Perhaps you have a person in your life that you love so much that there really is nothing they could do that you wouldn’t forgive them for. That you are entirely predisposed to believe the best about them! Well that is the way God sees us who are His children. There is an old–fashioned Bible word called “justified” that describes our relationship with God right after we have received the gift of eternal life. We are “justified” which means God’s demands for justice have been accomplished.

We who deserved to die to pay for our own sins now have Jesus taking that punishment for us. He takes our penalty and pays it. In full! Do you remember Christ’s last words on the cross right before He died? He said “it is finished.” In the original language that was actually financial terminology that meant “paid in full.” Christ paid all that needed to be paid for our wrongs. He completed the transaction! And that action on His part makes us right before God. Completely! It is God who has already done the justifying by having Christ die on the cross to pay for our sin and wrong. Years ago I taught myself a simple definition of ‘justified’. For me it simply means ‘just as if I’d never sinned.’ If we continue our analogy to death row it’s not just that we’re pardoned by God. No. It’s as if we had never been charged with the crime! Isn’t that amazing?

So, did this new concept immediately take effect? That I would understand it’s as if I never did anything wrong? Well, no! Another important step I needed to make in my relationship to God was to learn not to keep saying I am sorry to God all the time! Reading that may sound odd at first. What’s wrong with saying you are sorry for wrongdoing? We have to do this with our friends and family or we will not have very good relationships, right? But with God there was a subtle way my apologizing was not building relationship with Him.

I have come to the realization that if the main way I am relating to God when I make a mistake is always saying I’m sorry, and repeating that same cycle, then I am missing a big part of what God is wanting to do in my life! Of course we certainly do not want to do things wrong intentionally. I am not suggesting that we are free to do things we know are wrong on purpose as if God’s grace and mercy towards us were cheap. I would never want to do intentional wrongs repeatedly. But sometimes we get caught in an endless cycle of doing things we don’t want to do, apologizing, and then doing them again. It doesn’t seem very much like the kind of life we expect to live if we are daughters and sons of the King. King Jesus. We are human, of course. But at some point, God helped me to see how He wanted me off the sin/sorry/sin/sorry cycle. And honestly I was very glad to get off the treadmill!

God wants us to walk in the freedom of knowing Him and knowing we are completely free to be ourselves. Even with our flaws and tendencies to stay in the rut of doing things wrong. This sounds like a wonderful goal but how do we go about accomplishing this?! I am suggesting that we completely change the way we try to change. Whoa! What? I want to explore the things that have us on that treadmill we can’t seem to get off of. It will also help us find greater freedom to do the things we want to be doing. Here’s how.

Repentance is a Bible concept that is a little different than just feeling sorry for what we have done. Repentance is a very honest looking at our lives, our mistakes and our sin, agreeing with God that we are wrong in doing the sin, and then doing a complete turnabout from the direction we were heading. Repentance is doing a 180 degree turn from the direction we were going. It is a big concept.

C.S. Lewis once said that repentance is like the pilot of an airplane who happens to be flying directly into a thunderstorm deciding to do a 180 degree turn to avoid the storm. No sane pilot thinks it makes sense to fly into a thunderstorm. It doesn’t take much effort to get the pilot to agree with that. When you start hanging out with a new friend you learn pretty quickly what they are passionate about. You learn what they love and hate. What they see as valuable and what they see as destructive. Things with God are no different.

As we spend time with God we learn what He thinks are wrong thoughts and behaviors but we also learn about all the wonderful things God has given to us. And the God who made us has given us a whole lot to allow us to experience happiness and even joy that are perfectly right! This process requires a reorientation of our thinking and really our being. If we are not doing wrong then we don’t have to repent of course. But what do we do when we find ourselves doing the same things we know are wrong? Or sinful? Or unkind? Or just not the people we want to be? If repentance is a good biblical concept and something God asks of us, then why do we get caught in the cycle of feeling so crummy? I think a verse in the Bible speaks to a subtle but powerful truth that can help us.

The Bible says, "...the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death." (2 Corinthians 7:10). Okay, so this is suggesting we can actually repent but do it without regret? And that repentance isn’t what’s getting us in trouble at all but the regret? This verse brings up that we are going to have sorrow in this life. But the kind of sorrow we get from what the world has to offer gives us a lot of sorrow. And that the sorrow we get from knowing God makes us actually want to turn away from the wrong we’ve done and turn the rudder of our ship toward God. And that in that turning we won’t have regret. That sounds wonderful! But what if I am the king or queen of worldly regret? And can find 42 things to regret about what I have done since this morning?

One of the first steps is that we are going to have to re-train our hearts about how to do our repenting. This verse says “godly sorrow produces repentance WITHOUT REGRET.” We still get to agree with God that we’ve done wrong in our lives but coming to that place won’t have to be accompanied by regret. Can you spell relief?

This whole point/counterpoint between godly sorrow and worldly sorrow is worth really thinking about. We should feel sorrow because of sin, but God's will is that when we do the repenting/turning away that’s required that we’ll be able to do it "without regret." Biblical repentance doesn’t mean we just try to improve ourselves by making ourselves feel "bad" because of what we have done wrong. It means that agreeing with God that something we have done is wrong and turning with our whole hearts away from it without regret. If we have repented then we are forgiven and we don’t need to go over it again and again. We did it…then we repent…and we let it go. Why? Because if God has forgiven us He won’t bring it up again nor even remember it. So why do we want to go on day after day beating ourselves up. Why not put that to rest and believe God that we are forgiven?

Making ourselves feel bad about what we have done wrong may punish us into a temporary appearance of outward conformity, but it does nothing to help change our behavior long term. The Bible says, "...the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and harsh treatment of the body self-abasement...are of no value in restraining sensual fleshly indulgence." (Col. 2:23). Repentance by making ourselves feel a bunch of regret is harsh treatment of the body and has "no value in restraining sensual indulgence."

Drowning ourselves in condemnation may feel religious, but it is not God's will for us to grow that way. Making ourselves feel bad for what we do wrong is "self-made religion" because the pain we feel seems to justify our wrong doing or “fix” it somehow. Do we really think that God wants us to beat ourselves up over and over again for what we did and for what we repented for already? Should we continue to think about it again and again? Does that make us into the pure, wholesome, mature people of God He wants us to be? I honestly believe wallowing in sorrow over our mistakes keeps us locked in the identity we have of “wrongdoer.” And if that’s what we think of ourselves, what are we likely to do? Live from our identity! By the same token, if I realize I’ve done something wrong and choose to agree with God and ask His help to change I can step into the identity of “son” or “daughter” and I know I am cared about. My identity as God’s loved son has me doing things that are worthy of that identity.

No amount of feeling bad will ever make the payment for or justify what we have done wrong. Wrong things done have consequences and hurt people or hurt us. Self-inflicted pain from guilt doesn’t actually make us right before God because, "God is the one who justifies (makes us right before Him)" (Rom. 8:33b). Condemning ourselves after we have done something wrong gives us a false sense of being "good" again. Self-condemnation keeps us bent on earning a sense of right standing before God and prevents us from putting our faith in the suffering Christ did for us and the pain He felt on our behalf. Self-condemnation gives us a false sense of goodness before God.

Remember I said it would take me a long time to draw back close to God after I made a mistake. Then finally I was able to but slowly. I learned that I needed to stop closing myself off from God! I needed to learn to accept God’s love in the most practical of ways. God knew my sin before I ever knew Him and He knows my sin after I come to know Him. Surely His love for me and His kindness toward me is not less now than before I was ever aware of how Christ died for me and gave Himself for me.

Trying to motivate improvement by condemning ourselves makes it so we want to hide from God—not draw near to Him. It closes us off inside. Jesus told the religious leaders of His day, "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people..." (Matthew 23:13; see also 2 Corinthians 3:17). When we try to motivate our own repentance or anybody else’s and hope for change by condemnation we are being pharisaical and are shutting ourselves—and others—from the freedom necessary for experiencing closeness to God.

If there is only one "guideline" I could give you about changing your heart after you have done something wrong it’s to have you let go of the need for self-condemnation. Directing your heart away from self-condemnation is not easy. We have this notion that to have any compassion for ourselves is wrong. The Bible tells us to love others and treat them with respect and compassion and love. But if we were to tape record the malicious, disrespecting and mean-spirited things we say ABOUT ourselves when we fail, we might all be shocked. We have to learn to speak truth about ourselves.

We can say things like “the way I just spoke to my teenager was rude and disrespectful. That is not the way you want me to act, God. Please help me exercise self-control around this young person to build her up and help her become the person you want her to be. Lord, don’t let me flog myself and go into a tailspin but just repent, get your help and move on to being a more loving parent.” This may take repeated efforts to change the way we talk to ourselves. We are not to slander others and we certainly shouldn’t slander ourselves. My encouragement to you in this is to not ever give up on this effort! It will take practice but it will bring life back to you and those you are around.

Please don’t miss these two things. Repentance requires that you retrain your heart to stop trusting self-inflicted guilt and that you start trusting Christ’s ability to help you live this new life with His help. Christ paid for the sins you committed and that is an amazing gift. But the gift keeps giving in that He also gave you the power to live a new kind of life. For repenting to function without crippling regret we have to retrain our hearts. We really have to think hard about what we believe in our heart is the best way to correct ourselves and do better the next time. If you can delight in ministering to yourself in this way think of the delight you will have in ministering to others in this way! Kindness towards yourself as you are learning to be a better, more loving person is as powerful as kindness towards others. There is actually nothing biblical about being mean to others or being mean to yourself! There is a wonderful verse in the Bible that says “it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.” That is true and I really believe God wants His kindness towards us to spill over into our own kindness toward ourselves.

Observe your reaction when you do something wrong. Do you stay away from God? What gives you freedom to draw near to God again? Kindness! God’s kindness! Do you trust the forgiveness of God because you made yourself feel badly for long enough? Try something new. See if you can trust the forgiveness of God because of the power of the cross and God’s cleansing of your whole self.

We won’t ever live right before God if we are motivated by self-condemnation! Consider it sin to feel any sense of justification or righteousness because of how much pain you inflict on yourself through self-condemnation. The security you need is not from how well you protect yourself from God. Hate any sense of "righteousness" you feel because of self-inflicted pain from condemnation.

Teach Your Heart to treat yourself like you want to treat others. Discipline motivated by fear, self-condemnation, and guilt won’t change you at the deep levels that are needed. There is too much in life coming at us too fast for us to treat ourselves this way. You have to help yourself to not fall into the pattern of trying to flog yourself for your mistakes and sin. It isn't enough for you to know in your head that self-condemnation is an ineffective and sinful way to repent. Your heart has to learn a more effective way to correct unwanted behaviors and turn to God. You may need to ask God, the Great Healer, to show you what is true about your heart so you can understand what is going on. And what keeps you from accepting God’s unfailing love and kindness toward you as you pick yourself up after a mistake or a sin . . . with His help.

Remember that shame lives best in darkness, isolation and our “not telling.” When you get brave enough to tell God exactly what happened and exactly how it is making you feel, you have brought your concern and your pain into the light by telling your story. And you are no longer alone. God has infinite patience for us and our lives. And our smallest attempts to live in His light. It is hard, but with practice it gets easier. And our burdens get lifted right off our shoulders!

Use thanks and praise to help your heart hear how good and safe it is to trust the cross of Christ. Listen to what you are thanking God about! React with thanks and praise at the slightest indication of self-condemnation or self-based righteousness.

“Father, I am a mess. I’ve done it again. And I am SO ashamed of myself I can barely stand it! I am trying not to hate myself and my actions. You are a holy God and look what I just said to my stepdaughter in such a mean tone of voice. What was I thinking?! But I understand you are my Papa. And that you love me in spite of the worst thing I think or do. And I am amazed. Thank you God! I believe I am your son. Well, I’m starting to. So I am telling you my sin but I know you say you’ll forgive me. I really struggle with believing that but right now I guess I just will believe you. Thank you. Now Papa, will you help me clean up this mess with this young stepdaughter of mine and reconnect with her? I believe you, God that you want to do this for me. This is so hard to be so honest with you, but here I am, God. Thank you….”

Get your heart to hear that it is far more effective to change by hearing thanks and praise to God for the truth about how God truly feels about you and your situation. The cross is more powerful than your sin. Thank the Lord with great joy that you don't have to put your faith in the severity of your self-condemnation. Delight your heart by praise toward God that you don’t have to wait to trust the forgiveness of God until you are "done feeling bad."

Biblical repentance is a more effective way to grow—a way of delight toward God—not of contempt toward yourself. You have to get to the heart of the matter—without self-condemnation. Delight can help you change. Joy is the strongest bond known to man and the joy of the Lord is our strength. It binds our heart with God’s. We need God’s strength in our lives. Don’t shut yourself off from God when you make a mistake. He is the only Person who is completely trustworthy with your heart!

Christians tend to feel: “I have something wrong inside and so why shouldn't I hide from God?’ But God is the one who gave us this spiritual awareness to begin with, right? So why do we feel we need to hide from Him when He knows all about us? Would you hide from your doctor after you found out you had an infection? Wouldn’t that be counterproductive, especially if this doctor was willing and able to help you? We have to learn to accept that something is wrong in our lives but that we can still move forward with repentance because God loves and understands us. If you have this awareness you can be sure that God is calling you closer to Himself. But He also wants you to take steps to turn the affections of your heart more fully toward Him. Remember that you can move forward without having to punish yourself into improvement over and over for the same sin!

The thing is when you sin…repent…do a 180 away from the sin and toward God… then you really are free to let it go because God has let it go. Once forgiven of a sin you are truly forgiven by God. It doesn’t mean that there are no consequences for our actions while on earth because with sin comes consequences, but once we are truly repentant and forgiven by God that sin is gone for all eternity. Let it go and just move on and do what is right. Sounds simple, right? But it takes practice like any wonderful habit of friendship or relationship.

Next time you sin again run to the Lord! Don’t stay away because you sinned. Give it to God and get in right standing with Him right then. He wants this for you! He wants to help you walk closer to him every day and not get drug down by staying stuck in sorrow about your sin. He’d rather help you walk as a precious son or daughter who knows you are forgiven. And are being helped up to keep walking on a good path with him! Do it right on the spot even if you don’t feel like it. He has already made you in right standing with Him. His grace and forgiveness of you is big! Accept His free gift so you can keep moving. And move with new freedom! It is for freedom that Christ has set you free!

Mark Phelps

The Good News Of Jesus Christ

Go into the whole world and proclaim this message: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

What truth is that? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s this: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son. If we are going to look at what God meant by this, we have to look to why He bothered to give His Son Jesus to the world. But we also have to look to the cross Jesus died on. We have to look at what was essentially the electric chair of the Roman world, the cross. It was a method of torture for the worst criminals. Roman citizens could not be crucified because of the privilege of their citizenship. I want you to look at the cross. Come to the cross. This message of the cross is for everyone. Christ is alive! Of all the things you will ever see or hear, there is only one message that will change people’s lives and hearts. There is a way, if you come by the way of the cross. We receive our freedom purchased by the ransom at the cross.

Wait, ransom? Ransom is an interesting word. Today it mostly means the redemption of a prisoner or slave or goods for the price demanded. An older meaning of the word is a means of deliverance or rescue from punishment for sin, especiallythe payment of a redemptive fine. Actually what Christ did on the cross was a combination of both of those. Each of us was found guilty for sins we have committed and we are required to pay the price for what we have done. When you think about today’s modern climate and the whole thought process behind whether to pay terrorists off to buy back an abducted person you realize the government has to think clearly about whether to ever pay the ransom. In Christ’s case He willingly paid the ransom price without being asked, and the payment? His own death! The ransom price to pay for the whole world.

I want us all to understand the meaning of this cross. Not the cross that hangs on a wall or around someone’s neck but the real cross of Christ. The cross expresses the great love of God for man. It is scarred and blood-stained. His was a rugged cross. His real purpose for coming was to die! I know that many will react with confusion or horror at this message but it is the truth. And with all my heart I want to leave you with the truth that happened on this cross. With the life of Jesus hanging on that cross God said “I love you! I love you! I have loved you with an everlasting love!” He loves you and he is willing to forgive you of all sins.

On our churches we have a cross. It’s embossed on our Bibles. It’s an ornament that we wear around our necks, Christians and non-Christians. Research shows that objects that are a regular part of our lives begin to lose their impact on us as symbols when we look at them all the time. And apparently it happens with crosses, too, if we are not careful to keep their symbolism and meaning very alive. I have wondered, since the cross is a symbol of torture and execution if what we should do is rotate our necklaces and symbols with other methods of execution once in a while. So sometimes we should wear electric chairs and sometimes we should have tools of beheading. Other times we should wear a noose. Okay, I’ve said this to make a point and I’m not sure I’m really suggesting this, but I want us to talk about the meaning of the cross till we understand it.

But when we talk about the depth and the real meaning of the cross it becomes an offense! Why is that? The cross is offensive because it confronts people. What it confronts us with is our sin problem and, it is a confrontation that all of us must face. Our sin problem is that our sin has to be paid for in this moral world we live in. Christ died on the cross to pay for our sin but He doesn’t force that gift on us. We have to individually choose to respond to and accept that gift. It is a beautiful gift that will impact our entire eternity but we have to accept it. God is a gentleman always and He will not force that gift on anyone.

We are people with different backgrounds and we have various needs. And we are all objects of God’s mighty love, to the point that he gave his son, his only son to die upon a cross. The cross was the most terrible form of execution by the Romans for criminals. And Jesus endured all that in our place because of our sins. We deserved the cross. We deserve hell. We deserve judgment and all that that means.

I know there are many people who dispute this. People do not want to hear that they are sinners. To many people it is offensive. The cross is offensive because it directly confronts the evils that dominate so much of this world. You see the Bible teaches that all of us have done wrong. We have all gone astray. We’ve everyone turned to our own way of doing things, even if it is at someone else’s expense. And when we turn to our own way we go astray from God’s way. And that includes the whole human race. Every one of us, the 7.2 billion souls that are now alive, have turned away from God.

And that is why the world is in such terrible danger right now. It’s not dangerous so much because we have atomic bombs. It’s dangerous because of the human heart behind the bombs. Hearts filled with hatred, envy, strife, greed, lust and all the other things that could pull the trigger.

One reason the cross is offensive to people is because it demands. It doesn’t suggest. It demands a new life style in all of us. Sin is a disease in the human heart. It affects the mind and the will and the emotions. Every part of our being is affected by this disease. How can we break this bondage? How can we be set free? God helps us break those chains. The Bible says: “If any man is in Christ he is a new creature. Old things pass away. Everything becomes new.” Christ can make you a totally new person. It sounds inviting and it sounds impossible. But it is the most real invitation you will ever get. From a God who can back up His promise.

On that cross God was laying our sins on Jesus. Christ’s crucifiers not only put nails in his hands but before that they had scourged him. A Roman scourge was a terrible thing. They took whips embedded with little pieces of glass and stone pellets on those whips and beat a person almost to death. And then they took an extremely heave cross and made him carry it which in his weakened condition was almost impossible. Jesus was finally assisted by someone who a guard ordered to do the carrying or he might not have made it to a place outside of Jerusalem. And then they put nails in his hands.

If you decide to Google the mechanics of crucifixion you will find it to be true torture. The victim finally is asphyxiated because he can’t get enough air in his lungs. But even that was not the real suffering. The real suffering is when God’s anger toward sin was poured down on Christ’s head. In the Bible it says (Matthew 27) that the earth turned dark for three solid hours while God was pouring down the punishment for sin on Jesus’ body. You can feel some of Jesus’ anguish in this ordeal when he said: “My God my God why have you forsaken me!?” In that terrible moment he and God the Father were separated.

Not long after Jesus made that statement his life on this earth was going to end. But, I want to take a station break and talk about what happened RIGHT at the moment He died. It amazes me every time I read it. Here’s how it happened.

“At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, ‘Surely he was the Son of God!’”

I don’t know about you but I think I would have liked to have been one of those guards. And be there to watch people pop out of tombs and walk around. Every time I read this passage I think of God the Father watching the whole thing and being incredibly proud of His Son having giving such an amazing gift to mankind. Call me a goof, but I can’t help but wonder if the Father couldn’t help Himself in His joy over what had just happened that he had to raise a few people from the dead to show people how real His Son was! And that believing in His Son was going to have earth shattering consequences in their lives not unlike tombs opening up! I really think He did it to give us hope for our futures. And hope for right now. Wander through Matthew 27 in the Bible sometime if you want some encouragement.

What still amazes me in all this is that Christ was a willing victim. Christ willingly shed his blood. A decision made before time began that Jesus would live as a human being and die for all mankind was accomplished in that willing act. And the shedding of that blood carries with it God’s very life. The shedding of Christ’s blood is the meeting place between God and man. The Bible says without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. And that is what Christ was doing on the cross. He was essentially paying reparations to God for our sins.

Jesus did a lot on that cross the day he gave his life for mankind. He was paying for rape, and murder, and torture and kidnapping and human trafficking and heinous crimes but he was also paying for mean spiritedness and selfishness and petty things that we think, say and do every day. He paid for it all. What Christ accomplished on the death row of all humankind was to offer us forgiveness for all we had done and even would do in the future. It was the greatest single action with the greatest consequence of all time. The cross and the resurrection of Christ offer forgiveness of sins. It offers a whole new life and actually offers you eternal life if you come to the cross by turning from your former direction away from God and by an act of faith turning toward Him and accepting His amazing gift.

There is no other way to be saved from the consequences of our own sin except through the cross of Christ. We actually have no ability to make this payment on our own, much as we might like to. The plan that the Father and His Son, Jesus, came up with before time ever began was that Jesus would pay for our sin through human sacrifice. Him! The God/man. Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me”. The only way to the Father; Father God; is through His son Jesus Christ.

Now why Jesus? He’s the only one who was born into this world without sin, but more than that He was the only righteous one. The Father wanted someone without sin to pay for the sins of the whole world and the only human who has ever existed who filled that bill was Jesus. And when you come to him and accept His gift of eternal life (yours to accept or reject!) you become clothed in his righteousness. Another way to explain that is that God now looks at you the way He sees Christ. And since Christ is sinless and without even a blemish on His soul, guess what? That is how God sees you! Squeaky clean and beautifully new! God no longer sees your sin, he no longer sees your own heart, he sees Jesus’ heart. But with your beautiful new heart all wrapped up in Jesus.

Now I don’t understand everything about how this all works. There are many things about the cross and about salvation/us being rescued that I do not understand. And I am not told by God that I have to understand it all. I’m told by Him that I need just a mustard seed’s worth of faith (a really small seed!) to believe. And the best thing is anybody can believe! This gift is open to all! A blind man can believe. A deaf man can believe. An old person can believe. A young person can believe and that word ‘believe’ means commit. I commit my life totally to him.

Jesus Christ from the cross says: “I will save you! I will forgive you! I will change you! I will make you a new person if you come to the cross by repentance/turning away and faith.” Come to Christ!

When you come to Christ you come by the way of repentance. To repent means to change, to turn from your sins and turn to Jesus Christ and say: “I’m a sinner, I need forgiveness and I know that you are the only one that can change me”. You will eventually see your life change, but this is a process that the Lord assists you with every step of the way. He does NOT leave you in your own mess without a way of escape from a lifestyle that for many of us was in real opposition to His ways.

The Bible says that in spite of our rebellion and rejection God loves us. And actually He always has. From before the world and time even began. He loves us so much that He gave his son to die for our sins. And when Christ died on that cross he became guilty of lying, he became guilty of slander, he became guilty of jealousy, and he became guilty of the filthiest dirty sins. Jesus lived the life I could not live and he died the death I should have died. Christ took the hell that you and I deserve in to his own body.

Now God said: ‘Receive Him! Believe in Him! Put your trust and your confidence in Him and I will forgive your sins and I will guarantee you eternity in heaven. It’s all yours and it’s all free. All you have to do is receive it.”

Today I’m asking you to put your trust in Christ. I’m going to ask you to pray this prayer, sentence by sentence as you read along on the page here. “Dear Heavenly Father I know that I’m a sinner and I ask for your forgiveness. I believe your Son died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins. I repent of my sins. I invite you to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow you as my Lord and Savior. In Jesus name, Amen.”

He’s alive! I’ve given my life, not to a dead Christ, but to a living Christ. And he’s given me a song to sing. I have reason for existence. When I prayed this prayer it was as though the God of the whole universe had shown up. And the first thing I noticed was that he is so good and so holy and so wonderful, too wonderful for words.

I know where I’ve come from. I know why I’m here. I know where I’m going. Do you?

God loves you!

For God so loved the World

That he gave his one and only son

That whoever believes in him

Shall not perish

But have eternal life

John 3:16

Mark Phelps

Breaking Up Concrete

Today, 2015, I love Jesus. I understand and know his love for me more than I ever have in my life. I experience the presence of Jesus, personally, in my life every day as he provides my strength and my courage and my hope. He shows himself to be a faithful friend indeed. Jesus is the friend of sinners. I have experienced this in so many ways over so many years.

And if you asked me today what I believe is the most important and the very highest priority of life my answer would be different today than in years past. Today I believe the most important and wonderful thing we have to do in this life is to know and understand and love others, know and understand and love ourselves and know and understand and love God. We are to love God with all of our hearts, all of our minds, all of our strength and all of our soul! And we are to love others as we love ourselves. And I believe this will be our primary work when we get to heaven.

But I have not always known Jesus’ love or experienced his love or believed that knowing Jesus and knowing others and knowing myself was important. I have had to work hard at knowing and understanding this, and living this.

My wife once described my life as she observed it. She believes the effect of abuse in my early life was like placing a heavy layer of concrete over my heart and mind; over my entire life really. And the work I did in the years of healing went a long way toward blasting that concrete into smaller pieces and removing it from my heart. But the blasting took much longer than just the years I spent in organized formal healing therapy. In her loving and careful way my wife has expressed the reality that, like a broken dish, the cracks in my foundation may never completely heal. But with God’s help I can learn to be a good life manager and learn to live a full life even though the cracks may always be there.

The very fabric of my heart was stained from the abuse and the lies of my father. The washing and cleaning of my heart has taken most of my life. It is possible for me even to this today to suddenly realize I have just been living the last few weeks or days of my life under the subtle influence of some early mistreatment or lie. And then I will finally sense the presence of the poison and have to break up more concrete and cry my way back out of some dark place back to the light of life. The great part is that once I realize what is happening I know I can do the work to get out of that place.

These experiences may be categorized as spiritual warfare, the normal on-going struggle of living a life with Christ and fighting back against the effects of our mortal enemy. But at times it is more than just struggling with normal day to day battles. Sometimes I realize the quiet presence of steely cold fingers tightening their grip around my neck and cutting off my ability to breathe freely again. And I have to fight back. What I do is immerse myself in the truth of the love of my Jesus. I have to get to sections of His word firmly in my mind. I have to choose to immerse my mind in his love. I search out music that describes his love and care or his splendor and glory and power and hide myself away in quiet solitude. I stay there waiting until his precious love and magnificence gives me the strength of heart to break back through the cold concrete and warms my heart. I wait until He reminds me of his love and faithfulness again. Joy returns and with it strength, wondrous strength and peace that defy any circumstance.

This has been a fight of mine for years. In earlier years my fight was focused on getting myself to understand that God was not my mortal enemy. That was actually a huge battle for me because of what my father repeatedly taught us as children. I had to learn that the Lord is in fact a faithful friend, a friend who was working wonders in my life before I ever knew he was there, and who has not stopped doing good continually for me. I had to fight to understand that God was not going to crush me or annihilate me or turn me into a grease spot. Now these battles seldom surface anymore. I see this as amazing proof of how far the Lord has brought me in my healing.

Later the fight turned to focus on the truth of God’s love for me, his desire to have a close, intimate relationship with me. This fight included things like believing he was not standing next to me ready to clobber me when I made a mistake. And the fight included my learning to believe that he was not condemning me at my points of greatest weakness.

I had to learn that God was near to me and desired me to turn to him in my weakness and failure; learn not to hide from him. I mean if things were going good and I was rolling along pretty well feeling safe and secure in my relationship with God, I did not want to admit when I would come upon some confusion or difficulty, or heart pain, or that I may have made a mistake. Then I would have to break through more concrete and work at getting back to the place of knowing and being assured again that nothing I could do would cause God to turn away from me and abandon me.

Part of the breaking of concrete includes breaking through shame.

Do you remember in other blogs we’ve said that guilt is what we fill when we have done something wrong, but shame is the feeling that we are wrong and bad?

Part of this work involves me rushing into a flurry of activity to pore over the Holy Scriptures to find passages to remind me and reassure me of who God is. And that he still loves me. When I feel that sense of shame coming over me I want to do something about it. For some of us the shame triggers cause us to even feel things in our bodies . . . dry mouthed, heart racing, heat rising up in our faces. Or for some of you it’s a sense of dread or dirtiness or helplessness. Or a myriad of other things that are our reminders that we are feeling as if we ourselves are bad. And we really do need to find ways to fight against this and regain our sense that we are valuable people.

The breaking up of concrete in my life has meant continuing to work on overcoming the dynamics of abuse, even after the main abuse has been resolved in formal therapy. The fabric of my soul is so saturated with the effects of early abuse that it simply takes on-going work that presents itself at the oddest moments. For me, often the latest round of work only becomes obvious after the battle has subsided and I get in touch with the emotion of what I have just been through . . . again. Then I break down in tears again, strength returns and I come back out fighting the good fight to hold onto the truth even stronger, standing up against the lies in my soul.

You know I sometimes liken the challenge of healing from long-term abuse like that of healing from a difficult cancer surgery. At the moment the surgeon comes out to the waiting room and says the cancer has been removed is almost when the healing really begins. And the person has to recover from the procedure itself but all the atrophy of muscle and tissue, the loss of strength and coordination and the return of normal body weight and function. Sometimes it takes a very long time. And that can happen for victims of abuse, too. Our main therapy for the biggest issues is indeed a triumph of will and of bravery to face all the issues, but it is like a cancer being removed. The person has SO much ground to recover after all the years of loss of the normal activities they never did.

Victims of abuse and other trauma, whether physical or emotional, carry with them the feeling of fear that we feel within our bodies as a tight wire of hyper-vigilance.

As a child, whenever I was going about my business in a normal manner and in the moment, I was most vulnerable. I say this because you would think that in the going about of your normal daily activities you would feel pretty safe. Whenever my father found me in one of those moments, he invariably found reason to find fault and punish me. Of course this was my perception, as the one being abused. I think my father had so little skill in relationship building that the only thing he felt comfortable doing was being in the one-up role of instructor, coach and critiquer. My father had no sense of what it meant to nurture and praise and respect a child for the good things he was doing along his journey.

The closest positive analogy I have of my father is that of a drill sergeant. I think my father almost had that perception of his role with us. He thought if he ever let up on his string of abuse and criticism that we would lose the motivation to keep doing things well. My father had so little sense of the normal motivations of a child’s heart it’s just astounding to me, even now. What my father ended up doing in my life was crushing my heart. Nothing that made me happy was really mine or safe around him. Everything I valued was subject to confiscation or destruction. Maybe the drill sergeant analogy is a pretty apt one.

I went to the store by myself when I was five years old because a ring in the five-cent machine had caught my eye. (Today it would be a dollar or more). I helped myself to a nickel out of my mother’s purse and walked over to the store by myself. When I returned home my mother and father were just heading out the back door to come find me. I had no idea this would be a problem. They had already begun asking me to go shopping for them when they needed something. It seemed a natural thing for me to do . . . go to the store. It was only four blocks away. So what if I was only 5 years old. But my father took the ring and crushed it under his foot while I stood and watched, then gave me a beating. Thankfully for me at that age he was still only beating us with his leather strap instead of the oak mattock handle.

I brought this feeling of impending doom that went along with my father crushing us in soul, body and spirit with me into early adolescence and into my teen years. If ever I felt that I was a little bit secure and on the right track, either I did something to sabotage myself or circumstances set me back. When I was seven years old my father told me to shine his shoes. I plunged myself into this task with my normal intensity and frantic furry. But I hit upon some confusion. I could not tell if his shoes were black or brown. I looked at them and looked at them. I literally agonized over this issue for 30 minutes, knowing if I took much longer I would get beaten for not having his shoes shined in time. In my confusion I could not ask for help. God forbid I would draw any kind of negative attention to myself! Abused children simply cannot risk this!

So I finally decided the shoes were black and I polished them with black shoe polish. Problem! They were not brown or black. They were some unique color I had never heard of and they were to be polished with the clear polish. Oh but I did not know clear polish existed! I had never seen clear polish. No one told me there was clear polish. But I got beaten anyway because I polished the shoes with the wrong polish. I dug the hole in my heart to hide away even deeper.

For me, my life was a feeling that when things are going okay, I must be especially careful to not mess it up. I have to be more watchful of anything that might derail me. I learned to focus on the things that might go wrong rather than living in the moment of things going right. It felt way too risky to enjoy the small pleasures of the moment because to let my guard down risked me getting hurt even worse. And this vigilance is easy to bring forward into your adult life even after your abuse. Well, unless you break up some concrete!

Many who have been abused or brutalized carry with them similar effects. Some call it a nagging stressful anxiety while others call it a hopelessness or despair. Some are paralyzed by it; others choose to face it with courage. But to even attempt to go from the paralysis takes great acts of courage!

For those who face their abuse with courage, there is hope. But the effects of abuse have to be faced again and again. More concrete appears and must be jack-hammered away. There is much concrete and very little sun shining into the heart initially. Eventually more and more sun gets through as the concrete is broken up. Here is what some of the concrete consists of:

Void of Trust - As abused children we were hurt by others who destroyed our trust and took from us childhood’s most precious gift—innocence. If you struggle to define trust then try to define the opposite of trust . . . If you live in “Normal Land” that may be hard for you to do. It may sound like some mental exercise or a game. But for the abused person the opposite of trust would be the visceral feeling abused children carry in their soul. They can’t define it, they can’t talk about it, but it just is!

As a very young boy I was so upset one day wanting my mother and she was not available to me. As usual! I tried everything I could to get her attention. Still failing I flung myself down under the staircase to hide, and hope for her attention; the magical thinking of a little boy. When at last my mother found me under the stairs, as she approached, I stormed out the back door of our house because I was overcome with the hurt and loneliness of having been left so long under that stairwell. I announced ‘I’m leaving this place!” My mother followed me grabbed me and spanked me and told me I was going nowhere. My mother didn’t stop that day to find out what was going on in a little boy’s heart that would make him say he wanted to leave his home.

Perhaps that would have been fine if she had remained with me for even five minutes just to connect with her little boy, but she was off again nowhere to be found. I was left again with no safe harbor in the storm and no assurance within my heart that anyone would ever be there when I needed someone. To date I have no idea how often I have replayed this conflict out in my life of needing someone in some situation but not being able to trust they will be there, not being able to reach out for help. I pretty much go it alone in life. Perhaps I still have big chunks of concrete to break through that lay over parts of my heart keeping it locked in darkness. Sometimes I grow tired of finding just one more chuck of concrete that has to be demolished in order to just live a normal life.

Silence - As abused children we were coerced to be a part of the conspiracy that entrapped us in the abuse, and hid it from those who could help us. We were silenced by force. The last thing we would dream of doing is reaching out for help from someone who could actually help. Isn’t that sad? My father mocked the very people we would think to reach out to (police, teachers, other adults) thereby ensuring we would not think of them as a resource in our time of need. The concrete over this part of our heart seems to grow back even thicker as we try to use the sledge hammer in this section of concrete, and requires re-breaking again and again. Shame grows best in silence and healing comes from telling our stories in a safe place.

Hyper Compassion - As abused children many of us have within our hearts a complete aversion to harming others, for the golden rule is emblazoned on our hearts by the abusive parent as they live out a double standard right before our eyes. We never want anyone to feel what we felt. And when we do lash out, we are appalled at ourselves and want never to do it again. The sad thing is some of us have become comfortable with the language of the abuser and we have to work hard to get their vocabulary out of our language because their actions are NOT in our hearts! But we carry the guilt of our transgressions and are less forgiving of ourselves than we are of those who abused us. Doesn’t that seem an incredible shame? We have been brutalized sometimes but we end up taking out our broken emotions on ourselves.

Because we will not willfully harm another, we are often seen as weak. Others often lord it over us or take advantage of us. But I know many of you are fully aware that anyone can hurt and badger and abuse smaller, younger, and more vulnerable people. That is NO sign of strength. There is a Proverb that says “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, And he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city.” You can see from this that God puts a very high priority on controlling ourselves. God doesn’t just say it isn’t weak, he says it is a bigger deal than capturing a city. Anybody compare your self-controlled, loving behavior to that of being a mighty general in its impact? Well God does…

On the playground at the grade school I used to stand against the outside of the brick building at the point where two walls come together. I would press myself into the corner and watch the children play. It felt safe for a few moments and assured that no one would come up behind me or blind side me with pain. My teachers thought I was shy. It never crossed my mind to say anything. I thought all the children felt the same way I felt. What I was then was a child who had just had the stuffing knocked out of him when it came to confidence. Can you imagine trying to keep the average kid from having something to say? Well, we abused kids did not have that privilege. My hope for many of you is that you have gained your voice as an adult, or are in the process of doing that right now…

Powerless - As abused children we can feel powerless because we are kept powerless by a system of false beliefs that we’ve accepted as truth. These beliefs may be imposed on us by others; they are born of our fears and self-condemnation; they have the potential of keeping us small and helpless. Concrete of this type permeates and covers every inch of our heart.

Warzone - As abused children we were born into a warzone, whether it was a household in Middle America, a shanty in India, a warzone in Asia or a brothel in Indonesia. We did not choose the abuse, the disease, the bombs or to be kidnapped and sexually abused. Others outside our control heaped it upon us. We had no choice where we were born but born we were. Instead of a loving, caring, nurturing environment—something all people must have to be healthy and happy—we were born into misery and despair.

False Expectations - Those who harmed you cannot heal you. Yet this is the justice that we long for in our souls: to be suddenly loved by those who abused us. We hold onto that hope. This is what we did as children. We forgave and forgave, always in the hope that this time, we would do the “right thing” to please our abuser so that we would be welcome and the abuse would stop.

When we were little children perhaps at times things got better for a while or at least the abuse subsided temporarily. Then we get our hopes up that finally we had done whatever manner of atonement required to be forgiven of what we knew not, so that we could be received with love and care and safety. If in our perception this happened, such times were short-lived. The abuse would resume with a vengeance, so we always lived with our guard up. The attacks would often seem so random, so we were always on edge.

Yet we kept going back to our abuser, hoping to be forgiven, hoping to be loved. We knew no different. It’s what children do. We sought our healing through their acceptance. For most of us, that acceptance has never come.

With enough healing work, and concrete blasting we gain the wisdom to realize that the acceptance will never come, and that this is a death that we have to accept, the death of a relationship. When we hold onto it, we are holding onto a corpse. There was never any life in our relationship with our abuser. We were asking for souls in the soulless. Perhaps we are finally able to grieve this death.

Our abuser cannot heal us. They are only capable of harm. We do not have to put ourselves in range of their fiery darts. We couldn’t be free from them when we were children, but we can be free from them now! They will do harm to us as long as they have breath in their lungs. They can be fathers, mothers, pimps, ex-spouses, former molesters, even siblings.

When we turn our backs on them, they will attack us with guilt and obligation. But we’ve never been malicious. We are guilty of nothing. To heal, we must walk away from them and no longer allow them to harm us.

We may take huge losses in doing so. I have taken mine, and it was the greatest loss of my life. I know the pain of malice from those that stayed in the abuse, and of malice that follows you. I am the worst of the worst of evil according to my extended family and my entire family still living in the cult compound truly believe this. I took my tremendous loss and moved towards healing. For to not take the loss, and to still bleed from it, I would never have healed. It was a hard step, but a critical one for me. And it is a critical step for all of you on your journey of healing.

We can choose to bleed from emotional wounds. Or we can choose to not be wounded any more. As abused children, now adults, we have to reach that place where we seek our healing over and above all things, including relationships with those who continue to abuse us. We must choose to no longer go to have our wounds tended by those who wounded us.

So I break more concrete. I had been working my way into the kingdom, or at least attempting to for far too long. I could not believe God would just love me as I am. How could I believe that? My father did not! So I had to be sufficient within myself. Why would I dare show up in front of God without being fully sufficient!? How could I ever dare to show up in front of God with any weakness!! Weaknesses are crushed by those with power! We live our lives believing any sign of weakness means we will be exploited.

As abused children, we were taught that we were not worthy of love, or that love was something that had to be earned. We learned that love was something that could come and go. What we were taught of love by those who abused us was that our desperate need for it was a means of control, and it always led to pain.

If love is something that has to be earned, and can be given and taken away, it is no wonder that we have so much difficulty in our relationships with people and with God. If we are in a relationship with someone who truly loves us, there is always the fear that we can lose that love. For so many of us, this insecurity harms the relationship. How many times can our partner reassure us? Logically, we know that we are loved, but emotionally, the fear of loss of love is so deeply ingrained, that it overrides our logic and sabotages our relationships.

More concrete to break up!

True love cannot be earned. It just is. There is no prerequisite, and no conditions. Conditional love is not love at all. God loves me unconditionally and I will break up as much concrete as necessary to finally get this wonderful truth through to the depths of my heart.

Perhaps contrary to common understanding you cannot be in a place to receive true love until you truly love yourself. If you do not love yourself, you have no basis for loving another. It is the lack of self-love that can destroy even those relationships where you are loved unconditionally. The Lord tells us to love others as we love ourselves. That can look very ugly until finally enough concrete has been broken and the light finally shines through to your heart!

Mark Phelps