Dear God,
I have tried to believe in you. I really have. I desperately want you to be there. If you aren’t there, it would be difficult for me to have the hope I need to keep going, to push through the darkest days of recovery and life in general. But I’m going to be honest with you. I haven’t had the kind of life which encourages undying faith. With inescapable trauma plaguing my entire childhood, creating painful patterns in my adulthood, it didn’t promote a general appreciation for the beauty that is life. I know I innately have it. But it is so marred in trauma, I can’t see it.
And I’ll be even more honest, the people didn’t help very much. When I was growing up, religion was used against me all the time. My abusers made it clear that I was to honor my father and mother. They used guilt, so much guilt, to keep me under their control. They let me know that God likes girls who fall in line, do as their told and never speak up. They let me know God believes men are more important than women, even that women are here for the benefit and pleasure of men. They quoted the Bible just to prove they were right. Honestly, I didn’t understand who wrote the Bible until I was older. I always thought you did. I didn’t know that men did.
And I’ll be honest again. Other people weren’t much better. They told me that I should just believe in you and everything would be okay. They told me to pray and things would work out. They told me prayer would fix everything. But it never fixed anything. And they never took any action. They never did anything to help me, save me or change my circumstances. So I thought I wasn’t praying right. Or maybe, even worse, you weren’t interested in what I had to say. Maybe it worked for everyone but me.
So when I grew up, I have to admit, I wasn’t too convinced you were on my side. I mean, I couldn’t see how you had been on my side. Maybe you were. Maybe you kept me alive. But honestly, that didn’t seem like a huge favor at the time. And when those abusive patterns continued, even after my desperate attempts to escape and live a better life, it didn’t help our relationship. Honestly, you were equated to my abusers in my unconscious mind. I just thought your goal was to continue the pain and punishment. It was the only way I could explain those patterns. At the time, I didn’t know what else could be causing them.
But then in recovery, things started to make more sense. The memories started coming back and I saw the source of the patterns. I started to understand you differently, and I desperately wanted to believe in you, in a different version of you than my abusers and religion had shown me. But honestly, there were still so many mixed messages. I felt hope, but my inner parts were sharing hopelessness. I felt empowered to change my life, but my inner parts were sharing powerlessness. I felt tiny snippets of joy, but the despair and grief from my inner parts was overwhelming. I could stand in nature on a beautiful day and feel suicidal. How could you do that? How could you be responsible for a world like that?
And honestly, the pain in the world is a little hard to cope with too. Even if I was healed completely from my trauma, walking through this place can take its toll. There is darkness around every corner. There is pain in everyone and many are acting directly from that pain. It is a struggle to have a relationship with you knowing about all the pain. And my awareness has been a blessing and a curse. I see the pain of others more clearly because of it.
But I keep trying to see you in the world, in my life, in me. You are a different God than the one used against me or preached at me. You are the one I have chosen. You are the one who meets my understanding and my expectations. Maybe it’s right. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know that answer. How could I know? But I do know it is my right to see you as I need to see you. It isn’t blasphemous. It isn’t sinful. It is the same personal choice I never knew I could have in my life. But I have extended it to you. Honestly, it is the only relationship I can have with you. It is the only one that will work. My understanding of you has to be on my terms.
And honestly, I think you get that. In my life, most haven’t. And maybe that is what keeps me going. Maybe it keeps me hoping that you really are there, that you really are different from the others. Of course, I don’t know anything for sure about you, or much else for that matter. But without some version of you, it is difficult to walk through this world seeing the pain in the human race. Without some version of you, it is difficult to see the good with so many bad experiences in the past. So I will commit to keep trying. And I have the strange feeling you are committed even when I hate you, yell at you and question your very existence.
And that will have to do for now.
We will have to make that work.
Love,
Elisabeth
This letter is not intended to promote a particular spiritual or religious viewpoint. It is meant to promote the opposite. It is important that we embrace the unseen in whatever form helps us to heal. And this letter explains my personal experience.
This letter really resonated with me!
When people do unspeakable acts, manipulate, control and abuse in the name of God, it is almost impossible to separate THEIR God from the idea of a God who cares, of a God who loves and of a God who is working for good.
How can God be love when the people who follow him do so in hate?
Thank you for helping us understand that their God doesn’t have to be ours. And for that to be okay <3
Thank you Allanah! It is absolutely okay. <3
Thank you. Yes, yes. God, love, unconditional love, like the love I feel for my daughter. It is the only version of God that makes sense; that no matter what, I am loved by God, unconditionally. Men wrote the Bible, all sacred texts for that matter. The Bible story of a God who loved me so much that he/she would descend to earth and become human and die for me is a beautiful love story, and it is hard for me to resist it. How do I say no to a love like that? So I believe, but in my own way, and call on God, on love, unconditional love. If in fact I was created in her/his image and likeness, divinity resides in me. I am spirit ( divinity), live in a body and have a mind; the trick is to heal the shit that happened to my body and the impact of it on my mind. Remembering that I am spirit helps. My spirit self can help me heal my body and mind.
Thank you, Elisabeth.
Thank you Jocelyn. You are so right. It all about healing so we can get back to what matters.
This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read. I share so many of these feelings with you. Thank you for your raw vulnerability, friend. I needed to read this today as I struggle with my own railings against God and all that I still have to heal and figure out about what place God has/had in what happened to me. ❤️
Thank you my friend!
Excellent well written piece that hopefully either validates or invalidates the existence of God to intervene or allow for the terrible things that happen in life.
Life is an incredible journey filled with many pitfalls, evil people and can be very difficult to navigate. The Bible will only leave you more disappointed and perplexed if used as a reasoning or coping device.
Thank you Andre. So true.
You are a shining example of the God inside us all. Someone who can pull through contrasting experience at all odds to lead others into love, peace and purpose.
Thank you Kate!
Thank you for always being able to put into words the confusion and pain in my soul that I cannot seem to unravel by myself. As a grown woman and mother, I still feel so much like a fragile and vulnerable little girl. Even though I am finding healing myself an impossible challenge, I do believe God is helping me be the kind of mother for my son who stops the cycle of abuse and maybe even provides a little hope for my own future.
Thank you Stephanie. That is beautifully said.
Outstanding Elisabeth! My faith has greatly improved ever since I learned to see God as a person. I pray and talk to him like a friend as well as get to know him in the bible. Anyone can be called a friend of God like Abraham if we view Him this way. I pray for your faith. 🙂
Thank you Keith. I am so glad you have found what works for your healing.
Yes. I am struggling with the God thing right now and what it/he SHOULD look like and what I SHOULD think/believe. Thank you for this. As always ❤❤❤
Thank you Victoria. Love to you.
How beautiful Elisabeth, you find the words to express what is in the soul of many. As usual your blog has inspired me to look deeper within to find and assist healing the little parts who were tortured, abused and neglected in the name of God. This is helpful to show that by opening to a new perspective we can see that God(source) was and is always there. Something I am still working on as well.
Many blessings <3
Thank you Wendy. It is so helpful to have the awareness you are talking about. I am glad this post helped you with your journey too.
I have believed most of the time that if God is the way others describe him,I am not one of his loved children,for sure.
I don’t think He loves me at all.
That is what we learn from our trauma, but it is not reality. Sending love and light to you now.
Much of what you wrote here is exactly how I feel too. I have been told the same things too like prayer changes things & Yes from experience it has however not always & that confuses me. I have also been told to not be afraid because God is always with me but yet I have been beat & abused by many my entire life….was God with me then? If so, why did he allow it to happen? Why did he allow my ex sister in law to get custody of my 3 children when God knows I was a good mother? He knew what was going to happen before it happened…then why did he allow it? I don’t understand…why?
The “God talk” can get us very caught up in the question of why. In reality, we can’t know. And when we get caught up in it, we can allow our recovery to get stuck on the cognitive side, losing track of what we can do now. This is another aspect of how this can sidetrack us.
Thank you as always! ❤️🙏🏻💙
Relationship and my feelings with and surrounding God have always been tenuous, sometimes sweet, many times the whys, sometimes I am embarrassed by my brokenness, sometimes it feels so overwhelming. It’s nice to hear others’ thoughts, struggles and journey. I have a lovely Christian women’s group I attend sometimes, the thing that trips me up is hearing things like just give it to God, just pray on it like that’s the only right answer, I know they know differently, my internal struggle is such that I also have to do the hard work for myself and I feel that gets diminished. I have not shared that with the group yet, I’m not sure if I will. I do love the women, perhaps it an opportunity for some honesty, I’ll see. Anyway thank you again as always. 💜💛
That can be so tough to navigate. Many people don’t want to do their own hard work so they will try to convince us that we don’t have to do it. And those kind of statements can feel so invalidating to our inner children.
this really hit home for me. I’m going to share it with my therapist, who is a Christian therapist (not why I started seeing her- I didn’t even know until I came in for our first appointment, fortunately there were no bleeding Jesus’ or I would have run.) which has meant that I am working on the spiritual aspects of healing more then I had before. It’s tough to try and see how God can let these things happen, the what if’s of is “their” God the same as mine? Did he allow these things to happen to me? etc.
I’m still learning how to make this work for me, but like I said, this really hit home for me. I’m going to share it with my therapist, hope she gets it…
This is such a complicated subject for us. I can see so much benefit in having this discussion with your Christian therapist. We must be allowed to question these kind of messages in our healing journey.
Oh my goodness that is my story too. So beautifully said. I grew up never being protected and told I was going to hell at age 5 for bad thoughts. I still to this day cannot fathom a loving Father Abba that really loves me and will take care of my enemies.thank you
Thank you for your comment Brenda. Abusers so often use religion to control us. But those are lies they tell.