Responding to Christ

Peace, Hope and Healing

Personal Testimonies

This page contains personal testimonies of people who have experienced sexual abuse and who have found peace, hope and healing through a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Julie's Story

My story ultimately spans many years but here I present some of the main points. I was twenty-four years old. I was happy, in a relationship, healthy and confident. It was what today would be called an ‘acquaintance rape’. The man was old enough to be my father, a friend/employer of my own partner and father to a friend at work. He was somewhat of the ‘big man’ of the village I lived in, the one who owned most land and whose family had dominated the place for generations. But he was friendly enough and we had got on well over the two years that I had known him. He was, however, a drinker and regularly got into fights with non locals due to his Welsh nationalist fervent beliefs. He was a 'ladies man' but always with those of his own age and we had all heard the rumours of his use of prostitutes since his marriage had ended. But he wasn’t alone in this. Others in the community were similar-it just seemed part of the way of life amongst this small insular village. I thought he was alright. He was always kind to me and my partner and accepted me, despite my ‘Englishness’, because my partner, also Welsh, had accepted me as part of the community.

A Night Out

A group of us went out one night, not a group of drunken youngsters, but a group of people from the same village including this man and a dear seventy year old. We had a lot to drink and it resulted in my having a massive argument with my partner. I walked out and began to walk back to the village with him threatening to take the lamb that I had hand-reared to the slaughter house with the rest of his flock the following day. Later that evening I visited this man who had always told both my partner and I that he would always help us out-he had even offered to pay for the wedding if we ‘just got on with it and got married’. And so I went to see him. He was kind and understanding. He promised to sort things out with my partner and if necessary to buy the lamb and keep it at his farm until my partner had ‘calmed down’. I had a cup of coffee and some soup. I lost the next three days.

Darkest Days

The passage of time and place over those days is completely distorted even to this day. I remember times of joking and feeling fine and times of fear and physical pain; which came when I couldn’t say. I can recall him raping me at least four times and seemingly passing out throughout since I can still not recall the ‘end’ as it were. I remember sometimes putting up a fight and getting hit and other times freezing with fear and just wanting it to end. The first time I became truly lucid I was sitting on a couch in front of a television and the news was on. I felt sick, dizzy and shocked but still at that time not really sure what had happened. I didn’t even know what day it was. He just looked over at me and said it was the best sex he had ever had. My first thought was that he must be playing a joke and so I just said well I hope you took precautions. No, he assumed I would be on the pill because of my being in a relationship. I simply stood up and went home.

Reality Dawns

When I got home I went into the shower and only then did I see the state of my body, the cuts, bruises and massive bite marks, one of which left a scar which took over five years to disappear, and it was only then that the internal pain hit me. Flashbacks occurred over a period of a year. He admitted what he had done to some but said that it didn’t matter because ‘she was out of it’. My partner still blamed me for going up there in the first place and despite numerous attempts to restore our relationship I eventually returned to live in the town I was brought up in as a child.

Pregnancy

When I found out I was pregnant my partner immediately suspected that it wasn’t his and so did I. A scan at hospital originally suggested that it could be my partners. So despite having moments when I felt I not only wanted but needed an abortion, I decided not to abort. However, when I became seriously ill with pre-eclampsia, which left me in a critical condition, a scan changed the original date making the baby very likely to be the man who raped me. After three months in hospital with a sick baby who I couldn’t bond with and after the trauma of a HIV test because of his past with prostitutes, I suffered from what they called a psychotic episode brought on by severe reactive depression. I was considered a suicide risk and a threat to the life of my baby. I was sectioned and locked up away from my baby.

Trying to Move On

Eventually released I was determined to crawl my way back. Fourteen years on I love my daughter and have recently sought a DNA test from the man who raped me who is now in his late 60s. He refused. I had thought of police action. But then I remembered the response of people. Some didn’t believe. Some thought little of it. I wasn’t a virgin. This wasn’t rape in a dark alley by a stranger. Somehow it didn’t ‘fit the picture’ of the typical rape and yet having had sexual partners I was very aware of the difference between consent and rape. The marks on my body testified to what my mind and heart knew and what my memory, though distorted in many ways, recalled.

Revenge

I spent eight years angry, struggling to bring up my child and seeking the bloodiest of revenge but ultimately always being too scared. I spent eight years feeling ashamed and also so angry that I was not believed and when I was I was blamed in some way for what had happened. I worked hard to get my life back and whilst on the outside I seemed to do so successfully, inside the trauma of the rape, my serious pregnancy illness, baby’s birth and being sectioned, haunted me.

Really Moving On

It was my anger with what the Bible seemed to say about rape that was the means God used to open my eyes to the fact of His existence through Jesus Christ. The story of my conversion is below but for now I want to share that only He has helped me to understand and to be at peace. He has taken my anger and grief and used it to show me things about who I am and about who He is. I can still get upset to this day though never as deep as before. I can still get angry but never as deep as before. The deepness hasn’t dissipated with the passage of time since after eight years it was still as raw as that first lucid day. The deepness has dissipated since He has begun the healing process. I will never have justice in this world. I know however that my God will avenge. I also know however that He could save that man and forgive him. I initially found solace in the former but now am beginning to accept the latter. If you are a sexual abuse victim then I’m sure that will make you angry. I cannot convince you of the reality of Christ and how peace and hope are possible. I can only tell my story and pray that Christ uses it as a means through which to whisper to you ‘I am here and with me there is peace with God and hope and healing’.

The Beginning of Healing

Critical of Christians Before I became a Christian I would have been offended at being associated with what I had considered to be a human construction, sold as some ‘truth’, taken up by those gutless enough not to live according to their own sense of morality. I was polite to Christians but inside they made me angry. They promoted an absolute: God. I didn’t believe in absolutes. I equated that with the denial of true human freedom. Christianity was simply an oppressive system of thought and the sooner the world was free from its ‘taint’, the better. If my criticism of Christianity had once been rooted in primarily academic thought, it also soon became one emotionally motivated by the personal experience of rape. If I could find, or create, opportunities in my teaching position to undermine some of its basic tenets, I would. I took witchcraft as a symbolic contestation of the patriarchal content of Christianity; lesbianism in the same way. I believed the personal to be political-so I took the latter into my personal life. I wanted to show Christianity as both ‘mad’ but more importantly ‘bad’ and to be rightfully challenged. My Will, (despite having had occasion to confront my mortality and that of my daughters’), stated the absolute need for me to have a humanist burial. I wanted to take my challenge even to the point of my death.

Hostile Exchanges What began as a range of hostile emails to various Christian anti-abortion groups, led to my participating on Christian discussion forums. I enjoyed the challenge of this, often boasting to my students of my ‘victories’ in arguments. I read the Bible in order to challenge it. After some months I began to be more than intellectually curious and found I was battling against a heart which wanted to ask ‘are you there God?’ I was angry with myself for wanting to even ask this question. As the curiosity grew, so did the conflict. Partly in response to a challenge and partly as an attempt to just end a journey that I had never imagined finding myself on, I decided to go to a church. Apart from a couple of marriages and funerals, I had never been to a church service. I sat for three weeks outside Grace. I watched. My pride hurt. When I finally made it through the doors, on the way in and out ensuring that nobody I knew would see me, it was less with a truly seeking heart and more with the hope of confirming my original criticism. Then life would return to normal.

Growing Conflict For months I listened and the conflict and frustration grew. For some reason I couldn’t just quit and ‘walk’. I could only walk with the ammunition needed to justify my original position. So I decided to create a situation (an argument) which could justify my leaving in a self-righteous manner. The problem was that those involved were not playing the game the way I had hoped. Not enough ammunition. I tried to engage the visiting pastor. He wasn’t having any of it either. I was left very angry and frustrated. And still needing an excuse to quit and walk. Whilst in the car driving home, God became a reality. I knew He was there. It was a simple knowingness-as I know the reality of the air I breathe. For over thirty hours I struggled with God. No sleep and no work. I tried to ignore Him by desperately convincing myself that His reality was in fact just some psychological phenomenon. If I ignored Him, stopped going to church and stopped reading the Bible, I would soon recover.

Waking Up I went to bed early quite at peace with this. I had a strategy to deal with His seeming reality. In fact I was quite chuffed with myself. I had a story to share: how Christianity had even half indoctrinated me! At one o’clock in the morning I found myself wide awake. I walked downstairs. I just sat there. Through what seemed like an eternity, a sense of nothingness just grew and grew-beyond a mere negative emotion-beyond depression. Absolute nothingness. And then I was made aware of the presence of Christ. I did not see or hear anything but my very being knew His reality and His presence. And I knew what He was saying: that’s enough now. He was right. It was enough. During the moments that followed, I did not decide to adopt some man-made principles. I did not reach out in human desperation to some therapeutic humanly constructed knowledge form. I did not even become ‘all religious’. I entered into a relationship with my God who had hung on a cross for me so that at that moment I could finally be made right with Him-so that I could finally know Him. On reflection I believe that the nothingness I experienced during those early hours of the morning was but a tiny glimpse of what it is to be separated from God. It is only due to His grace that I will not face such a thing for eternity after my death.

That happened October 30^th 2002. I was baptised seven months later. Today I remained convinced of the reality of Christ. Through the many physical, spiritual and emotional trials that followed my conversion, I have known more than ever that October 30^th 2002 was indeed no illusion. With trials have come great blessings, the greatest one being the constant affirmation of Christ as indeed real, alive today, still calling people to know Him, and still remaining the closest and wisest friend I will ever know who guides me daily through this life and eventually into eternity. I know I remain far from what I should be. But I know with absolute certainty that I am no longer what I was. That is the power of the God that I had once declared ‘dead’.

I will lie down and sleep in peace,
for you alone, O LORD,
make me dwell in safety.

Psalm 4:8

Hannah's Story

Interweaving the Threads of a Tapestry

Early Years Although my parents were bought up as observant practising Christians, in the emancipated swinging 60s, they chose to leave my spiritual life at a token Christening in the family gown. That might have been it, had they not taken the equally unusual decision of having me educated at a convent school. By the time I was seven, I had realised the other girls had something I wanted – a sense of family, community and God, and I took myself off to Sunday school to find it.

Growing Up Overnight One year later my teacher and my only grandparent died – and I learned what happened if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had been an ordinary school day and I’d had a tennis lesson after school. I ran into the school to visit the cloakroom and literally ran into the priest. He asked me to show him where the swimming pool was. I pointed, feeling he should know that. He asked me to take him there and, though sensing it to be a strange request, I complied. Hours later when I re-emerged, it was dark, I was in big trouble for being late and losing my hat, yet the greater loss was my sense of innocence and wellbeing with my world. Through a network of contacts my mother took the abuse issue up with the school and the only question I remember being asked was his name. As with so many examples of abuse, he was sent away, and I the abused felt guilty, despite potentially saving many others girls my fate. From that time I felt different, and when boys came along in my teens, I felt there was no purity to hold onto, so it didn’t really matter what they did to me.

Dealing with Loss At 17, when I found my first serious boyfriend all but in bed with someone else, I became anorexic as a way of trying to deal with these compounded messy feelings. With my father’s death from cancer when I was 21, I stopped going to church, feeling a loving God couldn’t let all these bad things happen. My then boyfriend was Jewish, and when I married him a few years later, I became Jewish, deciding to try another God. Our marriage worked if I was compliant, and as I was already mentally prepared to expect abuse, I put up no resistance when it followed. After my mother also died of cancer, my mental state crumbled, and I became depressed and suicidal. In hospital I opened up for the first time ever, about the cumulative chaos of my life – and my husband chose to leave the marriage.

Life Makeover Slowly from age 30, I rebuilt my life, first physically, then mentally, then emotionally and finally spiritually. I was on anti-depressants for seven years and in therapy for ten. The seeking of spiritual wholeness took me on a tour of Islam, through meditation in an Indian sect, meeting the Dalai Lama and Buddhism and finally to re-explore Christianity. I went on an Alpha course and on week 6 of the course I got a complete miraculous cure of clinical depression, and on week 10 I committed my life to Jesus. It’s difficult to explain to a non-believer what is the point in being a Christian. For me, there are countless benefits of membership of being a committed Christian that only become clear once someone has committed! These include feelings of peace and joy, greater patience with life and, most of all, hope no matter what happens.

Healing and Closure I have come to peace with the loss of my innocence, death of my parents, end of my marriage and breakdown of my health. I have been given back all and more, and found a sense of family and community. Although the priest died five years before I went back to my convent to find him, the Mother Superior said ‘he had many years to contemplate the error of his ways’ at a closed order. Apparently, he had been sent to the school for swimming lessons to deal with back pain, something that probably would not happen today. I have planted a tree in his memory, and often go there to visit it and find it a place of solace.

Making a Difference Forty years on, I am at peace with my abuse and although we are all work in progress, I am pleased at God’s healing and my profound recovery. After a corporate career in human resources (12 years) I ran my own not-for-profit break-even business for 10 years until 2003. Then, having had a taster on a 3 month sabbatical in Indo-China, I started working in aid work, initially part time (25-50% per year) and then full time from 2004.

A Life Changing Moment I have worked in numerous countries in Africa and Asia, experiencing and sharing many cultures. In West Darfur, Sudan I came across a girl who had been culturally circumcised (female genital mutilation – FGM) as a child and was raped at age 10. Due to this practice she could not give birth safely. She was brought to the clinic in which I worked and her baby was delivered by caesarean section - both her and the baby survived. This experience has lived with me, and over the last six years I have learned more about the cultural and Islamic reasons for FGM. I have also worked in a Somali refugee camp in anti- gender based violence and I have trained in both Pakistan to learn anatomy/physiology, and in Nigeria in fistula surgery to correct tears that occur at birth. This journey led to a desire to campaign to help eliminate FGM in the 28 countries it is practised. I am currently developing a charity to help with this work and am interning with FORWARD (http://www.forwarduk.org.uk). I plan to work in this field for the rest of my life to stand against the unnecessary pain and health risk these girls have to endure.

This verse continues to give me solace.‘For I know the plans I have for you’, declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’. Jeremiah 29,11.