Here at Give Your Story, I write about hope. Hope is God’s design for our need to seek Him. He wants us to seek Him, and He wants us to LOVE Him. That is God’s hope! Last week, I discussed spiritual gifts in my post “What are Spiritual Gifts Anyway?” I plan to continue exploring spiritual gifts, but today, I wanted to share one of mine with you.

I am an encourager. This is why I write about hope. One example of my gift of encouragement is that I use my story to encourage you to have hope.  I can’t explain why I have this gift; I just do.  We should not be afraid to humbly talk about God’s gifts to us.  After all God gave them to us and I am bold enough to say that Jesus had all these gifts and we are to be like Him! I am incredibly grateful for my gift of encouragement because it has allowed me to see hope throughout my long journey, including the death of my father at age seven, molestation by my Youth Pastor between the ages of 13 and 16, a lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder and anger, and sex addiction. When I review my life and compare my story to many others, despite my struggles, my story doesn’t even scratch the surface of the horrendous stories of abuse and hardship that others have endured.

Between the ages of 13 and 16, I was groomed and molested by my Youth Pastor in my home church. Ron Weber, who currently resides in Minnesota, is the man responsible for those acts of harm toward me. I believe it is important to identify and call out those who have caused us significant harm. Especially when they have not corrected themselves and asked for forgiveness.  Grooming and molesting a child is on a GRAND SCALE.

This experience was obviously a terrible time in my life and impacted me in many ways, some of which I may never fully understand. When I reached the point in my life where I realized I was a sex addict, that my life was unmanageable, and that I needed help, one of the first questions I asked was why, how, and who? Why am I a sex addict? How did this happen? Who caused it? I went into victim mode. I truly was a victim. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

When we heal, the first thing we do is deconstruct. I call this “reviewing the tapes.” It is crucial to understand what happened to us and why. Healing from significant wounds is a long process. If I were to give you a freedom date for my story, it would be close to 43 years between the first significant hardship and the healing that gave me what I know today as true freedom. That timeframe may scare you—43 years? YES! However, it wasn’t all bad. Even in the depths of my addiction and troubled life, God was there, offering hope and calling me to Him.

During my early recovery from sex addiction, there was a period when I honestly wanted to punch the man responsible for the harm done to me. Instead, I ensured he could never harm someone else the way he harmed me. I made sure he was defrocked from the Lutheran Church. That gave me some satisfaction and eased my mind on that topic.

Here is the cold hard truth about me: Even though I hated what that man did to me, his harmful methods taught me how to be selfish and get what I wanted. In part, despite how much I despised what he did to me, my internal need for comfort from all the harm he caused led me to become, in some ways, like the monster he is. Now, I don’t have any record of molesting children—by the grace of God, that is not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is my anger manifesting sideways as a result of the harm he caused. His selfish methods to fulfill his desires became my learned method of using sex to comfort myself. Then I projected all these fallacies onto everyone around me, and in many regards, I was just like him. That is a hard pill to swallow. The fact is, this is what happens to many victims of abuse. Do we all know at least one victim of abuse? Often, we may understand them to be unhealthy people. Not to be mean, but it’s often true. I was one of those people. The simple summary is: Harm inflicted on me by others became a learned coping method to deal with the pain from that harm. By the grace of God, for me it manifested in me in a less impactful way. While harmful to my wife and children, my story is not on a GRAND SCALE compared to many other horrendous stories.

I DO NOT DISCOUNT ANYONE’S STORY OF ABUSE.

However, regardless of what your story is, at some point we must do the work to HEAL.

Deconstruction is necessary. The solution? Teaching healthy methods to handle life. Approaches like positive reinforcement parenting instead of negative reinforcement parenting. Or, here is a healthy Jesus message instead of a self-serving method that sounds like Jesus but isn’t because it harms someone.

So, if teaching healthy methods is the solution, how do we get there? Do we deconstruct and then just relearn the healthy methods? I think NOT. There is middle ground.

When you have old electrical systems in your house and need an electrician to rewire the system, do you know what happens? The electrician leaves the old wires hanging in the house. For this conversation, that is what happens in our brains. The old wires are still hanging there. When certain triggers come along, they cause us to reconnect the old wiring system. It’s what we’ve known for, in my case, 43 years plus. There are old wires hanging in your house that need to be dead-ended so they can never be reconnected. How do we do this?

Here is my answer: and it is extremely critical!  Inventory, accountability, and the work you must put in to dead-ending the wires! In a 12-step program, that is the method we use. This method includes owning your own stuff regardless of who gave it to you.  I call it what’s your part in the problem.  Yes, I was a victim.  Yes, I was affected.  However, I participated in unhealthy behaviors as a result of being victimized.  Last I checked two wrongs don’t make a right.     

I ask without an answer to my own question: How does a Christian who has been harmed by their church’s toxic message recover? Well, they deconstruct. Great! Then they relearn healthy methods. Great! But what about all the old wires? Is it just as simple as repentance? What if we aren’t even aware of the old wires still hanging? What if the electrician didn’t tell you which wires they changed? How would you know what wires to dead-end? The light switch didn’t work, so you called an electrician. The electrician fixed it for you, and now when you flip the switch, the light just goes on. Well, who did the work? The electrician! So how do you know which wires not to reconnect? That’s why we must do the hard work of looking at ourselves.

Here is what my path looked like for 43 years.  Lots of bad behavior with consequences for my actions.  I would end up in therapy over an over well into my adult life and then I became aware of my sex addiction at the age of 30 and entered a 12-step program where I have been for the last 20 plus years.  Mental health problems began to creep in and medication and significant incidents continued as I fought the good fight to be a better person.  More therapy and now I am bipolar which had been mentioned before but I was in denial.  Then I found Jesus.  Boy was that awesome.  More trouble and more therapy and this time we will try medication again but that lead to suicidal thinking and now what?  Jesus can you please help me? Why won’t he help me?  I kept fighting and more therapy and then?  PEACE.  That was my answer.  I truly hope all that crap is not your story.  Is that the Christian answer?        

I truly do not know what the Christian answer is. I wish I did.  I might have taken that path.  I don’t have all the answers. I do, however, have hope. Hope is the reason I am where I am today. My life was a mess (name your mess). I surrendered to the mess and worked to better myself, climbing out of the pit that was given to me. Here is the insanity of the entire thing: I held onto the pit as I was climbing out! It was all I knew. However, when my troubles became too overwhelming, God provided me with an alternative. People gave me the space to heal, but—I HAD TO DO THE WORK to get to the fruit!

It wasn’t all Rosie. It was a ton of hard work!

Hope is in front of you, and while you are doing the work to pull yourself out of the mess, the journey just begins. You want it all right now, but you keep clinging to the mess. Even though you cling to the mess, hope drives you to continue your journey. Things start to happen that you could never dream of, and you lean on that. You continue to do the work, and while things keep improving, you still fall once in a while. Even still, you keep on getting up for the fight. The hope lives deep inside you, and you do your best to keep the hope!  

THEN THERE IS PEACE.

I hope for you in your journey.