How broken is too broken? How much healing is enough? Will I
ever be ready for a relationship? Marriage? Kids?
Often these questions plague survivors of sexual abuse and
assault. I myself had questioned if I would ever be healed enough to even begin
dating someone. I had read books by survivors that ended with a short blurb
after depicting well, the seriousness of trauma, saying, “I’m now 45, have a
wonderful husband and three great kids.” And all I wanted to do is scream at
the book, “HOW?!”
There were times in my life that I felt so broken that I
thought that I, like Humpty Dumpty, couldn’t ever be put back together again. I
didn’t see how in even the next twenty years, I would ever be at a stage of
healing where I could get married and have kids. I was terrified of men. I was
afraid of being hurt. I was daily bombarded with flashbacks of my past. I
loathed myself. I had given up hope on ever being the main character in a
romantic story.
In hindsight (oh the beauty of it), I see that my
pessimistic outlook came from having an unreasonable expectation that somehow I
needed to be completely healed, healthy and basically perfect in order to get
married. What I didn’t realize was that this was a lie.
It wasn’t that I didn’t need to seek healing, or desire to
be free from the pain of my past, it was more that I needed to allow someone to
love me, even in my brokenness. I often would push interested suitors away from
me, inwardly screaming “I’m too broken!” My fear of them discovering just how
broken I was and then rejecting me caused me to run and hide any time there was
even a remote interest from a man. I never thought it would be possible for
someone to look at all of me, all of my messiness and stay. But God, in His wondrous
mercy, had a plan.
Without me realizing it, He wove a beautiful love story into
my life. He brought in a man who first became my friend. A friend who stuck by
me even in the middle of my flashbacks. I was on the journey of healing when he
entered my life, but I was nowhere near to the level of healing I had assumed I
would need to be at. But that’s just it. I never got to that place before I got
married.
Yes, I had had significant breakthroughs in my healing, but
I was still broken. What I didn’t know was that my now-husband could love me
fully, even in my broken state, and would become one of the most powerful
sources of healing in my life. God knew exactly what He was doing when he put
this man at the local food pantry the day I decided to volunteer for the first
time.
What I want to say to you, my friend who is still asking
these questions, who is still wondering if you will ever be unbroken enough to
be loved, is that:
1) You
are already loved.
God loves you just as you are. He
knows you fully. Inside and out. He adores you. Scars and all. You don’t need
another man to tell you what the Creator of the Universe has been saying since
the beginning of time.
2) You
don’t need to hide.
The man God has for you will be
able to see all of you and love you for who you are. You just need to be brave
enough to trust in His plans for your life. To trust that when the right man
comes into your life, you can begin the slow process of letting down your walls
and allow love to move in.
3) Life
is unpredictable.
You may feel as though you’ve been
waiting for this guy forever, and it seems like he’s never going to show up. I
don’t know what God has in store for you, but I know He desires good things for
you, and I know that you can’t even begin to imagine what they are and when
they will come about. But hold on my friend, they are coming.
Love, hope and peace to you.
