Peniel - Day 4...11:57pm

I’ve been putting off this last Peniel entry all day. I just don’t know how to say what I feel I need to without it just sounding so blasphemous. Maybe it is just that so there’s no way to describe it as otherwise. But I explained it to my pastor/father this morning and he understood what I meant and agreed, or at least didn’t disagree to the point that he felt he needed to advise me to rethink or do something different. But I can’t remember what or how I explained it to him. The discussion was intense, emotional and actually quite informative. When I shared with him what I have discovered and concluded this past several days, he remembered some things that happened when I was four that helped me get a little further down the maze. An idea or two about what caused that four or so year old boy to start believing he is a bad person, and we discussed the effects. It all fits. About a half an hour later, my mother added another piece of the puzzle.

Why oh why did I wait so long to do this, to delve these depths, to admit how I felt and fears, to talk to my parents about my early years in a non-avoidance way and see what the three of us together might discover. The healing I feel is beginning now could have begun when I was still a child if I had been able to just voice my need for help, to voice my feelings and fears. But the lie had me trapped and caged. And the fact that I never did expose the lie, that core belief of my horribleness and worthlessness, not even as I got older, is my part in the pain. It’s what I did to keep the wound fresh and alive and effecting my life. I have to accept my part, learn from it, and forgive myself.

Then there is the part that belongs to the people who damaged and broke a defenseless and sensitive young boy into pieces. Some of them were children who had obviously been damaged in much the same way. They were victims themselves, sick and broken. I don’t believe it’s a continuation of the pattern of letting it be ok to damage me to not hold them responsible. What they did was not ok. But I have to forgive them. From what I’ve pieced together from what little I remember and from what my father remembers, I don’t believe malice motivated them. I blame whoever abused them. So, what about whoever that is. Well, he or she must have been sick to do that, but I don’t know anything about what happened. What I do know is that hating them will not make what happened go away, it won’t damage or punish them in return, it won’t provide justice for that innocent little boy who had his innocence obliterated. But it will kill me. So once again, I must, in self-defense, choose to forgive.

And that is the attitude I must take in the case of the crazy lady next door who quite probably was the initial source of trauma, the first speaker of the lie, who wielded the words that destroyed me emotionally. Sick bitch. Looks like there’s some anger there. But what kind of damage makes a woman attack a barely four-year-old child? God, she must have been hurting so badly. I have to forgive her.

And God’s part. God didn’t do anything wrong, unless it was to make humans with free will. Since I happen to be quite fond of the whole free will concept, I can not fault my creator for that. And since each of us does have free will, he could not, without overriding said free will, force any of those first abusers not to hurt me. He could not force me to ask for help instead of holding all the pain, guilt and fear inside. He could not force me to quit believing the lie. He was there the whole time ready to begin the healing the first opportunity I gave him to do so. But I had to stop pretending and hiding and be honest for that to happen. The adult me knows all this. Understands it to an extent, and believes my God is innocent of wrong doing. The child I was felt totally abandoned by the God he believed in, trusted, loved more than anything. That child felt hurt by God. That feeling was legitimate, even if the understanding was flawed and therefore placed the blame on the wrong subject. And so, brace yourself for the blasphemy, I must forgive God. I must release my maker from the guilt, real or imagined, of the boy I was being broken and for that broken and cracked foundation being used as the blueprint for the actions and reactions for three decades. For allowing a life to be so destroyed.