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www.thelutheran.org (click on “study guides”).
Pam Marolla tells survivors: • It was not your fault. • God is with you.
• God has already changed your name from “Shamed” to “Beloved.”
• Keep telling your story until someone validates all those points for you and you start healing.
Don’t ever mistake forgiveness for
taking the burden of the crime off the offender and placing it on yourself.
victims a lesson. Te church has to be careful about how it uses
words. Forgiveness is a tricky word. Built into the Lord’s Prayer, it’s an unavoidable mandate of Jesus. Yet most Christians, if we are honest, have some definite double standards when it comes to who and what needs to be forgiven (or not). If another driver hits your car, you expect restitu-
tion. If your house gets broken into, you don’t inquire whether the robber is repentant. You call the police. Yet, if your daughter gets “broken into,” she should forgive? We simply don’t know the harm we inadvertently
inflict when insisting on human forgiveness. Abuse leaves many layers of damage. Do whatever
it takes to heal, layer by layer. If you want to forgive, that’s fine if this is helpful for your journey. If it keeps you from eating yourself up with rage or bottling up all the emotions—do it. But don’t ever mistake forgiveness for taking the burden of the crime off the offender and placing it on yourself. And don’t ever do it because your abuser or anyone else demands it of you.
Anger and love Whenever someone hears my story and expresses anger at my abuser and love for me, I experience healing. Christian survivors of
childhood abuse have oſten, in the name of forgiveness, held back their anger, turned it inward or misdirected it. Tey need to be reminded that this crime wasn’t their fault. To heal, it’s absolutely necessary to get angry at the right person—but not get stuck in the anger. We also need to be fully known. Shame of child-
hood sexual abuse stays with a person a long time. Deep within them survivors have a place in their being that says, “If you knew all about me, there’s no way you could love or even like me.” Ask my husband how many times, early in our relationship, I tried to run away. I’ve grown my group of trusted confidants. Tey
grieve with me over the little girl no one helped. Tey rejoice with me in the strength and security of the woman I am now. We share each other’s sorrows and joys. It’s true community. It’s a giſt to discover true community through risk-
ing being genuine with others. And in finding true community, it’s possible to find truer healing of spirits, lives, relation- ships and more. Coming around full circle—isn’t this the giſt we seek in forgiveness?
Author bio: Marolla is pastor of First Lutheran Church, Galesburg, Ill.
August 2015 27
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