I love Jesus. I am fully devoted to Him, and yet I still struggle with the blame game. As people in my life hurt us, or we struggle with trauma reactions, we find ourselves questioning everything we believed to be fact, including Jesus’ love. Is this fair? Probably not, and yet here we are.
Dealing with an ongoing intense family situation is hard enough. Add in an extended family situation, and a situation that happened on Sunday which brought up all kinds of flashbacks and trauma responses and you have a recipe for a very fragile system. Then yesterday, while at work, I received several phone calls regarding a past trauma for my family, one almost 6 years past. We held it together fine at work. We got home, mom hugged us, and we promptly fell apart. And again, silently asked Jesus why we seem to have been created to be hurt.
In at least one of these situations, what hurts us is a situation that brings someone we love peace, joy, and fulfillment. We find ourselves feeling genuinely happy for the person, while navigating our own trauma related issues regarding the situation. And again, we find ourselves asking Jesus why we have to hurt for this person we love to have their happiness. What originally started out as resentment of our loved one turned into a resigned acceptance, and then to being happy for them. I believe that’s part of the healing process, but it seems we still need someone to “blame” and Jesus has fallen into that spot.
Our savior, our only consistent protector, the only one we can fully trust, and we are blaming him for allowing what feels like our constant pain. Our therapist says God can handle it. I still feel guilty, which only magnifies the hurt and shame about this situation.
So what do we do? We know the coping skills (as we’ve mentioned before). We know to reach out, only we don’t feel like discussing this situation with anyone. We know to reframe and refocus, but then it just feels like making excuses for the ones who are causing our pain. Like they get a reason to hurt us, and we have to allow it because they have their own hurts. That right there is definitely grace and it reminds me as I write this that Jesus showed us amazing grace. Unbelievable grace. So is this us learning to show grace? Or is this us putting ourselves in an abusive situation? Where is that line?
Tales Of Brilliant Chaos 