The Greatest Lie and The Truest Truth

The lie of trauma is that you are alone.
The truth of God is that you are never alone.

Sometimes the latter is a healing balm, a comfort to the soul.
At others, it is a grotesque thorn in the flesh, one that leads to the loneliest of questions:

How come God let the bitterness of trauma take root in my bones?
How is it that this good God was there when that happened?

All-powerful. Omnipresent.
And seemingly unbothered by the atrociousness of it, whatever it is for you.

I do not claim to know the answer. This is one of the mysteries of life, this question of a good and powerful God amidst the presence of evil and suffering.

But what I know is life, for the survivor, means oscillating between these two states. A state of holding a deep aloneness, and a state of remembering how never alone we are. God was there when the living death* found its way into our very souls.

We were never alone.

When the great alone hits, and flashbacks jump the timeline and pain seeps out from deep within, still we are never alone.

Sometimes it is a worshipful act to fully acknowledge the atrocity of it. To tell the truth about it. To listen as our bodies share what has made them ill. To bear brave and painful witness to the fullness of our own experience. To cry out to God and ask why. To demand an answer of the most-high can be a sacred act of finding your voice after it was squandered, of restoring the power God planted within you.**

But it is an act of humility to rest in Creator’s love even when the answer is not provided. To find comfort in the fact that He was there and He knows all and we were never alone.

He is still there, for God stands outside time. Holds it. Knows every iota of every millisecond. And I take comfort in knowing that He is still there, bearing witness to what should never have happened. He does not turn his face away from the grotesque, but offers His gaze to it. He never leaves it, even when we heal from it.

I wish I could explain why God let that thing happen to you. Why you were abandoned. Why the accident happened. Why you were abused. Why you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why they got sick. Why.

I wish I could give you a reason that would make sense of it all.

But maybe you can find comfort in knowing that you were never alone. And I believe that God was there (and still is there, as the only Being who stands outside time), offering you love, grace, and care in the midst of it. He does not look away from you, but looks into your eyes and your soul and your heart and your mind, and sees every beautiful and hard thing about you and says “my beloved”.

The lie of trauma is that you are alone.
The truth of God is that you are never truly alone.

*Shelley Rambo describes trauma as a sort of “living death” and this description resonates with me, so I have used it here.

**Some may find this to be a difficult thought to wrap their heads around. So I have provided more context here: I think God can handle our mess, and that He much prefers our brutal honesty. He knows our hearts, so there is no use in hiding our anger and confusion from Him. For those of us who lost our voices through abuse and trauma, I think God cheers when we finally tell him what we truly think. I think He is delighted when we find the voice He gave us. But, of course, I cannot speak for God, so I say this with great humility and trepidation.