abandonment

On a map of earthquake activity in central Oklahoma in February 2024, a stunning array of overlapping circles of three colors and various sizes arc from northeast to southwest.

Earthquakes, trauma – and silences that erase

Post published:March 7, 2024
Post category:My Story Trauma and Grief
Post last modified:August 15, 2024

Any eerie, uneasy silence that minimizes or denies an earthquake - or any other trauma someone is facing - shouts to those willing to hear: Look deeper. Ask, Why?

Divorcing: Orange-handled scissors cut apart a marriage certificate with a long-stemmed orange-yellow rose lying across it.

Divorcing: When God does what he hates

Post published:July 7, 2023
Post category:Knowing and Going with God Trauma and Grief
Post last modified:March 21, 2024

Once, in Malachi, God may have said that he hates divorce. Repeatedly, in Jeremiah, God reveals how much he hates divorcing. Repeatedly, he laments the nonstop betrayals that did, and could, bring him to do it.

The face of the betrayed: wilted sunflower "face" seen through shattered glass

Treachery and divorce: When God sees betrayal

Post published:June 15, 2023
Post category:Healing from Toxic Church
Post last modified:April 29, 2024

If you have been betrayed by a spouse: The God who sees you has been there. And as Malachi 2 tells us: The Lord hates treachery. The Lord defends the betrayed.

Pink flower with long green stem, fallen, bruised, petals closed, lying on strange green soil

Defender of the forsaken, The Sequel

Post published:December 30, 2018
Post category:Knowing and Going with God Trauma and Grief
Post last modified:March 12, 2024

God identifies himself as Defender of the forsaken - especially women forsaken in any number of ways by their husbands, children forsaken in any number of ways by their parents, and foreigners forsaken in any number of ways by the citizens of a land. This same God counts it crucial that his people defend the cause of those who are easiest to abuse.

Pink flower, hanging down, petals closed, but encircled by a very green leaf bed

Defender of the forsaken

Post published:December 14, 2018
Post category:Knowing and Going with God Trauma and Grief
Post last modified:March 12, 2024

If you have been forsaken - by your parents, by your spouse, by people around you who count you "not one of us" - know this: When God finds you among the bereaved and discarded, he himself takes up your cause.

My mother lies in her adjustable nursing-home bed, her upper body and head elevated. I sit beside her bed, reading her a Psalm. She tolerates it, for the moment. Even when she had no more words, my mother rejected me, as her dad had rejected her.

Newborn

Post published:September 8, 2013
Post category:Trauma and Grief
Post last modified:March 9, 2024

Now, at last, my mom is getting to experience what a newborn should experience. But it didn't have to look like this. It didn't have to end where it should have begun, with the middle of the story lost in the chaos of trying again and again to rewrite the start.