abandonment

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

Defender of the forsaken – this is God

Post published:February 20, 2025
Post category:Knowing and Going with God Trauma and Grief
Post last modified:February 22, 2025

The Lord sees when the vulnerable are wrongly rejected. He hears when the helpless cry to him, and he champions them. Defender of the forsaken – this is God.

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:February 17, 2025

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:January 12, 2025

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:January 11, 2025

If you have been betrayed by a spouse: The God who sees you has been there. He hates treachery. He calls out the treacherous - and he defends the betrayed.

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

People of God, defend the forsaken

Post published:December 30, 2018
Post category:Knowing and Going with God Trauma and Grief
Post last modified:February 18, 2025

God identifies himself as Defender of the forsaken. This same God counts it crucial that his people defend the cause of those who are easiest to abuse.

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.