My life changed with two words, "statutory rape".It was like, what I would imagine, being hit by a semi. I felt so many emotions when I heard them...shock,shame, anger, confusion, guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, rage, hatred. They became my pit of despair. These are emotions I would continue to feel for the next 10 years and affect every relationship. Let me back up and give you some context.
It was my senior year of college and I was getting ready to go to orientation for student teaching. I had just moved back into my house off campus after the Christmas break. Since the beginning of the school year, I had been teaching the youth group at dad's church in Pendleton, IN and I also started dating one of the regular church goers. He was 20 and the son of one of our more prominent couples. He lived at home with his parents and a member of my youth group who was a distant relative. He had a reputation for being irresponsible even dishonest, but I didn't care. You see, I was the last single one in my family. My sister had just gotten married that July and my brother had been married for six years and had two children. I just wanted a mate, someone to go to dinner or a movie with, to not have to be single for the holidays again.
Our relationship started out rocky to say the least. He stood me up on our first date. I remember being angry as I was driving back to school and spilling my guts to one of my roommates. She was sympathetic, but believed that I was being too hard on him, that my expectations were a tad high. "Give him a second chance." she said. For anyone who knows me, that's not my modus operandi. I cut people off after the first disappointment, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." was my motto, but after a couple of pleading phone calls from him, I relented.
Things went pretty well from there. We talked on the phone about every night(he always called me), and saw each other every weekend. He helped with the remodeling of the youth room and came to church every Sunday. My mother and my sister-in-law were pretty vocal about their feelings toward him (neither knew about the first date fiasco) and so I hid my relationship with him. The first my mother heard about it was the night of the Christmas party for the company where he worked. He was late picking me up from my parent's house (another of my pet peeves), and mom got home to ask questions. She was annoyed, but ultimately supportive (that took a little wind out of my sails). It was a great night, he opened doors for me, told me how wonderful I was, bought me ice cream. I don't remember why we weren't talking Christmas Eve, but he sent me flowers after my uncle died Christmas day, so things were back to good New Year's Eve. I had come home to host a sleep over with the girls at the church and he came to drop off his relative. For months to come, I would relive that night, looking for a sign of the turmoil that was to come.
The night before I heard those life-changing words, my dad called. I was in the kitchen with one of my roommates and was expecting a phone call from him, but got my dad instead. He informed me that my guy had been arrested. That was shocking enough and when I asked why, he told me it was because he was AWOL. I was upset, but it was endurable. The next day, my mother called and asked me what I was thinking about in regards to him and I told her I was done, no more. It's then she told me that she had asked dad to lie to me, that he was in fact in jail for statutory rape(that relative in my youth group) and that the girl was pregnant.
The rest of that day was a complete blur. I went to class, but heard nothing. My mind just kept reliving that moment and those two words, "statutory rape". I was like a cow chewing his cud.
The weeks to come were rough, and I became an angry person. I kept people at arm's length and pretended that I was fine. To make things worse, dad agreed to counsel the guy even after I begged him not to claiming it was "God's will". What had once been a close relationship became estranged, and I withdrew, from life, from him, from God.
It took almost 10 years, countless crying sessions, a move to North Carolina and three years of talk therapy and medication before I was ready to embrace my pit as Joseph did in Genesis. As Tara Barthel said in her general session at the Peacemaker Conference, I was forgetting three things my duty, depravity and destiny. I had forgotten God and believed He had abandoned me. I felt lost and alone because I forgot my duty to serve God, my own sinful nature and the destiny God had for me.
Joseph remembered and embraced all of those things. He had had dreams about his destiny and he held onto those and his relationship with God through his journey from the pit to Egypt. Never once did Joseph give up on the destiny God had for him, and when he was faced with the decision to help his brothers or let them suffer as he did, he remembered his duty telling his brothers, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today."(Gen. 50:20).
After I moved out here the guy committed suicide. I felt mixed emotions...relief, guilt, frustration. You see, I had never had an opportunity to confront him, to tell him how he hurt me, to understand why he did what he did. I felt like I would never have closure or find reconciliation. I would never have the chance to tell him how much I hated him, and I would never be able to hear him apologize and grant forgiveness. What I never realized is I don't need that, I need to remember my duty, my own depravity and the destiny God has for me. I need to remember that God is always with me no matter where my pit is or how big it is, and He will always use the bad for something good even if it's not in my time or my way. I pray it's not just me....
