My Restore Story: The Redeeming Power of Story
“It was so long ago.” July 10, 2018
“I don’t feel like I deserve to be a victim.” July 13, 2018
“I feel gross in my own body.” August 4, 2018
“I feel hollow. Paralyzed. Unable to think about anything else yet unable to form words about it.” October 26, 2018
“What if all of this grief is for nothing?” July 18, 2019
I’ve always been an avid journaler. I was gifted a colorful Barbie diary as an eight-year-old. I’ve been writing down my thoughts and emotions ever since.
My husband and I were hardly out of the honeymoon phase of marriage when I started to reflect about being raped as a teenager. Even now, behind the safety of a computer screen, the word “rape” makes my body tense up. Familiar emotions wash over me. “You weren’t raped. You couldn’t have been raped. That didn’t happen.” But it did.
I hadn’t forgotten about it. Instead, I had shoved it away. After a conversation with a friend the summer after I got married, I started to think about what had happened. I spent hours fixating on that dreadful memory. I poured out my heart in my journal. I felt like a haunted woman. My body suddenly felt like a foreign object. I started experiencing anxiety around others; it felt like everyone knew that I was unwinding on the inside. One year after writing about the rape in my journal for the first time, I told a friend over the phone that I thought about it nearly everyday.
I wasn’t the only one being tormented by my past. My new husband was dumbfounded with how to care for me. I spent hours on the couch in either a mess of tears or completely paralyzed in silence. Neither of us knew what to say, so we often just said nothing, instead letting the moment of awkwardness and despair pass. We knew we needed help.
Late that summer, we decided to participate in Restore. We didn’t know much about the program, other than it was one of our church’s main sources of care. We knew we needed care, so we gladly committed to it.
The week of our first meeting with our closed group I felt terribly anxious. However, I knew that I needed to face my reality. I wrote in my journal: “It’s weird, but you feel safe in denial. But you’re not. The ‘peace’ you feel is a false sense of peace. What happened was real. Hiding from it is foolish.” Although I was afraid, I knew that stepping out of the darkness by participating in Restore was an act of faithfulness.
During our first night of Restore, we talked about the redeeming power of our story. God uses stories—His story and our story—to make himself known to us. God wasn’t calling me to merely understand my story; He was calling me to understand my story in light of his story.
His story of love and restoration gives meaning to even the confusing and dark parts of my own story.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing how Restore has shaped one woman’s life, and helped bring the healing of God’s love into her story. Interested in having God’s story speak into yours? Check out Restore: Changing How We Live and Love today.
