Scars

I walk into the room, hardly making a noise, but she jolts out of a deep sleep at stares at me with enlarged, terrified white eyes. The first time it happened, I laughed because she looked so funny being scared awake like that. The second and third time, I gasped because her reaction scared me. I thought she was having bad dreams. But now… now I want to cry when it happens. Now I know. 

She’s staring at me, frozen. I can see her heartbeat in her throat but she barely breathes. A silent scream. 

“It’s okay,” I soothe. “It’s just me. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

I still cannot imagine the nightmares this girl has lived through. It took her a long time to talk about her first rape. It took her several more years to tell me about the multiple rapes, the break-ins that would jolt her from her sleep. Sometimes the men would come in numbers, sometimes only one. Sometimes the men would rape her and leave. Sometimes the men would sleep next to her all night and leave in the morning. Those nights she never slept. She never moved. She never lived.

I asked if she ever screamed for help.

Her eyes narrowed and she pulled down her shirt to point to several scars near her breast. “They told me they’d kill me if I screamed. You don’t scream when the knife cuts you here.”

If I stopped to process this during our conversation, I would’ve been paralyzed with pain. Perhaps that’s why I’m so immersed in going at life here 90 mph 90% of the time. If I give myself moments of quiet, like right now as I type this, the tears will come. I weep for them. Years ago I prayed a prayer I didn’t understand at the time. Oh, but I understand it now. I said, “God, break my heart for what breaks yours.” And I’ve learned that sexual abuse is perhaps one of the biggest heartbreaks our Father experiences. He weeps.

But the story doesn’t end there. Because then He redeems. He rebuilds. He restores. And I’ve seen it in this girl’s life. Her remarkable faith, her unabashed hope, her unexplainable compassion. She has horrid memories of night, but she refuses to let the scars define her. Perhaps I can learn a thing or two from this incredible young woman in my charge.