“Good afternoon. We are missionaries from Canada, and we work with Ministerios Impacto in Tactic, and we’ve come to the hospital to visit patients and their families and to pray with them. Why is your daughter here in the hospital? What is she sick with?”
“My baby’s not sick. I brought her along because I didn’t have anywhere safe to leave her. My 5 year old is here because she was raped last night. It was my brother. We came to the emergency right away.”
What can you even say in light of a situation similar to this one? We took a few minutes to pray, but it seemed to me like something more needed to be done. As I walked out of the hospital that day, my heart was shattered by the realization that something had been done to her which could never be undone. The question “Now what?” echoed in my mind. What will become of her? Will this lead her through life questioning? Will this lead her to make poor decisions and pass on the chains of brokenness and pain to the next generation? Will she find healing? What does the path to healing look like? What next?
Then I looked up at my Heavenly Father, and I questioned him, “Why did I encounter her? Her situation? What do you want from me? What should my response be in light of such pain and brokenness as this?”
Sometimes God’s response to us comes like a gentle waves. Before I realized it was in answer to my question, God caused me to seek out a piece of audio I had heard more than a month ago in which I had heard the phrase “We are all sexually broken”. Without avail I searched for a number of days, knowing I had heard it somewhere, but I couldn’t remember for the life of me where it had been. In his grace, God softly nudges and reminds us in his good timing, and he brought to mind the website where I had heard the comment about everyone being sexually broken. It was on the Revive our Hearts website, which was introduced to me by a dear lady who now goes to my home church, who I had the privilege of meeting this past Christmas. As I began to search, I found exactly what I was looking for.
It was a series of podcasts labeled “Rethinking Sexuality”, with Nancy DeDemoss, Dannah Gresh and Juli Slattery, named after a book written with the same title by Juli Slattery. (Holy Intimacy, Sexual Discipleship, We are All Sexually Broken, About Sexuality)
As I listened, I began to understand a concept which, beforehand, wouldn’t have thought that I didn’t understand. Snippets like: “God intentionally gave us sexual desire for a holy reason”, “It is a profound metaphor that’s a tangible way that teaches us about God’s covenant love”, and then brought further to talk about two different types of people we see as reflected by Jesus interactions in the New Testament. The distinction is not between the righteous and the unrighteous, or good and bad people. Rather, the difference is in knowing that “Only God is truly good” (Mark 10:18) and “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). The distinction then is between those who believe themselves to be righteous, and those who recognize their sin, their brokenness, and their need for a savior. I think this concept is definitely something that those of us who have found salvation in Jesus Christ are familiar with. But I personally had never taken this spiritual truth to have meaning in human sexuality.
I know that in general, we often have this idea that humans have good hearts. The scriptures teach us that this is false, that we are inherently evil, and that we need redemption. This is never a concept I struggled with. But now, I was taking this truth, and seeing it applied to sexuality. Sexually, as in every other area of our lives, we are inherently broken. When we have this idea of a checklist of sexual sins, and we can say, “I didn’t have sex before marriage, I don’t participate in extramarital sex, I don’t look at pornography…”, we have this idea that we are sexually sinless unless proved otherwise. Somehow we compartmentalize sexuality, and we make ourselves believe that it exists in a different sphere, and doesn’t intersect or connect with our spirituality.
Reflecting then on that little 5 year old girl I met in the hospital, I recognize that I had come to the conclusion that she had been sexually broken, and therefore the assumption that this wound would be near impossible to heal. But, in relation to the previous paragraph, if we see only two types of people, we can define these by those who recognize their brokenness and those who hide their brokenness. I don’t want to be a hypocrite, as Jesus called the religious teachers of his day; one who claimed holiness and denied brokenness. My sexual brokenness looks very different from this little child who had her innocence taken from her. But in recognizing that I too am sexually broken, because I too have fallen short of the glory of God, I can place myself on the same side of the spectrum as her. There is no “us” and “them”. God’s perfect intention for human sexuality has been broken both in my life and hers. In all of us actually. And we all need healing. Her healing will look different than the healing I need. But we are on the same journey; broken people needing the redemptive intervention of our loving and good Father.
I am still unsure of the fullness of the purpose of this experience that God desires for me. I am confident that God is in all things, and I am determined to seek Him and lean deeper into Him as he continues to reveal to me his purposes and plans in my life. I am very encouraged by the realization that things are not what I had previously assumed, which was probably something along these lines, “As a sexually whole person, how can I relate to and offer hope to a sexually broken person?”.
As a sinner in need of God’s grace, and a broken human being in need of God’s redemption, how can I not walk alongside others who are in the same condition I am, regardless of the details of our walk.
~Written in 2019, posted in April 2020