00:00:10.440 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the MilMac Musings Podcast by Destined for Glory, where we reveal the intersection between God and science for living wholeheartedly. Hi everyone, welcome to MilMac and Musings. Today, prior to the show, we had a long, lengthy discussion.

00:00:29.640 And it was really nice to talk about this because in our hearts, as we've mentioned before, we have a heart for the caregivers. But our heart also and survivors, that's the key. It's the people who have gone through it. So we're going to just really be talking about that. And there's been some questions. And we're going back to Dr.

00:00:48.540 Diane Langberg's book for just a brief period because it's really important for, I believe, you as a survivor of particular abuses and complex trauma, that you really do have questions, and we are from a biblical aspect, but we understand, too, that what you've been through, you have questions about where was God through all this. Right. Same questions we've had. Right.

00:01:16.920 And as we were going through our particular walks, and we've talked about it before, that was one of the things too. I mentioned I was angry at God. And these are things that are really we feel we want to get out there so you can understand that your questions about God are valid. And God's a big God. Really big. Biggest. We are his hands of fetus we've mentioned many times.

00:01:44.100 And from physically and spiritually, we want to help you to grasp how wonderful God is. But there's some questions we're going to go over that are valid questions, and we'll go from there if that's all right. Yeah. Can I just say one thing just to feed off so that you can maybe segue into that is just to remember that as a survivor, things that you've learned through your life have distorted your way of thinking.

00:02:16.560 And so for us and what we learned, our view of God was very distorted, but yet it was understandable. And Gerard is going to just share some questions that you really have that we had. Right. That we had. And you know we understand it totally. And God does, too, because we are His imagers here on Earth. And when somebody's not imaging God the way that God is, then that's very confusing to that person.

00:02:45.780 So I'm going to just begin. Why are we trying to represent God, meaning us to help the survivor, who struggles with questions about God? And these are great questions. Who is he? What does he think about my abuse, my rape, the loss of all things? What does he think about me? Am I loved? Am I forgivable? Does his patience run out? Why should I have hope? Valentine's. Through and through.

00:03:11.640 And from my perspective, I just feel that as we move forward to try to help the survivor, they need to have that safe place and they need to build trust. Because for them, how can they trust? How can they trust? You know With an example of a person you know a father praying with his daughter, and she's a young girl, and the praying beside the bed, she gets into bed, he molests her, and then calls her a whore.

00:03:41.520 Why are you such a whore? And then why did you make me do that? Right. Exactly. And it's heartbreaking to hear that. So how could you not have these questions? And like you were saying, you have a distorted view of yourself because really, we're egocentric. When you're younger, you're egocentric, and then you're thinking it's your fault. Somehow this is my fault, that daddy or mommy can't be bad, you know and that type of thing because your world will crumble.

00:04:12.480 We always think mom and dad are the ones that know everything and that they do everything right. And then when that happens, it shatters your world. Right. It really, really does. But I'm going to mention one thing here too. And this is from our take is the people who are here to help you walk alongside you and it's the ministry. It's important from our perspective that you can maybe understand where our heart is.

00:04:39.420 If you want the survivor to understand that God is a refuge, then be one for her. Again, it's all about being here physically and spiritually. If you want her to grasp the faithfulness of God, then be faithful to her. If you want her to understand the truthfulness of God, then never lie to her. I mean, those are the things that have happened throughout their life. If you want to understand the infinite patience of God, then be patient with her.

00:05:08.040 And where you are not a refuge or being tired of being faithful, or fudging in your answers or growing in patients with the necessary repetition, then get down on your knees and ask God to give you more of Himself, then you might represent Him well. And that's our job here. Right. And that's what we were talking about earlier, is how you know a lot of times we go out there and we think that we're going to help people, and we're going to do it in our own strength. Oh, yeah.

00:05:35.220 And that's when we really hurt people by doing it that way, rather than you know knowing the love of God, the true love of God for us, understanding you know who we are in Him and what He has given us as a gift to be able to do through our relationship with Him. And that is only you know and depending on him to help others. So when people aren't doing it that way, it creates more mistrust. It does.

00:06:05.520 Absolutely. And I think as Christians, we've heard the horror stories of people who take scripture, and sometimes they take it out of context. But there's a few things that need to be done here. We need to be active listeners. Yeah We need to believe them. And we need to show that we want them to trust us. And trust has to be built. It just doesn't happen overnight. And we don't do that by throwing scriptures at them. No. That's not the way God do you ever see Jesus do that?

00:06:35.520 No. No. I mean, he had the compassion, as we were talking about yesterday. It's a great word for it. He had the compassion of people. And that's the love. Him showing it, you know Jesus showing what God is like. And we need to do the same thing as well. We need to let God work through us to help people. And we don't have to sit there. Did you hear in Colossians 3:12? God loves you. And they don't know anything about love. Yeah And that's a sad part.

00:07:03.840 And it took me after being born again a number of years for me to receive his love because I was damaged and broken. And it's not that we are all broken. But our goal is to, through the curriculum, through the ministry, is to help you have the tools to deal with this, as we said from the beginning. But again, from a survivor's perspective, they just need to know that you know those questions we ask are very real and are very important for us, for us to have the Holy Spirit work to us to try to help them to understand God's absolute love.

00:07:40.800 Yeah. And the patience aspect that you mentioned earlier, you know I think you know as you work with somebody, you have to understand that that person is not just you know you don't have an agenda for them and they're going to be all better tomorrow or next week or next month. It's a process and it is a piece by piece. I mean tiny little pieces by piece to healing.

00:08:09.540 If somebody tells you they have five steps to healing, you know there may be five steps to healing, but those five steps might take 10 years. Exactly. Because it's all about you know coming to a newer understanding and a new mindset of who God is for you, how much He loves you, knowing the truth about that, and knowing people, being able to know people that you see God in them, and that you know that you can trust them because of that.

00:08:42.480 Exactly. And you know just getting back to it, as I mentioned earlier, how can you trust somebody who's doing that to you? You know And the other story we heard about a younger girl who was being raped by her father three times a week, and then she may get a break because he was raping his other daughter. And then you have the added part of it because they wanted to protect them, but they just didn't know how. Yeah.

00:09:11.400 And then the guilt that was on the older one of not being able to protect the other one. And then the story of the young girl not in this book, but the young girl whose father was violating her continuously and using the carrot you know as bait, basically, to say, "Well, if you and not in so many words, but you know the understanding was, you get something new if you do this for me." And then how distorted the view is of you know number one, what a real relationship is about.

00:09:49.200 Number two, I have to do things like this to be able to get something new. And so it's just horrific, really. The reality is you're thinking of the unworthiness of how you feel about yourself, what you feel about yourself, how unworthy you are. And not only that, but again, you see from the perspective of yourself as the inner child, who can you ever trust?

00:10:18.840 And what is love? I mean, love is love really to them and to us as you go through the abuses, where is it? What is love? Well, it's not love, but it's a very dysfunctional, distorted view of what love is. You know I mean, a parent is there to nurture and care for and love a child.

00:10:45.060 But when they start bringing these elements into the situation, their relationship, a child begins to think that is love. Yeah. And they have such a warped view of so many different things. And then sometimes they just want to hear the words, anything just to feel something. Yeah And it's wrong.

00:11:12.120 These words don't mean nothing, but they may be hearing it and being in a dangerous situation and just hearing the words. Yeah It might be worse for them. You know As we talked about it, there was another part of this that we've talked about before, but really hit home to me. I apologize. I should have had it up prior to this, but I didn't. It is really statistics. Oh, yeah. The statistics of what it's about is really just mind-altering.

00:11:42.420 It is. I hope I have it up here. Well, I can't seem to find it at the moment. Oh, here it is. Oh, here it is. I'm sorry. Okay. So what I'm going to do here, and I know I'm taking a few minutes to do this, but it's really important to understand the statistics that are behind this. And my understanding is that these are reported ones.

00:12:13.320 What about the unreported ones? Yeah. These are mind-blowing. These are just mind-blowing glowing, and it's something and it's going to take a few minutes. So if you can just bear with me. Statistically, 31% of the women in this country will experience at least one episode of violence from a husband or a partner. That translates to one in three, one in three. One in three. So in my community of friends, one in three. Imagine that? Mm-hmm.

00:12:42.840 I mean, it's horrible. More than three women are murdered daily by their husbands or boyfriends. Pregnant women are more likely to be victims of homicide than to die of any other cause. The statistics for rape are not that different. At least 20% to 25% of adult women, one in four or five, and 12 percent of adolescent girls have experienced sexual assault or rape during their lifetime.

00:13:09.960 According to the Medical Association, about 700,000 women are sexually assaulted each year. That is more than one woman per minute. Can you imagine that? It just makes me weep, really. Oh, and it's terrible because we're all created in the image of God, and we're perpetrating not so much we are, but there's people who are doing this are perpetrating this and others. And a lot of them have been perpetrated on as well.

00:13:39.120 So as we move forward with that, I apologize, but these were just eye-opening for me. It's more than one woman per minute. Close to 100,000 males are raped every year in the United States, according to the CDC. We'll be able to put this up on the website too. Two-thirds of rape victims had a prior relationship with the offender. 70% of reported assaults occur to those 17 years of age or under.

00:14:08.400 Childhood sexual abuse occurs in the levels of one in four women before the age of 18. Child sexual abuse has been reported up to 80,000 times a year, but it is believed that the number is unreported. Instances is far greater. One in five teenagers report it being solicited for sex on the internet. And we can go on and on with that.

00:14:33.480 And it just goes to show that the evilness that is out there and people perpetrating it and it goes back to generational mirroring and other things that hurt people and hurting people hurt people. Right. Yeah. To me, it goes back to understanding that for our time, this is the greatest mission field. There are other things that happen to people, but the statistics are much lower than what this is.

00:15:03.480 And it is very telling of how our minds and our hearts are just in the dungeon. And I mean, not to laugh at it, just to understand that we're broken people, and we don't know how to love people because of the brokenness that's gone before us.

00:15:32.100 And so we've learned a way to do things, and it you know perpetrates upon others who are very innocent. Instead of coming to the point of just saying, stake in the ground, we're not going to let this happen in our family anymore, which is what you and I did. Exactly. Doesn't mean that we can control everything. There are things that happen, but at least when you know I believe you say hurt people, hurt people.

00:16:01.800 I believe what you don't know can hurt you. And so when you know, you're better prepared to deal with it. Yeah I only took a minute to pause for a minute because this isn't in the United States. And people aren't really understanding this. So many people are so busy going on with their lives and everything else. And again, it comes back to this is all happening in the church. These same numbers happen in the church.

00:16:32.280 Yeah, it's not exclusive. Exactly. The other thing that happens that's on top of this is that the children are suffering that run away. And when they run away, they don't have any means to make any money or to provide for themselves. So they're in the city streets, and they pretty soon are into prostitutions or lured into it. And it's a horrific situation. Yeah. And then they're trafficked.

00:17:01.800 Exactly. So I brought that up just to really kind of give an overview of what we're dealing with in the United States. And again, there's so many others that are unreported. So the victims and the people who are the survivors of abuse, how can you not have such a distorted view of God? But God is the answer. And you don't know that. And that's not in a bad way. You just don't understand that because you're looking at your surroundings, which is just all you know.

00:17:34.620 And we as a ministry and others that are in this movement, we're here to help, and we're here to be that patient, loving, trusting person or people or ministry that you need in order to really start to help heal. Right. We're a safe place. We understand. We have a level of empathy and compassion.

00:18:04.920 I think they're mostly interchangeable. But for knowing what you've been through, but we also understand the powerful, absolute, loving God that we have whose purpose was to show us His love and bring His healing power over our lives so that we can be free from these types of things that hold us back from being who we are. Exactly.

00:18:34.020 And from the perspective of us as a person that's walking alongside you, we just can't tell you how heartbroken we are for what you've gone through. It's a horrific thing, and just know that we're here. Yeah That's all I can say on that aspect.

00:18:55.260 I was just thinking, you know Gerard, when you think about for me, I think one of the things that really helped me more to understand the depth of love for God for me was to understand really what he did for us and what he went through and what he experienced. And then you know the victory that he had in that. And I think that would be something really good for us. In fact, I think you know the way that she put it in this book was very powerful.

00:19:27.420 And it took me back to you know that moment in time where I just really, for the first time, grasped what had been done for us and the suffering that took place through Jesus for us so that we can be free, but not just free, but that we can come back up out of that place that really these are places that we're dead.

00:20:04.680 We're dead. And it's darkness. And so to bring us up into the light and for us to live really alive and fully understanding. I just believe that that helped me so much to understand. And I'm going to try to find it while you Yeah, please do. That's a great point.

00:20:29.040 Thanks for bringing that up because when you look at what Jesus did, you have to understand what I always say have to understand, but we would like you to understand that he came down, as we talked about, into the dungeons of our heart. But it's out of complete love for us. He created us, and he wants you to know him the true love, the true love of the world.

00:20:54.540 And in order for that to happen, it takes people like us and others who are part of the kingdom, who are followers of Christ, to, again, be the hands and feet of Him to bring that love that He can bring through us. It's not us. We can't do it in our own strength, as we were talking about. So it's just him working through us. And again, it takes little baby steps for that to happen. But it can and will happen if you would just like to embrace that.

00:21:24.240 And ask those tough questions. Ask the questions that are on your heart. Ask the questions that are difficult. And what I mean by that is you have questions about God that really a lot of people don't have because of what you've been through, what you've seen, the isolation of darkness you've been in.

00:21:43.080 And it's important to write down the questions, have them on your heart, bring it to us here at the ministry and the safe place that you have, the safe people in your life, because it's important to have them answered in a way that's just not throwing scripture at you, but just showing you the love of Christ, who absolutely has gone through everything that you can imagine while he was here on earth. I mean, he died. They killed him. He's gone.

00:22:12.120 And he was among us. And what happened? He was killed. Even his own creation didn't really know him or follow him. Some did, obviously, but it's just amazing what he did for us and just the heartbreak and things that he went through. So he knows all our afflictions. Every one of them, he knows that, through and through. And he's scarred for eternity because of that. And for me, I'm just so thankful that it's the God of love that we can turn to and to hold his hand as we move forward.

00:22:45.540 Again, asking the tough questions, and again, just working with people, patient, kind, and then that trust is built up. Yeah. I can't find it. Obviously, I don't know how to operate this machine as well as I need to. But really, I mean, in a nutshell, the things that you just said and then also that you know I mean, Christ suffered quite a bit while he was here on Earth and not quite a bit. He suffered more than we can understand.

00:23:15.000 Everyone rejected him, was against him, not everyone, but most people rejected him, made him feel you know didn't believe him, made him into this person who thought he was some high and mighty where he was really just this low, humble servant of God. He knew what his purpose was. He knew that he had to go to the cross. He knew that he had to die.

00:23:41.700 But he also when we think about life and we think about the cross, we think of you know just that our sins are forgiven because of what Jesus has done in the cross. But the other side of that was the resurrection life. And you think about how when Jesus left, He sent the Holy Spirit to empower us to live a different way, to know the truth.

00:24:12.060 But when he was on the cross, you know he was separated from God. He literally went to hell. Being without God is like living in hell. Exactly. That's what it is, absence of God. Yeah. And so he knows our sufferings. And I think it's just so important for all of us to understand Jesus knows.

00:24:42.420 And the more we know Him, the more we see that He knows. And the more we see that He knows, the more you know people that know. Sure. And then you know who's safe and who's not safe. And we can sit here and tell you all day long that we're safe. But you know I've had people tell me they were safe before and they weren't. So really having that understanding that we have been through this.

00:25:11.700 We have experienced the love of God on the other side of that and the resurrection life. And we want that. Right. For example. And I want to add one thing as well is that just because somebody's a Christian or they say they are Christian, they may not be. Yeah So you have to be careful with that. And that's where the trust and the safety and the group that you're with, you really need that. That's really important to take those baby steps of moving forward.

00:25:40.860 And one of the things just to follow up with what Jesus did, it's the resurrection that defeated evil. That defeated. So again, we're saying that they're bound. We're loosed. We can walk with God, and there will be resistance, but we walk through it in Christ, who is a divine warrior king, who is fighting for us every second of every day. Yep So we have eternal life. And I just wanted to I don't know if you have anything else to add on that, do you?

00:26:11.880 We understand. We understand not seeing God as a loving God. We understand a view of him that may not be what you hear other people talk about, but it's true, and it's real. It is. It's very real. And we want you to know it. Exactly. So we just wanted to bring up some of the things we did because it's on our heart to make sure that US is a survivor.

00:26:36.420 You know And just working through it, just understand that everything we're talking about is true regarding the questions you have and how you need people to come alongside you and to help you as you walk through this. Yeah. Anything else? No. Okay. Well, thank you for joining. We're so happy that you take the time to listen to us. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

00:27:04.740 And we thank you again for joining. Thank you for joining us today. If you have questions for us, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We look forward to hearing from you. Have a blessed day.