Warning, this post is raw and may be triggering.
My world growing up was harsh and craggy. There was no tolerance for fear or tears or failure, apart from being the plaything of my mom who would make a doll-like show of "loving" us when we were not happy, and then as quickly drop it and move on when she felt it was over. It felt like being a living doll for a self-centered child. While what she did is inexcusable, I don't really blame her. She was abused and living out of the flawed coping skills she had developed in a culture that doesn't recognize the existence of mental illness. She would just as easily scare me by pretending to be someone else and laugh at my terror or throw something at me with all her force. Only to then expect us to all sit pretty to fit the scene of domestic bliss she had in her fantasy for the moment.
On the other end was a dad who was disengaged most of the time. He'd try sometimes, but mostly spend all his free time staring vacantly at the TV. But he'd sure come out of that slump to discipline. I had to tow the line in everything from waking up, to eating, to dressing. And lest you think this is merely strictness, as I believed until middle-age, the difference is that to disobey was a mark of your rebellion against God himself and the punishment was fierce and severe. Having to stand and not flinch for spanking, on top of being jerked around and maybe grounded too. Sleep past 7am on a Saturday morning? He'd grab my ankle and drag me to the floor or throw ice water on me. While berating me as lazy and rebellious. Don't want to eat the hunk of grissle my mom thought was a prime steak? Well I was going to, and in the next ten minutes while a grizzly of a man glowered over me and threatened. And don't even think of gagging on it. Throw it up and you'll eat it again!
Why? Because this was love. God disciplines those ue loves, spare the rod and spoil the child, afterall. God tolerates no sin, no disobedience and refusal to submit in total meant I was bound for hell. Better not die before getting it sorted because then, oops, eternal torment, sorry. Because love demands justice, which includes wearing the belt approved by your father as necessary and approrpriate, you miscreant. Better be stricter in future to quell that.
I understand his abuse too and give him his due that when that anger was turned outward for my protection there was no safer place to be.
But how could I learn what love is in this environment? How could I learn the nature of God? Yet somehow, I did hear him. I know I had nothing to do with it. Because in the midst of my self-destruction, stress illness, and self-hate, I had experiences that literally kept me alive. It would be years before I would seek treatment because I knew it was my own unworthiness that brought me so low.
Eventually much of this was repressed and I thought I had moved on. But now I'm learning to heal. I am trying so hard to see God's gentle nature. To be wrapped in his perfect comforting arms and held truly safe, to be understood for who I am and not told what I am thinking, even though nothing of the kind is in my mind. Which incidentally will make you doubt your own sanity.
Like Picard hanging by the wrists naked in front of the Cardassian torturer who will free him to a life of comfort if he will only stop lying and confess that there are three lights when he sees clearly there are four.
This is NOT God. This and all such voices are the very sprew of satan. God will not bruise a reed, he will bind up and secure and seek our good. He knows our fears and gently assuages them. He washes our tears gently and cries, himself, at our suffering. And even the lies we tell ourselves, this voice of trauma and conditioning, he gently brushes aside. Where I would raze the entire city of my upbringing, He is not threatened and will make all things right.
This is the God that rescued me. This is the God that I want to know better.
