Rescue Me From the Place I Learned to Hide

There are moments from childhood that do not come back to us as complete stories.

They come as flashes.

A room. A feeling. A body tensing. A moment of shame we did not have words for.

When I was very young, my family spent a lot of time with other families from church. Sundays after church, Friday nights, dinners together. The adults would visit while all of us kids disappeared somewhere in the house to play.

I had to have been only four or five years old.

I do not remember all the details. I do not remember exactly how everything began or even how my pants came off, but I remember being in a room with other children and a Fisher-Price doctor kit.

I remember them taking the toy medical instruments and putting them into my private areas.

And I remember clenching my little body.

This is one of the moments in life my body remembers even when my mind cannot fill in all the blanks.

I remember other times this happened. Again, I do not remember every detail of what happened, but I remember being in a bedroom without my pants on and my parents came into the room telling us it was time to go home.

They were trying to get me out of the bed, and I held on to that bed with everything inside of me.

I would not let go.

For years, I think I remembered that moment as stubbornness.

This morning, I understood it differently.

I was ashamed.

I was terrified, if I let go of the bed, someone would discover what had happened and somehow, at four or five years old, I had already decided if they found out, it would be my fault.

This realization broke something open inside of me today, because a four-year-old little girl was not asking for that. A five-year-old little girl was not responsible for what other children, much older than her, chose to do with her body.

She was a child. I was a child.

Yet somehow, shame entered that room and whispered something to me I would carry for decades:

If something happens to you, somehow you are responsible for it.

I think this is where one of the strongest guards around my heart was born.

For so much of my life, I have tried to understand this shield inside of me.

Why do I protect myself so intensely?

Why do I keep people at a safe distance?

Why does vulnerability sometimes feel dangerous?

Why have I spent so much of my life taking responsibility for other people's feelings, choices, reactions, anger, disappointment, and behavior?

Why has speaking my truth sometimes felt almost impossible?

Why do I carry others peoples responsibility as my own?

This morning, I felt like God gently took me all the way back to that bedroom.

I wasn't protected there. Not because my parents knowingly allowed something to happen. They couldn't see what was happening.

She only understood:

No one sees me.

No one knows.

I have to protect myself.

I cannot tell anyone, because somehow this will become my fault.

So I protected her.

For decades.

I built walls around her.

I kept people far enough away they couldn't reach the most vulnerable pieces of me.

I learned to study people's emotions.

I learned to carry responsibility that was never mine.

I learned not to be silent. 

I did not want anyone to get in trouble.

I did not want people to be angry with me.

I did not want to be questioned.

I did not want someone to look at me and ask what I had done to cause it.

So silence became protection and self-protection became survival.

The hardest realization this morning was, I think this also impacted the way I have experienced God.

Because if you have never known what it feels like to be rescued from something that is hurting you, how do you understand a God who rescues?

If you learned early you had to save yourself, how do you surrender to a God who says, Let Me protect you?

If you learned telling the truth might make everything worse, how do you open the most sacred places of your soul and allow God inside?

I have loved God. 

I have learned to trust God in so many areas of my life.

I have watched God provide, heal, restore, lead, transform, and redeem things I never thought could be redeemed.

Perhaps there has always been the little girl inside of me still gripping the edge of that bed.

Still saying,

Don't let go.

Don't tell.

Don't let anyone see.

Protect yourself.

Keep your self safe because no one else will.

This morning, I cried out to the God of the universe:

I need You to come get me.

I need You to be a Parent to me in that room.

I need You to rescue the little girl who did not know how to ask to be rescued.

I need you to help me yell “Stop”

I need You to enter the memory where shame convinced me I had done something wrong.

I need You to walk into that bedroom, wrap me up, cover me, and take me out.

Because healing is not pretending the moment never happened.

Maybe healing is allowing God to enter the place where a part of me- us stopped moving forward.

Maybe there are moments in our lives where physically we kept growing, but emotionally something inside of us stayed behind.

A little girl stayed in a bedroom gripping the bed in fear and terror. A little boy stayed on a playground waiting to be chosen. A teenager stayed in the moment someone humiliated them. A woman stayed in the moment someone violated her. A man stayed in the moment someone told him to stop crying.

Life continued, but some part of the soul remained there, guarding the wounded child.

Perhaps this is one of the invitations of healing:

To allow the Divine Parent to go back with us in those moments.

Not to erase what happened.

Not to tell us it wasn't painful.

Not to minimize the harm, but to show us what pure parenthood looks like.

Protection without control. Love without conditions. Tenderness without manipulation. Truth without shame. Correction without humiliation. Safety without having to earn it.

A Parent who believes us.

A Parent who does not ask a frightened child why she didn't stop it.

A Parent who does not make the wounded person responsible for everybody else's comfort.

A Parent who says,

You can tell Me everything.

You do not have to protect Me from your truth.

You do not have to protect everyone else anymore.

I will protect you.

Today, I am asking God to teach my entire being something it never learned in that room:

I am allowed to use my voice.

I am allowed to tell the truth.

I am not responsible for another person's actions.

I am not responsible for protecting everyone from the consequences of their choices.

I am not responsible for keeping everyone comfortable and I no longer have to live as though danger is always standing on the other side of vulnerability.

Today, there is still a little girl inside of me learning to loosen her grip from the edge of that bed. ut She is no longer alone.

Today, I am asking God to walk into that room.

To cover her. To hold her. To tell her she did nothing wrong, and to take her hand and lead her out.

Where Did You Learn to Protect Yourself?

Maybe there is a moment or perhaps its more accurate to say moments in your own story where something inside of you stopped.

Maybe you learned:

I can't trust anyone.

I have to take care of myself.

My feelings don't matter.

If I tell the truth, people will leave.

Everything is somehow my fault.

Keeping everyone else happy will keep me safe.

Sometimes these beliefs are so old  we do not even recognize them as beliefs.

They simply feel like who we are, but what if they aren't who we are?

What if they are simply the things we learned while trying to survive something we did not yet understand?

Perhaps today we can ask:

God, where am I still gripping the bed?

Where am I still hiding?

What am I holding on to?

Where am I still carrying shame that never belonged to me?

Where am I still protecting myself because I never learned what it felt like to be protected?

And where do I need YOU- the Divine Parent to enter my story and show me what love, protection and rescuing was always supposed to look like?

A Prayer for Rescue

God of mercy,

There are places within us where life continued, but something inside of us stopped.

There are rooms we left physically but never completely left emotionally.

There are moments where fear became our protector, shame became our silence, and self-protection became the way we survived.

Enter those places today.

Go where we have been afraid to let anyone go.

Find the child who is still hiding.

Find the child still gripping the bed.

Find the teenager who stopped speaking.

Find the woman or man who learned to carry everyone else's responsibility.

Be the Divine Parent we needed in those moments.

Cover us. Protect us. Believe us. Hold us.

Rescue us from the shame that was never ours to carry.

Untangle responsibility from our hearts.

Teach us another person's choices are not ours to own.

Teach us telling the truth is not betrayal.

Teach us our voice is not dangerous.

Teach us love does not require us to disappear.

God, invade the places where fear has lived for decades.

Bring movement to the places inside of us that became frozen.

Bring words to the places that became silent.

Bring tenderness to the places that became guarded.

Bring truth to the places shame distorted.

And when we are afraid to loosen our grip, be gentle with us.

Show us what it means to be protected without being controlled.

Loved without being used.

Seen without being exposed.

Known without being condemned.

Parent us in the purest meaning of that word.

Then, when we are ready, take us by the hand and lead us out of the rooms where parts of us have been living for far too long.

May what once became a place of imprisonment become a place of liberation.

May the voice that went silent speak again.

May the heart that built walls discover safety.

May the child who thought everything was her fault finally hear the truth:

You were a child.

You were worthy of protection.

You are worthy of protection still.

And may every part of us finally know:

We do not have to rescue ourselves anymore because YOU ARE THE RESCUER! May we all begine to know this part of you. 

Amen.