The God that I know is loving, gracious and forgiving. But
the God I have always felt? He’s Old Testament: wrathful, disciplinary and
jealous. This view entirely ignores the redemption parts of the Old Testament
and basically the whole character of Jesus, but no matter what I read or what I
knew as head-knowledge, I was never able to shake the feeling that God was
always ready to smite me back into place anytime I disobeyed.
So when I became a victim of sexual battery a month ago, I
registered it as God finally punishing me for turning my back on Him earlier
this year. I had chosen obsession with losing weight and working out over God,
so how could I complain when someone finally found me physically attractive.
Even if he proved it through sexual assault. After all, this was what I had
wanted, and this was what I deserved.
It would take me by surprise just how not okay I would be
after the incident. After all, I was the mighty Josephine Liu, who was unfazed
by the thought of running through fire or electrical shocks. I liked danger,
and MMA, and driving ridiculously, illegally fast. I was tough. I was supposed
to be so much tougher than this. But yet, no matter how many times I told
myself to just suck it up and deal with it, or that girls in third-world countries
go through worse and live with it, I couldn’t move on.
Someone had entered my life, violated not just my body, but
also my dignity, and walked away scotch-free. I didn’t go to the police after
the incident, afraid that people would blame me for wearing yoga pants, and
think that I had been asking for it since yoga pants can be considered immodest. So by the time I came to my senses the
next morning and filed a police report, it was too late. He was long gone,
leaving me behind to drown in my shame and taking with him any hope I would
have for closure.
I would spend endless nights reliving the incident,
succumbing to feelings of dirtiness that couldn’t be rubbed or washed off, and
then to nightmares of snakes crawling beneath my skin and writhing up and down
my legs. As a way to fight back against my own subconscious, I would begin
reimagining how I should have responded. Instead of walking away without saying
a word like I did in real life, in my mind, I had the liberty of doing all the
violent, violent things to him I wish I had done. My love for Bruce Lee movies
and Castle reruns suddenly paid off. Not only did I have the technical prowess
to kill him, I had creative ways of getting rid of the body too.
My reaction could have been worse. One of my initial
thoughts was to get the snakebite piercings I always wanted, thinking that if I
had them, maybe I wouldn’t have looked like such an easy victim. But even the
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was victimized, and we all know what she looked
like, so I couldn’t justify becoming Girl with the Cross Tattoo to myself. But
killing the guy over and over again in my mind? That was so much healthier.
Especially when I didn’t tell anyone what was going on. I was too embarrassed
by how a stranger could break down in minutes the walls I had built up over years and so easily taint my purity and my self-respect. So I turned my shame into
rage against God.
It was God who had allowed this guy to treat me like trash,
and it was God who allowed him to get away it. It was God who didn’t protect
me, and it was God who used this to try to teach me a lesson. So it would not
be God that I turned to in the midst of my pain. No, I would swallow a bitter
pill, hold it inside me during the day and let it devour me whole at night.
I began the Honduras Medical Missions Trip with this burden
still on my shoulders. It had been two weeks since the incident. The nightmares
were less frequent and the rage would now only spring up at night. Few people
had known to begin with, and even fewer came with me to Honduras. I had hid it for
so long, I figured it was just one more week to get over with. But when we
finally arrived on Saturday, I knew that I could either hold God at arm’s
length and waste the week not pouring my heart into my service, or I could give
him the reins to use me and to break me as I needed to be.
What would begin as a missions trip to serve the people of
Honduras with physical and spiritual aid would end up physically and
spiritually healing me. But it wouldn’t be an easy victory. After praying
Sunday morning for God to show me what He needed to show me, we went to the
local church where we would be serving the next few days. After we were
introduced to the congregation as the medical missions team from the United
States, people from the church flocked to where we were to shower us with hugs
and kisses and their thanks. But when the men of the church began to pull me
close to hug me, a fit of rage rose inside me as their faces started to fade
out and all I could see was his, and him touching me and violating me all over
again. Though I kept a smile on my face, inside I wanted to kill them all. I
had no peace that night, lying awake after a nightmare of being overtaken by a
crowd, and allowed my anger at my vulnerability to shift into imaginary
violence against my attacker once again.
And though my rage threatened to overtake my desire to
overcome my bitterness towards God, I knew He had allowed it to happen for a
reason, if only to show me how much the incident still controlled me and twisted
me into the monster that I had become. But God surrounded me with wise and
patient Christian brothers and sisters to speak truth to me as I finally opened
up about what had been going on, and I began to meditate on my favorite Psalm
each morning to give me strength to face the day:
“When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
I was brutish and ignorant;
I was like a beast toward you.
Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
-Psalm 73:21-26
My flesh, my arms, my legs, my mouth, everything I had ever
relied on had failed to protect me when I needed them the most. My heart was
not strong enough to overcome the feelings of shame that followed, and I turned
to sin instead to subdue it. But God promised to be my strength and my portion
forever, so I began to trust that He would carry me through the week, and that
He would wash me clean of what had happened.
Thursday afternoon, my translator and I shared the Gospel
with a woman who had suffered through atrocious things done to her by other
people. Her husband used to tie her hands and feet together and beat her, and
his second wife had suffocated her son. My translator told her that she needed
to forgive, as Christ had forgiven her. I was taken back when I heard this,
thinking that what her husband and his second wife had done to her were
unforgivable, but as she began to nod her head and open up to the idea of
forgiveness, I knew that God was showing me that I too needed to forgive my
attacker if I was to ever have peace.
The next day was our last day working at the brigade sites,
and we ended the week by honoring the ordinance of communion and the tradition
of foot washing. But before we started, our host at the mission house showed us
a video depicting the crucifixion, when Christ was beaten, whipped and
humiliated before dying on the cross, bearing the shame that I so deserved. How
many times had I shared the Gospel the day before? How many times had I shared
the Gospel in college? Every time repeating the same lines of how He had died
for our sins, but numb to the weight of what He put Himself through to show me that
He loved me. Me, who shook my fist at Him when someone else sinned against me.
Me, who thought He had given me up to the world when He had conquered it so
that I may have peace (John 16:33).
Josh would drive the point home as we started Communion by
leading worship:
“The nails in Your hands
The nails in Your feet
Tell me how much You love me.
The thorns on Your brow
They tell me how
You bore so much shame to love me.
And when the Heavens pass away
All Your scars will still remain
And forever they will say
Just how much You love me.”
Before entering the room for the foot washing, I grabbed my
gray UCLA hoodie last minute from my bed. After the incident, I never wore yoga
pants in public again, but wore them that night because I had bug bites on my
calves and wanted pants I could roll up around my knees. And as Amos and
Enrique began to go around the room, it dawned on me that I was wearing the
exact same thing I had worn the night of the incident, completely unplanned (by
me, at least). So when Amos began washing my feet, symbolizing Christ washing
the feet of His disciples in John 13, I realized God had literally answered my
prayer to be washed clean, literally; not just my feet, but the dirtiest parts
of me, my sins of the past and of the future, my attacker’s sin against me, the
parts of my body where he had touched me, all of me. God had brought me in a
full circle so that I could stand before Him unashamed. As I stepped onto the
second-floor patio that I loved to do devos on, it was raining, and between the
foot washing, the rain and my tears, I could feel God say, “It is finished.” I
had found my closure with God.
Now I was ready to find closure with my attacker. I prayed
that night for God to give me the strength to forgive, but I didn’t know what
that meant or what that would look like. I would probably never see him again.
I would never be able to be nice to him or to tell him that I forgave him to
show my heart. So what would it take? I asked Emily the next morning how I
would know when I’ve forgiven him. Wasn’t it enough that I stopped killing him
in my mind? I asked. Emily replied that I would know I have fully forgiven him
when I could say I want to see him in heaven, when I could pray for his soul to
be saved, which was coincidentally the last thing in the world I wanted to do
at that moment.
I realized then what God might have wanted to show me all
along, just how much love it took for Him to forgive me, to not only give me
mercy, but to also give me grace. In my mind, I thought it was enough that I
had stopped imagining doing violent things to my attacker, withholding from him what I thought he so deserved (to die a new, creative death
every night). Mercy, just like when Christ died on the cross to take away my
punishment of Hell, which I so deserved. But Christ didn’t just stop there. He
gave me what I didn’t deserve. He gave me grace by granting me eternal life in
Heaven with Him, something I could have never imagined granting my attacker.
After all, he had sinned against me when I had done nothing to deserve it. Just
like how I sinned against a perfect, holy and just God, and didn’t, and still
don’t, and never will deserve heaven. That is love that I will never be able to
comprehend, least of all give.
I opened my mouth and prayed for my attacker three days
after arriving back home from Honduras. I’ll admit I cringed when I said it. It
literally caused me pain to envision him in heaven, so suffice it to say I’m
not sure just how much of the prayer I meant. Somewhere over 0 but less than
2.5%. But I’ll get there, someday. It’s true what they say, “To err is human.
To forgive is divine.” Thankfully, God promises to give me the strength to
forgive where I cannot. 2 Corinthians 12:9, “But he said to me, “My grace is
sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will
boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may
rest upon me.”
The God that I know is the God that I feel: loving, gracious
and forgiving, perfect, holy and just. He is more than I could ever sum up in
words or explain to someone or even feel through experience. He is the God of
the Old and the New Testament, and the Living Word. He is the Messiah, my Redeemer,
and my Prince of Peace.
The God that I know is my God who loves me, and nothing in this life or the next can ever separate me from His love. (Romans 8:31-39)
