La Limpieza

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)