A year or two into my
marriage, I was invited to attend a wedding shower for a young woman. As part
of the entertainment, our hostess asked if each of the married women would
share how she had come to know her husband. The woman beside me, who was just a
few years older than I, had introduced herself to me as Dawne. When her turn
came, she told her story. She said that a nice young man had asked her out, and
that as they were driving along, he reached out to put his arm around her
shoulders. Her response was to recoil violently and cry out, “Don’t hurt me!
Don’t hurt me!” because, she explained to us ladies, she had had a bad
experience with men just a few months earlier. The young man, however, met her
fears with gentleness and kindness and compassion, and he soon won her over.
A little later, as we
were left to our tea and conversation, Dawne quietly told me some more of her
story. When she was nineteen years old, she said, she was working in Edmonton in
a department store and living in a basement suite with a girlfriend. One day at
work she ran into a fellow whom she had known four years earlier at her church
youth group. He told her that he was married now and had a little girl. He chatted
with her only briefly and then moved on. A few days later, as she left work and
walked toward her bus stop, she saw this young man again, stopped at the curb
in a car with two other fellows. They offered her a ride home. She accepted.
She soon found herself
being driven, not toward her place, but out of town, north of the city. She
became understandably anxious. They stopped in a small town for gas, and as
they did, Dawne heard a clear voice speaking in her head: “Get out of the car.
Go to the ladies’ washroom, and stay there.” She had never heard of God
speaking to people today in an audible voice, so she wasn’t sure it was He.
Again the voice came, speaking the same words. But she was paralyzed by the
fear that had come over her and she stayed where she was. The men threw some of
their empty beer bottles at a stone memorial on main street as they sped out of
the small town and into open country. They pulled off into a field, and they
all raped her.
At one point she managed
to break away, and she ran as fast as she could through the light covering of
snow, the coarse, frozen stubble from the harvest slashing at her bare feet.
They soon caught her again, and they treated her even more roughly after that.
She cried out to the one
she knew, asking, “Why are you doing this?” He reminded her of something he had
said to her four years earlier. This young man, 18 years old, had sexually propositioned this 15-year-old girl. When she turned him down, he had said, “If I can’t have you, I’m going to
make it so that no one else will ever want you either.” So this was his
revenge.
That was the part of the
story I heard over our tea cups that afternoon, this, and the fact that the
rape had left her pregnant, that she had given the baby up for adoption, and
that now she was just counting the years until her boy would turn 18 and she
would be able to track him down. I did the math: he must be 14 or 15 by now.
Not too much longer.
I didn’t talk to Dawne
much over the next many years, although we attended the same church part of
that time and I would see her across the way in the congregation. And we would
always smile and say hello when we saw each other here and there around town. I
never stopped wondering how the rest of the story had unfolded.
More than thirty years
have passed now, since that wedding shower where I met Dawne. I contacted her a
few weeks ago and told her I would like to hear all that has transpired, and
that I would like to write about it, if she was comfortable with the idea. She
was eager to glorify God with this testimony of His faithfulness, so we got
together and talked. Her voice still trembles and her eyes still tear up when
she speaks of what happened to her 48 years ago, although she is quick to say
that the tears are more for gratitude of all that God has done since. Her story
picks up right after the assault.
As the three men dropped
her off at her place, Dawne had the presence of mind to cross behind the
vehicle and memorize the licence plate as she walked past. Once inside,
distraught and in shock, she received the help of her friend while a young man
from upstairs phoned the police.
When the officers
arrived, they insisted that they needed to take her to the hospital. Dawne
flatly refused to go with them alone: they had to let her girlfriend come along.
The hospital staff
confirmed that she had indeed been assaulted by three different men, and then
the police put the girls back in the squad car and proceeded to have Dawne
retrace the route with them. She had given them the licence plate number (the
car turned out to be stolen), and when they gathered up broken beer bottle
glass from the cenotaph in the small town, they were able to retrieve
fingerprints.
In due course, all three
men were apprehended. Meanwhile, as a month and then two crept by, Dawne
realized that she was pregnant. Her girlfriend had moved out, heading back to
school, and Dawne could not afford the basement suite alone. She was so ill
from the pregnancy that she couldn’t keep her job, so she found herself on
welfare, living in a small apartment, alone and lonely and depressed. The
church she was attending, because of her pregnancy, declared her to be “a
member in bad standing”—even though the circumstances had been made known.
(It’s all I can do to refrain from breaking in with some angry editorial comments
here.) Not surprisingly, she never went back to that church. For quite some
time, she quit going to church at all.
Someone told her that
they knew of a person who would take care of the unwanted pregnancy for her.
This was before the time when abortions were readily available: she paid $300
up front for what used to be referred to as a back-street butcher. The day
came, and she travelled by bus to the address she’d been given. But she found
she couldn’t go through with it: she stayed on the bus until it took her back
home.
The horror of the violation
was on her mind continually. She was so filled with hatred and bitterness that
she found herself fantasizing about committing mayhem on the three men. She
told her mom, and her pastor, that she imagined seeing them on the street,
running them through with a large knife, and walking coldly over their corpses.
Knowing that the attacker with whom she’d been acquainted had a little girl of
his own, she even imagined arranging for something terrible to happen to her
when she got to be Dawne’s age.
Strangely similar to the
offer of help in arranging an abortion at the three-month point, now at six
months a relative told her he knew someone who, for $300, would look after
these men for her. In the end she told her uncle no and held on to her money.
(She always assumed the proposal was to see that they all got a thorough
beating; now she wonders if the offer was perhaps to have them “terminated,”
and she shudders at the thought.)
She became more depressed
as the months went slowly by. She found herself thinking that both she and the
baby would be better off dead. One evening when she was over seven months
pregnant, she opened her medicine chest and took out a large bottle of aspirin.
Before she could even take the lid off, her buzzer rang. Who could that be? She
never had any visitors. She pushed the button and asked, “Who’s there?”
“It’s a blast from your
past,” shouted a raucous voice, which she immediately recognized as belonging
to a girlfriend from back in her school years. This friend had moved out of
province four or five years earlier. The young woman took the apartment by
storm. Spying the aspirin, she demanded, “What are you doing with those?” She
grabbed them from Dawne’s hand and stuffed them into her purse. “You’re a mess,” she
declared. “Go have a shower and get cleaned up. And do something with your
hair!”
Meekly Dawne complied.
When she had freshened up and even curled her hair, they sat on the couch and
had a visit. The friend placed a call from Dawne’s phone, apparently to her new
husband. “I won’t be home tonight,” she announced into the receiver. “Dawne’s
sick. I’m spending the night.”
The two of them then
pulled out the sofa bed and made it up, and they both retired. When Dawne woke
up in the morning, the hide-a-bed was hidden again, the bedding was neatly
folded on the couch, and her friend was gone. She didn’t hear from her or see
her again for another 20 years. She has always thought of the events of that
evening as more of an angelic visitation than a random visit from an old
friend.
The events of that night
prevented her suicide, but her dark thoughts, her hatred and bitterness, were
consuming her. She came to the place where she couldn’t carry it anymore. She
got down on her knees beside her bed and asked God to take it all away, to
change her heart, to change her thinking. She stayed on her knees until she
felt in her soul that the power of the darkness had been broken.
When the time came for
her baby to be born, she determined to keep her eyes shut the entire time. She
knew that if she ever laid eyes on that child, she would not be able to give it
away. The doctor laid the baby across her chest and told her she had a little boy.
Dawne lay there praying in her heart for him, entrusting him to the Lord, and
dedicating him to the plans and purposes of God. Then she spoke to the newborn
infant: “I know you won’t be able to understand this, little one; I know you
didn’t ask for this, but I have to give you up because I cannot look after you.
I am giving you the best gift I can give you: a mom and dad who will love you.
And I hope I will see you again someday.” When she signed the adoption papers,
her hands shook so badly that she could hardly get her name on the documents.
Two months after the
birth of her son, she married the nice young man that she had been dating since
a couple of months after the assault. Another month or two later, she faced her
attackers in court. The three of them had hired a lawyer; she was appointed one
by the court. He knew nothing about her, didn’t seem to want to, neither did he
even seem to be on her side. The wife of her antagonist was put on the stand,
and she testified under oath that her husband had been at home with her during
the hours in question. The proceedings became so distressing to Dawne that she
stood up and walked out, with the judge shouting after her and threatening to
hold her in contempt of the court. But then he followed her out and spoke with
her quietly, and on hearing her misgivings on the “justice” she saw shaping up,
he agreed to put her on the stand and question her himself.
The judge led her through
the telling of her story and the identifying of her attackers, and then he
said, “I understand you had a baby as a result of this encounter.” At her
affirmative, she saw her antagonist lift his head for the first time, startled.
He began to cry.
Now the judge addressed
the defendants. “Is this young lady telling the truth?” All three slowly nodded
their heads. Turning back to Dawne,
the judge said, “The police have charged these men with rape. Do you wish to
charge them as well?”
“No,” Dawne responded. Then
turning toward the men, she told them, “I forgive you.” She didn’t want any
more hurt from the situation, not for herself, not for anyone. She just wanted
to move on and leave it all in God’s hands.
The judge spoke again:
“The young lady may forgive you, but this court does not.” Each man was
sentenced to repaying to Social Services the full amount that it had cost to
look after Dawne during her pregnancy.
Once again, I’m biting my
tongue here. But I suppose in Dawne choosing not to charge the men, she
forfeited any right to compensation. Regardless, there is no way that any
amount of money could have undone the harm that was done to her. In forgiving
the men and trusting God, she did the most powerful thing she could do for her
own restoration.
As I write Dawne’s story,
I am reading a book on a present-day martyr, a Turkish man who was murdered for
his devotion to Christ. When it talks about his widow choosing to forgive, it
says something that helps clarify the dynamic of releasing someone who has hurt
us.
People
who do not believe on Jesus cannot understand that this sort of forgiveness is
a supernatural gift of God. Forgiveness does not include the wish that these
murderers should be spared earthly punishment. Forgiveness means to forgo one’s
own feelings of vengeance and to bless the murderers in the name of Jesus. (Faithful Until Death, Wolfgang Haede, P.
118)
On the second anniversary
of the rape, a son was born to Dawne and her husband. Dawne felt that it was part
of God’s redemption, blotting out the darkness associated with that date by
infusing it with new joy. Four years later they had another son. Theirs was a
happy, godly family. But Dawne’s heart still ached with a lonely love for her
first-born son. She prayed for him continually and yearned for the day, still
many years away, when perhaps she might be allowed to meet him. She began to
have a recurring dream, that she would awaken in the middle of the night to a
knock on the front door. She would make her way down the hall, open the door,
and there would be a young man saying, “I’m your son Allan.”
The dream came so
regularly and for so many years that she finally went and told her current
pastor about it. “Do you think this is God promising me that I will get to meet
him some day?”
“Where are you in the
dream?” the pastor asked. “What house?”
She didn’t know.
He prayed and asked God
that the next time she had the dream, she would be able to recognize her
surroundings. He also pointed out that it was important that she and husband
tell their two sons that they had another brother and that their mom was hoping
to meet him some day. After that, the boys began to pray for their other
brother on a regular basis.
The next time Dawne had
the dream, it happened as the pastor had asked: she was able to look around and
notice the layout of the house, the position of the closets and so on, and she
realized that it was the same house they were living in. The only difference
was that when she opened the front door and looked across the street behind her
son, there was a house opposite, whereas in actuality there was just a farmer’s
field, because they lived on the very edge of town.
Finally the day of her first son’s eighteenth
birthday came and went. Dawne began her search, but immediately found a closed
door. In rape cases, she was told, the records are sealed.
More than ten additional years
drifted by. Then in 1999, Dawne received a notice that the laws had changed and
all adoption records were now open. She placed a phone call to Social Services
in Edmonton. The woman who answered the phone was rather negative, and she
discouraged Dawne from proceeding: after all, would her son really want to find
out that he was a product of rape? Dawne began to second-guess herself: perhaps
the woman was right.
But after just a couple
more weeks, she decided to try again. This time she would phone Calgary instead.
And this time, from the moment the woman on the other end picked up and
identified herself, Dawne was sure that God was now working actively on her
behalf. The woman was full of compassion, first for Dawne’s awful experience,
and second for her burning desire to find her son. She promised to check into
it.
It was only a day later
that the woman phoned back to say she had located the young man, living about
four hours away. “Allan has been looking for you too,” she said. “He will phone
you tomorrow when he’s off work.” She also told Dawne the names of the couple
who had adopted her son. Dawne was rendered speechless: her son’s adoptive
father was a first cousin to her husband.
That first phone call was
anxious and exhilarating. Dawne was a little taken aback when her son asked
right off, “Are you a Christian?”
“Yes,” she answered,
wondering where this was going.
“That explains it!” he
exclaimed. He went on to say that his adoptive parents were nominal
church-goers, attending not much more than Christmas and Easter. “But,” he
said, “from the time I was six or seven, I always wanted to be in Sunday
School. There was a bus from one of the churches that went around Sunday
mornings and picked up kids, and I always made sure I was on that bus.”
Before they ended the
call, Allan asked if he could come for a visit in two weeks’ time, once he was
on days-off again. Dawne was so excited that she forgot to give him her address.
And she didn’t even have his phone number. Perhaps
he’ll phone back, she thought. But he didn’t.
Two weeks later, with her
husband out of town working, Dawne found herself waking up in the wee hours of
the morning, right about the same time that the dream always used to come. She
lay there thinking. He finished work last
night. He could just about be here by now. How will he ever find me?
Then she heard a knock on
the front door. She got up and made her way down the hall. She opened the door,
and there stood her son, now 29 years old. Across the road was the same house
she had always seen in the dream: over the years the town had grown and what
used to be the farmer’s field was now all residential.
They embraced, and Dawne
invited him in. “How on earth did you find me?” she asked.
“I stopped at a gas
station on the edge of town and got a map,” he said. “Then I asked the woman
behind the counter if she knew of anyone in town with this last name. ‘There’s
only one family in town that I know of with that name,’ she said. I told her I
was looking for Dawne, and she said, ‘She’s a good friend of mine.’ Then she
took my map and drew on it the route to your house.”
Dawne couldn’t recall any
friend of hers who worked in a local gas station.
The next morning, still
amazed that Allan had found his way to her house, she drove to the gas station
he had mentioned to find out who had been behind the counter. There she found
her friend Sue. “I didn’t know you were working here,” she said.
“Nope,” answered Sue,
“I’m not. Just filling in. Just last night and today.”
Back at the house, she
noticed that Allan kept going over to the patio door and staring out into the
neighbour’s yard. Then as Dawne was taking something out of a drawer in the
buffet, he glanced inside and saw a photo, which he then picked up. He did a
bit of a double-take. “You know Chris So-and-So?” he asked, pointing to a boy
in the picture.
“Yes,” she said, more
surprised than he was, “he used to live next door. He and his family moved away
a few years ago. But how do you know him?”
Allan hardly seemed to
hear her question. “I knew I’d been
here before,” he said. “I knew it!”
She stared at him. “When
were you ever here?”
“Do you remember one time
about 13 years ago when Chris’s grandma came to visit, and she brought along
another grandson, Allan, and he brought his friend, who was also named Allan,
and they called us Little Allan and Big Allan? I am Big Allan. I stayed there
for two days, and I played football on the lawn with your other two sons.”
Dawne was incredulous,
and she was actually quite angry with God at what seemed to her at the time a
cruel joke. But it would seem that God in His wisdom ordained that that was not
the right time to reveal mother and son to one another. He makes everything
beautiful—in His time. And in the
meantime, He was composing and orchestrating a fantastic story.
Dawne’s healing was a
gradual process over many years, with several significant milestones along the journey.
The first was God’s touching her in the area of her hatred and bitterness and
helping her to extend forgiveness to the rapists, within the first year of the
assault. Then she also had to deal with the way other people sometimes made her
feel. There was the policeman who, the night of the rape, when he asked for her
soiled clothes, held up her dress and said, “Well, no wonder. Look what you
were wearing.” It was a dress with a modest neckline and a hem that fell below
the knee. Seriously! This was in 1969, the era of the mini-skirt. I remember
how short I and my friends all wore our dresses back then. Dawne never wore
anything like that, but however unjustified the officer’s comment and the
judgement it implied, one can imagine the shame that fell on her.
And over the years that
followed, there were enough little remarks from people along the way to keep
throwing her off balance emotionally, innuendos that questioned her character
and lay the fault of the crime at her feet. When she was pregnant with her
third son, her mother-in-law said to her, “How can your husband be sure this
baby is his? After all, the first one wasn’t.”
These comments caused her
to question her own integrity. She searched her heart in vain for something
that might have brought the assault upon her. She finally brought it all to God,
like the psalmist who prayed, “See if there be any wicked way in me” (Psalm
139:24). She simply asked Him that if she had ever done or said anything to
incite this man against her that He would forgive her.
Still the depression
persisted. In 1984, on the fourteenth birthday of her lost son, she found
herself desperately low. Sitting down, she printed the date on the inside cover
of her Bible and then wrote a prayer:
Lord
Jesus, I am hurting deep inside. The memories are too painful for me. I cannot
bear them. I believe Your Word, which tells me that You bore our griefs and
carried our sorrows (Isaiah 53:4-5). I ask You, Jesus, to heal me completely,
not only of the memories but of their devastating effects upon my being. I rest
in Your Healing. I accept it in Your Name. Thank You, Jesus.
Three months went by.
Dawne had just been released from a second stint in the hospital for depression.
Six older women in the church, “spiritual mothers” to Dawne, invited her to go
with them to a retreat in Calgary. A woman would be speaking there, they said,
on deep emotional wounds. When Dawne said she couldn’t afford to go, these dear
and determined ladies pitched in and paid her way. At the retreat, she was able
to talk with the guest speaker shortly before a session.
“God is going to reveal
to me the root of your depression,” the woman told her. “He will show me while
I am speaking, and I’ll say your name so that you’ll know the next part refers
specifically to you.”
In the middle of the
session, the woman suddenly said, “Dawne. Now I’m going to talk about grief.
Grief is the loss of anything that was precious to you.” She went on to speak
on the subject, but Dawne had already heard what she needed to hear. She had
never grieved, never really affirmed and validated the pain she carried, for
two very great losses: first, her virginity, stolen in such a violent,
heartless, and ungodly way, and second, her first-born son, whom she loved with
all her heart in spite of the terrible way he’d been conceived. She came home
from the retreat knowing that she needed to somehow let God help her grieve.
It was the following
Sunday in church. She went up for prayer, which was nothing unusual for her.
Two of these “spiritual mothers” came to stand with her. The first woman just
reached out her hand and touched Dawne lightly on the forehead. The power of
God hit her so hard that she fell to the floor. A consuming grief was released
in her; she said later that it felt like someone had just died. Sobs wracked
her body and tears coursed down her temples as she lay flat on her back. The
first woman knelt beside her and prayed: “And now, Lord, I ask you to heal Dawne
completely, not only of the memories but of their devastating effects upon her
being.” She used the exact words that Dawne had written secretly in her Bible
three months earlier.
Meanwhile, the church
service stood still and waited for God to do His work.
When the grief finally
abated, the other woman knelt down, laid her hand over Dawne’s heart, and asked
the Lord to fill her with an overflowing joy. And then Dawne began to laugh.
She laughed until she cried; she rolled from side to side; she laughed until
her sides ached. She laughed a crazy, contagious laugh until the entire
congregation was laughing along with her.
When it was over, Dawne
knew that she was finally free.
When I think about
Dawne’s healing, it brings to mind something the Apostle Paul said in
explaining what really was accomplished through the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ: “O death, where is thy sting? O
grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55, KJV). The enemy of our
souls, whose continual intent it is to rob, kill, and destroy (John 10:10), tries to keep us in bondage all our lifetime through fear—ultimately the fear of death
and the grave (Hebrews 2:15). Jesus triumphed over all the power of death, the grave, and the devices of the enemy. Sexual abuse is one of the most painful ways the
enemy stings us with the venom of wickedness, but Christ won an absolute and all-time
victory over this and every other evil.
Some experts (Fred and
Florence Littauer) estimate that three of every four women have been victims of
some sort of sexual abuse, though often the painful memories are necessarily
repressed, and one in four boys also has been a victim. This puts the numbers
at a staggering fifty percent. Some of this abuse may be “minor,” and some
major, but even the so-called mildest cases generate trauma that can last a
lifetime. The walking wounded are all around us.
Recently I was talking
with a young woman, a believer, who suffered abuse in her childhood. “God tells
us that His grace is sufficient,” I said, “and that Christ took every pain,
sorrow, grief, and wound to the Cross. In doing so, He broke their power over
us. If His provision is not fully sufficient for this scourge also, then
Christ’s sacrifice falls short for half of humanity.” My point was rhetorical:
anyone who walks with Jesus comes to know increasingly that His provision is
not only sufficient but exceeding abundant above all that we ask or think
(Ephesians 3:20, KJV). Dawne would certainly agree.
There have been several
opportunities lately for Dawne to share her story with local youth groups. Some
might wonder how she could talk publicly about such a thing. But the power of an
evil deed, though it flourishes in darkness, is exposed and stripped of its
influence by bringing it out into the light. And where we’ve been badly
wounded, once we receive God’s healing, He gives us authority and power to
impact others with the overcoming truth of God.
She tells her story in
the context of the power of forgiveness. She talks about scars; she shows the
young people one that she has on her hand and tells them how she got it. “When
the wound was fresh,” she tells them, “it was very painful, but it finally
healed and only left a scar. The scar reminds us of what happened, but there is
no longer any pain.”
It is forgiveness and
faith that bring God’s healing into our emotional wounds.
As I finished writing her
story, I phoned Dawne to check a few of the facts. She was just putting up her
Christmas tree. “I’ve found this ornament in the decorations that has something
written on it,” she said, “and I’ve just been sitting here looking at it. It
says, ‘Without faith, miracles can’t happen.’”
