Psalm 91:1-3 (NLT)
“1 Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will find rest in the
shadow of the Almighty. 2 This I declare about the LORD: He alone is my refuge,
my place of safety; he is my God, and I trust him. 3 For he will rescue you
from every trap and protect you from deadly disease.”
“How in the world did I mistake the wrong signs?”
Falling in
love with my man was the easy part. I loved how he pursued me. There were
constant phone calls, checking in every morning before he went to work and
making sure I had what I needed. He seemed to be genuinely concerned about me,
and I believed he had my back. Coming from a traumatic childhood of domestic
violence and abuse, my boyfriend’s persistent checkups endeared him to me, and
it made me feel safe. The persistent and attentive behavior that had me
swooning while we were dating intensified to horrific levels when we got
married. I couldn’t go to work in peace without him constantly checking up on
me, making sure I was in fact where I said I was going to be. I thought it was
as simple as him loving my company and enjoying our time together, but it later
became stalking and antagonizing behavior as the relationship continued. I was
young and naïve, and I just didn’t recognize the signs.
It isn’t
uncommon for a person that has endured and witnessed domestic violence and
abuse as a child to carry the trauma into adulthood. Some of those harmful
patterns become entrenched in our psyches and because of this, the drama and
trauma we experienced will need to be resolved so that the patterns they caused
aren’t on repeat.
The fight or
flight response is one that is triggered when we’re in danger, and like it or
not, once domestic violence is experienced or witnessed, this response comes
into play. The dangerous incident is indented on our braincells; all traumatic
experiences are. From that point, instead of seeing people as loving beings,
it’s possible that we will see them only as predators, abusers, and aggressors.
This is all playing out in the background and consciously, we may not realize
it. When women are abused or have witnessed abuse as children, it is very
challenging for some of them to ever see men the same way. Even though their
relationships may start out loving, the man may do something that she perceives
as aggressive, and things can spiral out of control from there.
For some of
us, the question of why Heavenly Father allowed us to witness or go through
domestic violence and abuse in the first place isn’t resolved in our minds and
hearts. We can’t reconcile the ‘why’, and it all feels so unfair. And
because we can’t reconcile the ‘why’, we’re in perpetual fear. And this
fear creates within us an insatiable desire to be safe—to get it right, so to
speak. Our conscious mind tells us that if an individual can make us FEEL safe,
we’ll BE safe. We buy into this person quickly, lock, stock, and barrel. We
behave impetuously, without thinking through our actions, because we’ll do just
about anything not to be locked into the torture of continual fight or flight.
So, the fear we’re trying to escape is the thing that keeps us in bondage. This
is the insidious nature of fear. It’s a vicious cycle that continues until we
increase our faith and courage to stop it.
In Hosea 4:6,
God tells us that His people are destroyed because they lack knowledge. Many of
us greatly underestimate the heft of what our Heavenly Father is revealing. We
can be severely harmed because of the knowledge that isn’t currently in our
arsenals, and this is happening to many of us today. We blame God when we
should blame satan, the ruler of darkness. We are born into this world, and it
is a place where very bad things can happen because most people have refused to
honor God and His Word. A lot of us grow up in negative and corrosive
environments. But when we learn God’s Word, and we learn what He has
accomplished for us through Jesus Christ, we must come into the light.
Ephesians
3:18-19(NLT) tells us, “And may you have the power to understand, as all
God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.
May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand
fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power
that comes from God.” You and I owe it to God and to ourselves to stretch
as far and wide in our own understanding as we possibly can in order to fully
digest every morsel of this passage. Heavenly Father wants us to comprehend the
immeasurability of His love. If we started flying up towards heaven today and
flew continually for the next ten million years, we still would not reach the
top of the Father’s love. It knows no bounds.
It is
incumbent upon each of us to understand that even though there will never be a
tool that can measure God’s love, it’s immeasurability must be impressed upon
our consciousness. One of the ways that we comprehend its infinite scope is by
also understanding other truths that the Father has permitted us to know. For
instance, God created the universe in such a way that everything has an
opposite. There is truth and a lie. There’s love and hate, right and wrong,
faith and fear, holiness and sin, humility and arrogance, liberty and bondage,
life and death, and light and darkness. Fully comprehending the origin of these
is so integral to our lives that not knowing the Source of all love,
righteousness, faith, holiness, humility, liberty, life, and light will lead us
to destruction.
We can’t
co-mingle light and darkness. Darkness produces abuse, and without the
knowledge of God’s Word, darkness prevails. This is why God said in Hosea 4:6
that we can be destroyed by what we don’t know. Ignorance belongs to satan, and
he seeks to keep us blinded from the truth, but God is our Rescue. We
desperately needed to be rescued from darkness, and God accomplished this for
us through Jesus Christ. Ephesians 5:8(NLT) tells us, “For once you were
full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of
light!”
Romans 10:17
declares that faith comes by hearing and perceiving the Word of God. We need to
know that our safe place is in God, and then we need to actually make the
choice of accepting what Heavenly Father offers or else we’ll remain in the
punishment the devil doles out. We’re in the earth for this very reason, to
make the choice between the light of Christ and the darkness of satan. It’s
true that humanity has made the world a very dark place, but God has called us
to be His children of light. This means we can expose darkness for what it is,
because God has given us the faith of Jesus Christ, and there is no greater
power in the earth. Jesus Christ declared in John 16:33(NLT), “I have told
you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many
trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.”
It is
impossible to comprehend the unlimited depth, width, and breadth of God’s love
without also comprehending the magnitude of consuming darkness and hate that
the devil has for God’s people. Part of our work is coming into consciousness
about this so that we can make a different choice than those before us. We can
embrace the light and come out of darkness and find rest in the shelter of the
Almighty. Psalm 91:4(NLT) says, “He will cover you with his feathers. He
will shelter you with his wings. His faithful promises are your armor and
protection.” You will do yourself the greatest favor if you trust this
truth with all your heart and have faith that God is your safe place and
protection, and He is all you need. ■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are
taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by
permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All
rights reserved.
“Your Safe
Place Is in God”, written
by Kim for https://rescuefromdomesticviolence.blogspot.com© 2021. All rights
reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and
Savior.
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