Little Gerda Goes Forward with Courage and Safety

[Gerda]

Scout and Cardinal, amazing words. Very fortifying and humbling. Have been repeating them to myself since yesterday in some astonishment, thinking of what you see and said. Thank you so much, a real gift to me! And thank you for the poem, Cardinal, touching poem and even more touching that you thought of me in that context.

I read your story as far back as I could go when I first arrived here eighteen months ago. It was a cautionary tale for me. The effect of your H's behaviour on your children was shocking and shockingly obvious to an outsider. It took a while for you to notice, I think. But you have come SO far since then. It's abundantly clear now that you saved your children's lives, their souls, their hearts, whatever it is that makes up the core of their humanity. You are a very brave woman.

That was hard to read, but also gave me a lot of courage. It's what I think I have to offer, the blessing in this, a roadmap of where not to go. But it's complicated because I think I had to stand in that way in order to find faith and that is where any courage I have came from.

I never look back at my early posts. It's too painful to think of. It's painful to imagine what must be very clear about me then, through my words. I don't want to see it.

At some point I plan to figure out what I couldn't hear then, and to try to write a post for newbies that could touch on that. I'm not sure you can skip any steps in this process. But I was confused about the difference between standing for your marriage and allowing abuse. When people posted to me that my H was abusive, I didn't think they understood my life or what God expected from me. We owned two businesses together, one of which was part of our home, so it took a long while to figure out how to extricate myself and him, an endless time to get him out of my house, etc. But I didn't think I was abused and now it's quite obvious that I was, and that I thought I deserved it and that I thought I could handle it and that I didn't realize my kids were watching it.

I don't know if I am brave. I mean, I am very brave about things like working in a prison or a tough neighborhood or jumping into a business deal, etc. I think I carry myself in this world in a way that no one would suspect I was scared of anything. But I have been terrified of my H and terrified of court. I battle that fear always, and I beg God to save me from that burden all the time.

Somehow this latest round seems to make things much clearer for me. That I have to keep walking this path, there will be no escape from it because H doesn't want to escape and I don't have a way to get him the full equity right now.

I never felt particularly brave, quite the opposite. I think I am just willing to consider the possibility that God has a plan for me, at least some of the time.

As an example -- I've been bringing dinner to this old man from my church since Covid started. He always ate at the senior center and it was closed -- I mean, even the nearby deli was closed in the early days and this old man can't walk very well, has a permanent wound that needs weekly medical care and didn't have a fridge or a phone, so truly he could have died without help. (This old man is very faithful and played a role in my conversion, though he did not know it, just from my watching his patient suffering and prayer for a few years.) At first, I went every night with his dinner, and I was making calls to social worker, etc, to get him a fridge and a phone. There were times when he was very grouchy and depressed and I felt like it was an emergency situation. I could actually see him improve a little as a result of getting this one healthy meal a day. finally after things really opened again, I slowed it to every other night.

But I didn't do this with a generous heart all the time. Sometimes I had to clench my teeth to do it. I'd have these waves of resentment on my way to his place or while I am waiting the long long time it takes him to make it down the stairs to the front door of the building. Sometimes I have to swallow hard against these dark feelings in order to greet him kindly. But I have had several times what I see as very clear requests from God to keep serving this old man. And one day I realized that we really have no way to know that God cares for us unless someone else shows us by loving us. If I look at my own life, at the moments where I felt love from someone else, true love with no agenda but just care for me, those moments changed everything, and many of them increased my faith at God's ability to provide for me. And I realized that at this moment in that man's life, I was that person for this old man. I was the only person, there was no one else who would do it. That gave me peace about continuing to bring him this dinner every other night. But it didn't mean that I don't still sometimes want to revolt against it. And lately I watch myself in battle with my will, thinking of all that God has done for me, how he has sustained me through this impossible journey, all the help I have received, all the light and blessings that came to me, and then to think of how I battle myself, I battle my own opportunity to show God's love to this old man when I know that doing it has only refined me for the better and that there are further mysteries in it that I don't even know yet. Both when I feel like I want to go and when I really feel like I can't bear to go and go anyway, this is teaching me a lot about how hard it is to love as God loves.

And all of that is to say, that for most of my LBS journey, I thought that learning to love as God loves meant I had to keep loving my H as a wife, no matter what he did to me. Now I can see that I don't have to be that man's wife to show God's love in this world and that I don't have to be his wife to do God's will.

I know that many of you aren't religious so this may not make sense, but I think if you just think of "God's will" as the plan for your life, it will be clear and hopefully help someone else. It took me seven years to get to this point, and honestly it's only when H became such a horrible scoundrel in the D, not even what he did just as a pre-D MLCer, that I was able to see him, his mental illness and the impossibility of getting him to stop. Maybe God had to bring me through this fire, this crucible, to help me truly understand who H was. I see the signs were there all along but I didn't see them until things got so bad I was forced to truly look.