Ripples

A long time ago there was a man who lost a great deal of money in the stock market. He became depressed and started to drink, neglecting his own family and treating his children as worthless. The man's son grows older and marries, seeing himself as worthless and in turn treating his wife as he feels, degrading her as often as he can. One day the wife cheats on her husband because she finds someone who treats her with desire and admiration. The man in his sadness and hurt turns to alcohol to soothe his pain, just as he had seen his father do. One day as he is driving while intoxicated, he crashes into a van carrying a family, killing a mother and her two children, but leaving the father alive. This father, destroyed by the loss of what was most precious to him lashes out in rage and jealousy at those who still have children, to the point of kidnapping another's child and killing it. The parents of the kidnapped child sink into despair and numb their pain with Methanphetamines. The drug takes control of their reasoning, they become oversexualized and begin neglecting and sexually abusing their other children. One of their boys grows to be 14 and in his pain and battle against powerlessness rapes a neighbor child for offending him. The neighbor boy's mother cannot handle the guilt that she was unable to protect her son and turns to drugs herself. The boy is removed from the home, placed in foster care and ends up in a session with me.

I ask myself, who is to blame for this? Who should pay for the injustice done to my client? Is it the boy who raped him? Or the boys' parents who abused him? Or the kidnapper? How far back do we go? In an amazing session, my client's mother was talking about how she felt tremendous anger over what happened and wanted to kill the boy who raped her son, but then she softened, and said that she also felt compassion on him because she knew that in order to do this, some incredible hurt must have been done to him.

Recently, I was driving home with a strong hatred in my heart for those who have done evil to my clients and the many victims in the world. The hatred was so strong that I wanted to take justice into my own hands and kill those responsible for evil. Two recent and unexpected sources have opened my eyes to the place of hurt in the evils of this world; the book, "The Shack" and the children's book/movie "The Tale of Despereaux". Both struggle with the problem of evil from a creative and empathetic stance, realizing the complexities of the human heart. The frightening truth is that none of us are immune to deep hurt or beyond the possibility of making unloving choices as a result of this hurt.

While I believe that at each stage of the story I have described, each individual had a choice to make, I cannot help but feel more compassion and understanding for the hurt driving the decisions made. I only hope that there is a light more powerful than this strain of darkness, a redemption more glorious than the fall. I know that within my client lies the opportunity to end the darkness, and with God's help maybe someday...

My client grows to forgive the boy who hurt him and chooses to end the cycle of gaining power over others or being stepped on by others, but learns a third way of giving power to others in wisdom and trust and caring for power given. Maybe he will even become a counselor one day and help other children who have been abused. A child that he counsels learns that she is not worthless or permanently stained, goes on to marry and have children, giving her children the childhood and the love that she never experienced. Her children grow up safe and with compassion towards others. Her son travels across the world to work in a refugee camp in a war torn country. He brings healing to those who have been raped, sold into slavery, and have witnessed terrible atrocities. One boy that he rescues from slavery grows up to commit his life to freeing others from slavery and leads a movement of people to crack down on slave traders. An article is written about this man in a newspaper far away, and it is read by another man who recently lost a large sum in the stock market, causing him to put down his glass of whiskey.