As humans we experience both bodily vulnerability and emotional vulnerability. We are never guaranteed bodily safety; we are always vulnerable to injury, illness and death. It is our souls that are safe with God; in that eternal sense we are always safe.

God is vulnerable emotionally, but not bodily. His eternal soul/spirit is not in danger of dying. He is not vulnerable to being snuffed out of existence. He is safe. However, he did experience physical bodily vulnerability for a fixed amount of time in Jesus. For the most part though, it is emotionally that he is vulnerable, in terms of feeling pain, grief and sorrow. He technically has the power to change things but he created the forces and laws of the universe, the scientific principles that govern the created world. If he were to change things and exert his power, the world would no longer be the same. I assume that’s what will happen in the end, when God decides it is finally time and everything will be made new. Therefore technically he has the power but won’t yet use it to change things, in order not to interfere with free will or with the physical forces and laws of the universe that he created.

I slightly disagree with you about Jesus in Gethsemane [this comment is in response to Tanya Marlow’s thought that ‘Jesus was vulnerable in Gethsemane, yet with dignity and power’]. Jesus was in such extreme distress in Gethsemane; there is not much dignity in that, when you are that desperate and that scared of what is about to happen. If he wanted to do what was necessary, and to complete what he came to do, he could not use his power to stop it or call down all of heaven’s power to get out of it. I imagine that must have felt pretty powerless, even though technically he knew that the power was there. He was powerless to avoid the physical and spiritual agony if he wanted to accomplish the cross.

In disability, there is the vulnerability to not being treated equally to able-bodied people. In order to access certain things, whether they be crucial to our survival or whether they be activities that abled people get to enjoy without a thought to needing certain conditions or adjustments, disability means that we have to ask for help from others, we have to ask for certain adjustments that give us access to things that others take for granted. 

We, as disabled people, are vulnerable in terms of:

• being refused the medical help or personal care to keep us alive
• being refused the adjustments that would give us equal opportunities and access
• abusive people who would hurt someone who was powerless (due to a disability) against them
• being gaslighted
• being viewed as difficult and unreasonable by people who are reluctant to help and who disbelieve us or are incredulous of our disability, who think that our asking for essential adjustments is unreasonable, unnecessary or dictatorial
• being misunderstood and misrepresented
• others’ ignorance about our conditions, which in turn endangers us
• always having to receive help instead of give help, which creates a power imbalance and can lead to the receiver feeling inferior to the much-lauded “superior” giver of help

God is vulnerable in a few similar ways:

• God often doesn’t receive enough help on this Earth: Matthew 9:37 says ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.’ He is refused enough human helpers and co-workers against the backdrop of the infinite need of the world. He sees his loved ones suffering and cannot aid them all without human helpers choosing to do so out of love. He is not given the help that he needs
• God is vulnerable in terms of reputation, like disabled people are. There are many people who, whether deliberately or inadvertently, misrepresent God and who he is. Many people malign the reputation of the disabled too (“lazy”, “scrounger”, “waste of space”, “fraud” etc.)
• being misunderstood
• God loves us and dearly loves being loved back. This makes him vulnerable to the rejection of people hating him, because he gives us free will, the freedom to hate him. When bad things happen (suffering, injustice etc.) and people pour out their pain and blame at God, when they feel that he has failed them, God experiences the immeasurable pain and sorrow of having his loved ones hate him, which is isolating. He risks losing those he loves when he does not give them what they want or the help that they need. Disabled and chronically ill people often experience this same pain of their loved ones turning against them and hating them due to things beyond their control; often their able-bodied families get fed up with the ill/disabled person and ostracise them, lie about them or disown them. God is regularly lied about, defamed, ostracised and disowned, so there are similarities there.

The giving and receiving of love within the Trinity in their inter-relational dance must be the joy that is foundational to God’s strength. This generosity and abundance of love, given and received, is our template for how to live. If the giving and receiving of love was practised by everyone in the world, it would lead to everyone treating others as they themselves would wish to be treated in the same position. A natural byproduct of this would be social justice and relational justice between people. Able-bodied people would imagine themselves in the shoes of the disabled, and want the best for them, thus giving the help that they need, without them even having to ask for it.

God not only aligns himself with the hungry, thirsty, needy, sick, and imprisoned (Matthew 25:35-36 says ‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me’), he also becomes us, suffering as one with us in those ways, because he lives inside us. Therefore what you do to others, how you treat others, at the same time you are doing the same thing to God; you are treating God that way. Matthew 25:40 says ‘The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”’ And then crucially in verse 45 ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
It then follows that Christians would naturally want to treat the sick and disabled in the same way and with the same respect, honour, generosity and abundance that they would treat God. They will also receive back that same love, respect and honour because God is in them too. There is no superior or inferior; the able-bodied and the disabled both give and receive love. There is no power imbalance.

In this world, people are generally valued for what they do, not for who they are. Many regard the segment of the disabled population who aren’t able to do anything as worthless, instead of treasured and valued for who they are. Similarly, lots of Christians treat God as only valuable for what he can do for them, not treasured for who he is, for his nature. Disabled people and God are vulnerable in that same way; will we both still be loved when we don’t do anything but just are?

A final random thought: is being in human form the ultimate disability? With freedom and full ability coming to fruition upon leaving our human form? 

<p>The post Disability, vulnerability and God first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>

 
Twenty years ago today, I was baptised. I was 18 years old and about to go off to study Medicine at university. I had always believed in God, due to growing up in a Christian household, but I didn’t properly think about it, question it and take it more seriously until I was 9 or 10 years old. It was then that my faith took on a central, vital part in my life. When I was 18, I realised that I had never been baptised and decided to do so. It was a public declaration of what had been happening in my heart for a long time.

Obviously my faith and relationship with God have changed a lot over the years. My faith certainly has been through the wringer. I cringe at some of the things that I believed to be true when I was 18; I hope that I wasn’t too insufferable! On this twentieth anniversary of my baptism though, I’ve been reflecting on my faith journey and wondering what I would say is key to my beliefs now.

‘God is love. Those who live in love, live in God and God lives in them.’
~ 1 John 4:16

This verse above succinctly sums up my view. Love is the basis of my faith. The love is God and comes from him. Through communing/praying/merging/becoming one (whatever word you want to call it) with God, that sort of love seeps into the very substance of my being and (hopefully) spills out to others as a result. His presence is at the core of me — Godself overlapping and interweaving with my self — so that you get moments of sensing who he is, his heart, how he feels about you, the world, and others. You get occasional moments of feeling or thinking things alongside him, one with him. This can include his pain too.

Hopefully I have gradually come to know a small part of who God is and I love everything about him that I have found. There is so much more to know than I could comprehend and much that I don’t understand but I’m intrigued to carry on along this journey of discovery, of questioning, of peeling away the nonsense and the facile. I seek truth, even if the answers that I find are different than I expected or more difficult than I ever imagined. I always want to know the truth of things. I suspect much will remain a mystery this side of eternity.

I’ve found that a sign of God’s presence in someone, even if one is unaware of it at the time, is a tenderness as God nudges one towards kindness, empathy, fairness and compassion. When hatred, anger or selfishness rear their heads, the tug on one’s heart towards love, understanding and empathy for the recipient of one’s anger or hatred, pulling your heart to soften; I suspect that is God at work. You have to want it and let it happen though. You can choose to ignore the tugs and nudges, you can harden your heart. That’s the choice that everyone has to make: whether to follow God and his ways in this manner or not. Choosing to follow those tugs and nudges from God is what being a Christian is, I think.

My attitude towards the Bible has definitely changed a lot since I was 18. I remember someone telling me when I was young that I would find the answers to all life’s questions in the Bible. I read the Bible a lot in my teens, both as a whole and in bits, many times. It definitely does NOT hold the answers to all life’s questions.

Many people seem to regard the Bible as the fourth member of the Trinity. In doing so, they make an idol out of the Bible. They worship it instead of God. The Bible is not God. It can point people towards finding God for themselves but it is not God himself. The Bible has to be taken in context of the times and cultures in which it was written. My current view is that the Bible is the story of how human beings’ idea of God gradually and slowly changed as God tried to reveal himself to humans in a way that we could understand. An unravelling revelation of God. There were many misunderstandings along the way though and we got a lot of things about God wrong, misunderstood him so fundamentally, as can be seen by what is written in the Old Testament, that God finally sent Jesus to show us who he really is. ‘This, this is who I am’ is what God shows us in Jesus.

Jesus shows us that everything boils down to how, as we learn to live loved by God, that love transforms our hearts towards naturally wanting to treat everyone how Jesus said:

‘In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the essence of all that is taught in the Law and the Prophets.’ ~ Matthew 7:12

I have a complicated relationship with the Bible and still struggle with it. I often actually find it more unhelpful and a hindrance towards knowing God, if not viewed through the lens of Jesus and what he brought to our understanding.

I still struggle with many things about God but I stand by what I wrote back in 2018:

‘I’ve been living with the realities of the non-intervening side of God for over fourteen years. It doesn’t get easier but I’ve also realised that my expectations were skewed by so much Christian teaching – that God always saves or rescues you and intervenes when you need it most and when you pray hard and passionately. None of this is actually promised in the Bible but, before becoming ill, I heard this preached so often.

People seem to need to believe that God will intervene in desperate situations for them, even though when looking at the world, you can see that’s not the case in most instances. It’s very rare that miracles happen.

All God promises is to be with us always, even if we can’t sense it or experience it in a tangible way. Getting to know the God who does not save, who does not help in the way that I want, has been both excruciating and, on the rare occasion when I feel God so close, his hand on my shoulder, that I can feel what he’s feeling and pick up a small slice of what he’s thinking towards me, it’s breathtaking and melts you, resting in that communing moment together. It doesn’t change the desperate situation you’re in, it doesn’t help in any way that you’re needing or wanting but it’s what’s there.

What strikes me is how vulnerable God makes himself. He risks losing people he loves and risks us ending up hating him when we feel so hurt by him when he doesn’t intervene or protect us in the way even any earthly loving parent would.

I don’t think he’s testing us and he definitely doesn’t want us in pain or any cruel nonsense like that. Instead, there’s the intense vulnerability of whether we’ll still love him back for who he is, not for what he does and whether we’ll still see the good in him. It might take a long time to get there and a lot of anger, hurt and feeling betrayed, which must be painful for him, but he just absorbs it while we wrestle with it all.

There is something special though when we do see his goodness and still love him, despite our anguish and what we perceive as his lack of action, and I think that melts him. This has been my experience.’

It does sometimes feel that there’s also a gaping wound at the heart of me, in the midst of God’s presence. Even though I may intellectually know the theological reasons why God doesn’t intervene in the way that we want and the way that we feel we need, it still hurts so much.

This is a little story of what it feels like: a king in a faraway kingdom has a 6 year old daughter who gets kidnapped by an enemy kingdom. The enemy king tortures this 6 year old every day but the good king can’t come and rescue his daughter because he can’t justify the tens of thousands of lives of his knights who would die in a battle to get her back. First and foremost, he has to put his responsibility towards his people first, his duty as a king. It is agony for him as a father but he can’t let his people die just to save one life, no matter how much he longs to. Years later, long after the daughter has been safely returned to her home and her father, even though she understands why her father couldn’t have come to save her when she was little, and even though she wouldn’t have wanted him to sacrifice anybody else’s life to save her, there is this great painful rift of a wound between her and her father. Because however much she intellectually knows that he did the right thing, part of her is still 6 years old being tortured and just wants her Daddy to come and save her. It hurts too much and that wound doesn’t feel healable or understandable. 

It’s a silly story but it has repeatedly stuck in my head as chiming true to what it feels like. Apart from I’m the one still stuck in a dungeon being tortured, wanting God to come and save me.

So my faith journey definitely hasn’t been easy but I wrote here in May 2023 about suffering and God:

I love that God is the exact opposite of an abuser. God never forces, never controls or coerces, never compromises our autonomy, our freedom of will or mind or crosses the boundary even to influence us in any way, apart from to share his love.

My experiences of awful, powerful people in this world, are that they always seek to control, to manipulate, use their cunning to influence, to curate people’s perception of them. I love that God is the opposite of that. That he goes to such great lengths not to do that.
The restraint and pain it must take, when he has the power to do anything. I imagine that he wants to use his power to intervene even more than we want it (which is a LOT), to stop our suffering (whether individual suffering or the larger collective suffering of natural disasters and war), the suffering of the people he loves. The restraint it must take to still not rush in to save people when we question his love and care and goodness for not helping, for not intervening. Because to intervene would somewhere along the line take away someone else’s autonomy, choice, their complete freedom, even if it is a person doing an evil thing. Even though it means that he doesn’t intervene when he would want and when we would want/need. Everything is sacrificed to protect our free will.

I used to be furious at him. I used to tell him that we are his responsibility; he created us so he should take care of us. But somehow, in order to prevent us losing freedom, freedom of choice and of belief, this is what seems is necessary. And he makes himself vulnerable to being hated by those he loves when he doesn’t intervene. Just so that he will never mess with our autonomy or consent or choices or thoughts. He never crosses the boundary to influence us. I love this about him. Because it means we can trust him. If God has gone to this much trouble and pain to keep our autonomy, then he’s not going to just throw all that out when we die. It must be key to everything.

So it is not a lack of power that restrains him but it is love that restrains him. Even though it feels like the opposite.

There we come full circle back to love. God is love. That sums it up.

<p>The post Twenty years ago today, I was baptised. All these years on, what do I believe now? first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>

I’m not going to speak here about any individual cases, including the high-profile story that has rocked the evangelical world recently, the one that has even hit the mainstream press. Instead, I’m going to write about the questions that arise in our faith when Christians turn out to be abusers, whether they’re famous or unknown. I hope this may help anyone who might be struggling, whether it be because they’ve been abused themselves or because they are shaken and sickened by revelations that have come to light of Christian abusers.

Whether the abuse is verbal, physical, spiritual, sexual, medical or psychological, so very many questions are thrown up: Why does God not intervene? If God loves us and ultimately is responsible for our existence, doesn’t he have a duty of care to look after us, to be at least as loving as any earthly parent? Loving parents would do anything to stop their child from being abused so how can God love us as much as he says he does, if he doesn’t even intervene when any loving human parent would? How can we forgive God? Has God betrayed us, let us down, even maybe sinned against us (*theological gasp*) when he doesn’t stop the abuse from happening? Were the abusers ever “real” Christians? Did they ever truly know God? Why would we want anything to do with God if God also loves the abuser, loves the person who damages others so deeply and maybe permanently? If the abuse happens in childhood, brain development and immune system responses are drastically altered by abuse. The person you were meant to be, is changed forever. How can God forgive the abuser or even bear to listen to their prayers? Surely if God loves those who have been abused, he would cut off the person who did the abusing? Surely it would be a betrayal for God to still be in contact with them, to still listen to their prayers? Should we ever be asked to forgive abusers?

These are questions that most people of faith will face at some point in their lives. We all have to wrestle through the questions with God. We will probably go through every possible emotion, every state of doubt and faith in our struggle. We might have times of complete doubt, while all the illusions on which we built our faith crumble. It might take a long time. Don’t panic if belief doesn’t seem to be coming, if you can’t believe for a while. Keep coming to God, even if you don’t think he’s there. Gradually, something real and true will emerge from the ashes.

I can’t answer all the questions but what I can offer is where I myself have landed after a long journey (I still have a lot to learn though):

I love that God is the exact opposite of an abuser. God never forces, never controls or coerces, never compromises our autonomy, our freedom of will or mind or crosses the boundary even to influence in any way, apart from to share his love. My experiences of awful, powerful people in this world, are that they always seek to control, to manipulate, use their cunning to influence, to curate people’s perception of them. I love that God is the opposite of that. That he goes to such great lengths not to do that.
The restraint and pain it must take, when he has all the power. I imagine that he wants to use his power to intervene even more than we want it (which is a LOT), to stop our suffering (whether individual suffering or the larger collective suffering of natural disasters and war), the suffering of the people he loves. The restraint it must take to still not rush in to save people when we question his love and care and goodness for not helping, for not intervening. Because to intervene would somewhere along the line take away someone else’s autonomy, choice, their complete freedom, even if it is a person doing an evil thing. Even though it means that he doesn’t intervene when he would want and when we would want/need. Everything is sacrificed to protect our free will. I used to be furious at him. I used to tell him that we are his responsibility; he created us so he should take care of us. But somehow, in order to prevent us losing freedom, freedom of choice and of belief, this is what seems is necessary. And he makes himself vulnerable to being hated by those he loves when he doesn’t intervene. Just so that he will never mess with our autonomy or consent or choices or thoughts. Never crosses the boundary to influence us. I love this about him. Because it means we can trust him. If God has gone to this much trouble and pain to keep our autonomy, then he’s not going to just throw all that out when we die. It must be key to everything.

So it is not a lack of power that restrains him but it is love that restrains him. Even though it feels like the opposite.

Also, God lives in us, so surely any wrongdoing that an abuser does to someone, the abuser also does to God at the same time as well? God is with us in the abuse and suffers it along with us too.

I find that Christians often rush to offer forgiveness and welcome to abusers instead of supporting the victims/survivors of abuse, instead of keeping safe possible future targets of abuse. This may be because Christians are keen to emphasise that everything can be forgiven, that everyone has sinned and needs forgiveness, so who are we to judge? But it’s not the same. Some sins are worse than others. Some sins damage and harm others, instead of ourselves. There is a big difference between things like rape, child abuse and murder – life ruiners – and things like stealing some penny sweets one time or getting irritable every now and then. There are different degrees and the difference in damage done to others is immense. People who have been abused have higher rates of suicide, higher rates of substance abuse and are more predisposed to chronic illness due to the physical changes that take place due to the effects of abuse during body development.

The only people who have the right to offer forgiveness (apart from God) are surely the people who are victims of the perpetrator of the crime in question. Anyone who hasn’t suffered at their hands should not have a say in the matter of their forgiveness. Those not directly affected by their crimes can more easily forgive because their life hasn’t been permanently damaged/ruined. Nobody should ever be asked to forgive their abuser. Maybe, once the healing process has been started, God might eventually put it on someone’s heart to forgive their abuser, but might not. God might never put that on your heart and that’s fine too.

Tanya Marlow (writer, and Friend Extraordinaire) and I were once having an informal email conversation about a specific case of abuse; what she wrote was powerful, important and insightful. She has kindly given me permission to quote her words here:

“looking at the way an abuser interprets things can make you question your reality and experience. But what they think does not equate to truth or reality.

What I have been thinking is this – yes, God does forgive, but forgiveness is for the repentant. You have to feel the weight of your sin, appropriately, in order to be repentant. And you need to make reparation. Think of Zaccheus – when he realised his sin, he didn’t just jump and yell, ‘hurray, I’ve been forgiven! And maybe now I won’t steal any more (after all, I am quite rich now…)’ He paid back everyone he’d stolen from. Not only that, he paid back four times more than he had stolen. The first is called justice. The second is called reparation.

So my question for a “Christian” child abuser – is he truly repentant? Let’s start with timing – when did he repent? Was it when:
a) he became a Christian,
b) having already been a Christian he experienced a conviction of spirit at the wrong he had done
Or
c) he got found out?

When he ‘repented’, did he
a) immediately turn himself into the police and
b) acknowledge the full weight and seriousness of what he had done, knowing that abuse has the power to wreck the lives of the victims and
c) stay away from all children as a precaution and admit the fault to his church/employer so they could monitor him?

Or did he
d) say that going to the police himself wasn’t necessary because he’d changed now and learnt his lesson so didn’t need to be punished.
e) Figure that if he got caught then he would plead guilty (because he’d be convicted anyway and that would probably get him a lighter sentence) and
f) claim God to be on his ‘side’ as a forgiven sinner, thus dismissing the need to be forgiven by the parties he had wronged and silencing those whose lives he had ruined, and dismissing the need to face justice for his actions.

Are abusers skilled at ‘grooming’ environments and people so that they are seen by the public as trusted people and ‘good’ people who can’t be blamed for anything, so it must be the victim’s fault? YES
Do abusers continue to do this after they have been discovered? YES.

It’s very hard to change, and they generally need a lot of in-prison therapy to come to terms with the weight of what they’ve done. It is hard to live with the degree of shame and guilt that they should be feeling if they realise the enormity of what it is they’ve done. So in order to survive, they minimise the guilt, just as they had to minimise the crime in the first place to justify it to themselves. They’ve ‘groomed’ themselves first and foremost, to persuade themselves that they are a good person and that what they’re doing isn’t bad, or at least not that bad.

But it IS that bad. And if you are an abuser, it takes a lot of therapy to realise the weight of what you’ve done, understanding that you will probably never be forgiven by your victims, and having to live with that, accepting your legal punishment as a small token towards justice, and seeking to make ‘reparation’, for example, by avoiding children and talking to other convicted abusers and talking them through the process of realising their guilt.

Most don’t make it that far. Most just stick to the abusing persona that’s got them through their lives. ”I’m different, I’m not like a real abuser, I’m the exception” is the common thought of an abuser.

‘It’s not my fault, it’s because I was abused as a child’ is not a valid excuse, even though it might go towards an explanation, because most abuse victims don’t turn into abusers themselves. ‘I’m a good person in so many other areas of life’ is not an excuse. It is the mindset of the abuser to believe that they are the exception to the rule, and don’t deserve to be punished.

I think God doesn’t ‘micro-manage’ this world – and that miracles are unusual for a reason. I struggle with this, but I still believe it to be the case. Which means that what happens in the law courts is mainly a result of our legal system rather than anything else. (I hate that it puts the victims through so much.)

So – an abuser does NOT get to control the narrative. An abuser is already skilled at manipulating the general narrative so that they look good to other people – but it’s not the truth. The Bible has things to say on what it means to repent in order to be forgiven. Jesus had angry things to say about those who harmed children.“

When it comes to ‘forgiving’ God, I think of this quote from ‘The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Christian Speaker Aged 45 ¾’ where Adrian’s character is giving a talk and gets the feeling that there might be some people present who need to ‘forgive’ God:

‘I mean there must be some of us who want to climb up into God’s lap like small children and bash at his chest with our small fists and say “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I asked you to help me and you didn’t
help me. You knew what I was feeling – you knew what needed to happen and you didn’t do it. You say you love me but you don’t! If you did you would have done something, but you didn’t! I hate you!”’

Suddenly spotted Gerald’s face, his eyes wide with surprise at what I was saying. Remembered when he was just a little boy.

‘When my son was very small,’ I said, hoping Gerald wouldn’t mind, ‘he did exactly that once or twice. First, he’d be really angry, and then when he’d worn himself out with crossness, he’d cry, all curled up in my lap. Then, when he’d cried the last drop of energy away, he’d just fall asleep and I’d hold him for ages. And the important thing is – I think the important thing is that he had to go through all that fighting and fretting to get the nasty spiky feelings out of himself, and he did it all in the safest place he knew, which was in my arms.’

God can take it all.

I don’t know if any of this blog post will help anyone. Questions are always a great place to start, anyway. Let me know if you find any answers!

I will leave you with the penultimate stanza of my poem ‘Then the whispers started’, which is what I believe and imagine God says to all who have been abused:

I love you
You are a good thing
My love is fierce and inextinguishable
I will sit here in your heart
and my love will burn away
the damage that was done to you.
I will burn away the lies
that you came to believe to be true –
the lies that burrowed into your soul
and whispered to you,
telling you that you were bad
and undeserving of love.
I will hunt down each lie
and flame them out of existence.
I will tell you of the wonders I see within you,
I will tell you again and again and again
until you come to believe the truth
instead of the lies.
For I love you
I delight in you
and I say that you are good.

<p>The post What happens to our own faith when Christians turn out to be abusers? first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>