Almost three years ago i read a story on CNN about a young girl in the Congo who was raped...this story changed my life, and my views on God and the religion I had clung to my whole life. And after three years I am done with the questions, and now going to find answers. This is a clip from the article off CNN....
"She was 15 years old when armed rebels attacked her village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She fled her home with her uncle into the night, but the rebels caught them, stabbing her uncle as he tried to protect her. Then they dragged her into the forest, tied her to a tree and raped her on and off for a month.
"No one came for me,'' says Jeanne, now 18. "No one asked about me or where I had been. No one from my family looked for me."
Their pain is evident. A few women can barely walk or have to shuffle along with a large stick for support, as if they are very old -- and in a way, they are. All these women have been violently raped.
I pass them as they wait to see the doctor. Puddles of liquid have collected under some of the women sitting on the courtyard benches. The smell of their urine hits me. I catch the movement of balled up rags nervously crammed into their laps as they try to stop the flow. I walk by with my eyes drawn downward. As I look up, I meet their eyes. They quickly look away, embarrassed that I have seen. I look away as well. The women's inability to control their bowels and urine comes from repeated rapes. The medical term is fistula. The walls of their uterus and bladder have been broken from repeated gang rapes by rebel soldiers, objects shoved roughly inside them and even guns fired into their vagina.
"A man with a gun can do whatever he wants," Cecile Mulolo, the psychologist at Panzi tells me.
I ask Mulolo how old is the youngest and oldest rape victim at Panzi. "The oldest is in her 80s," she replies, "and the youngest is 16 months." (CNN.com)
I read the news a lot, I was raised in a home where world issues were well known and the news was a regular topic of conversation. As I grew up, my interest in world issues increased and I have read many devastating stories about how the rest of the world really lives. But this story shook me to my core, and it shook my faith and brought me to a place where I was filled with questions I could not answer.
If God really is a loving God, than how could He allow this to happen?
He could have removed that 15 year old girl from the tree, He could have split that tree in half, He could have made all those men raping her drop dead, He could have let her family search for and find her, He could have let her chains fall off in the night and her be free, but He did not.
And I needed to know why.
I still want to know the answers to those types of questions, and this is my new journey. I have lived a life of faith, based mainly on what I have learned and been told. Today I start a journey to understand and live a faith that I KNOW, a faith that hits my stomach as Frederick Buechner says. I know longer want to say I am a Christian because that is how I was raised, I want to say I am a Christian because I have weighed the options, learned the history, experienced the miracles and decided this is the truth.
So this blog will be my journey, into an attempt at understanding the God that I say I follow and this religion I have proclaimed throughout my life. This blog won't be as juicy and dramatic as my last might have been, but that's because my life is not juicy and dramatic anymore, for which I am beyond grateful. But this blog will be honest, and raw, and a glimpse into my story, and what I have been through and how it has shaped and formed what I think to be real.
So feel free to come along if you'd like.........
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