A Little Girl
Photo by Italo Melo from Pexels
In the beginning was pain and confusion
Dark and blackened days
Devastation of a swirling mind
Denial, denial just to get by
And a little girl
Just a little girl
A lone little girl
And the devil laughed and said “I have won!”
In the middle was pain and confusion
Trudging through the daily
Gasping for air in the daily
Cursing Eve and Adams bites daily
Longing for things to be made right
Glimmers of light in the dark
In the fog just a glimmer
Pain that escaped into the daily
Confusion that bled into the daily
And the devil said “I have won.”
And then came a fire that was consuming
A fire so large and consuming
That lapped at the devil’s heels
It burned up pain and confusion
Turned lies into vapors
In the cool of God’s night
Leaving truth in the ashes
And in the ashes arose an alter
A memory to what was real
And The God of His People had won
He said “Her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved’.”
She arose from the ashes
Looking forward to the rising sun
And stepping out into the flourishing world
She smiled at the day that was dawning
She laughed at what was to come
With the alter behind her
With her God before her
She walked away in Peace
Surrounded by truth and love
A little about the poem
This poem is about a friend but it also about every woman who has experienced sexual abuse.
A few years back a dear friend, we will call her Hope, disclosed a plan to the women in our community group. Hope had been sexually abused during childhood. Her early adult years were spent in spiritual darkness. On one miraculous day both her and her husband came to faith. Sometime following her conversion she began to journal as a way to work out the pain of the trauma she had suffered. Hope, now a grandmother, told the women in our community group that she no longer felt a need to keep her journals. As a symbol of the work God had done she decided to burn them. The way Hope talked about the pain she had suffered, the way God had walked beside her, the way he had redeemed and healed so much of her story was absolutely inspiring. As someone who has suffered trauma myself, I found great hope in her story and the symbol of fire. At the time of this story, I felt very broken and Hope’s story gave me hope that I would not always feel broken and that one day like her, I could experience the kind of faith that “laughs at the days to come” (Proverbs 31:25).
