Hope within the Darkness

In the beginning, I was young...he was handsome. he said I was beautiful, smart, worthy of love...make me feel that way. And so we were married, walking joyfully together down a church aisle, our union blessed by God.

The came the angry words...the verbal tearing apart...Now I was made to feel ugly, unintelligent, unworthy of any love, God's or man's.

next came the beatings...unrelenting violence...unceasing pain. I shouldn't stay, but this is my husband...promised forever. he says i deserve it...maybe I do...if I could just be good. I feel so alonge...doesn't God hear me when I cry out silently as I lie in bed each night?

Finally came the release, the realization. It's not me...it's him...I am worthy of love, God's and man's. One spring morning, my heart was filled with hope and with fear now only of starting over on my own. And so again I walked...down the hallway of our apartment building...never agin to be silent...never again to live with that kind of violence, to suffer that kind of pain.

- A battered wife (Excerpted form "When Home is Where the Hurt Us," Christopher News Notes, no. 326.)

Last evening at PROOF, the High School youth were invited to listen to a guest speaker share her story of a high school relationship that turned into a marriage with domestic abuse. The speaker shared about the warning signs of an unhealthy relationship with one of the main signs being control over the other person. She also talked about how a person who experiences domestic abuse doesn't have a specific profile and it can happen to anyone. It's an incremental process that breaks a person down. The hope for the evening was to plant the seed of what is and is not a healthy relationship, the resources available to get help and how we are called to treat every person with love, worth and dignity.

~Angie Slattery