The Call
Last week the leader of the intercessory prayer group I have attended since 2000,
asked me to share how God called me to ministry. I wrote this very brief story
to prepare.
I lived the first 4 years of my life in my
grandmother’s home. Granny had a policy that you didn’t touch a child more than
absolutely necessary or you would turn them in sissies – especially boys.
Unfortunately, one relative didn’t obey Granny’s dictum, and I was sexually
abused multiple times at the age of three. Aside from sexual abuse, I was
physically abused a couple of times and emotionally abused for much of my youth.
Mom and Dad got back together when I was four, and we
lived a fairly normal life from then on, except that there was no bonding
between my parents and me, or between them and my three older sisters. I grew up
in a full house, but one devoid of real love or intimacy. The first person I
bonded with was my daughter at age two.
Perhaps it was this familiarity with loneliness and
the need to have someone who cares for you, that prepared me for fostering
children for 15 years, starting in my thirties. In the end, my wife and I burnt
out completely and even had to give up custody of our adopted special-needs child.
We spent ten years attempting to recover from the
depression, anxiety, and exhaustion with only partial success. It was then that
such horror stories of the three teen girls kidnapped from the streets of
Cleveland and held for ten years, being raped almost daily; and the story of
Anna Kampusch, the Austrian pre-teen kidnapped and held in an underground
bunker for most of the next decade, and of course, raped daily, affected me.
My sympathy morphed into curiosity as I researched
the internet to see how much of this
evil really existed. I was horrified to find out that child sexual abuse was
rampant throughout the entire world, and yet, nobody wanted to talk about or
read about it, not even Christians. This meant that very few Christians were
praying for this, which I decided was the worst atrocity in the world.
Over the past 12 years, I have come to the conclusion
that God will allow man’s will to be done even when that will is egregiously
evil, unless there is a significant will countering the evil, which might
appear as Christians praying against it. But few Christians are praying about this,
and most don’t even want to hear about it.
I associate with one of the largest churches in
western Canada and yet when I started putting brief stories of children being
sexually abused on their prayer website, I was kicked off the website. The
administrator and Prayer Pastor felt the stories were inappropriate. I was
devastated. I realized that is how the Lord must feel about it, too.
I believe God has called me to help spread the message
of the incredible horror of child sexual abuse and the desperate need there is
for Christians to pray for them.
In the western world, about 1/3rd of girls
will suffer from one of myriad forms of child sex abuse. In Africa, South Asia,
and South and Central America, the numbers fall between one half and two thirds
of all girls when you count all the different types of child sexual abuse.
My Child Sexual Abuse blog has been read in more than
150 countries with the total number of pages viewed at more the 2 million. If
it has made any difference in the world, I won’t likely ever know this side of
Heaven, but I’ll keep trying. God would expect nothing less.
https://northwoodssaveachild.blogspot.com/
@GaryWmMyers
