Secrets have a way of revealing themselves

It's strange how secrets have a way of coming out (Luke 8:17, 12:12; Matthew 10:26; Mark 4:22 and Ecclesiastes 12:14, to mention a few). YHWH has allowed me to uncover several secrets over the course of my lifetime, including one recently that pretty much knocked my proverbial socks off.  

It happened when I found a former childhood friend on Facebook I’ll refer to as “Tasha”, who lived next door to us in Missouri some 50 years ago. When the conversation turned to “whatever happened to our parents,” Tasha wasn’t surprised at all to discover that the man she knew as my adoptive father was a pedophile who molested me for years. “He tried it with me, too,” she admitted, “and also with the two neighbor girls up the street.”

That part actually didn’t shock me, because I knew “Daddy” had a thing for little girls. What blew me away was when Tasha admitted that her own father was also a pedophile who had sexually abused her and her three sisters during their entire childhoods! “Mama never knew,” Tasha said, “because Dad only did it while she was at work.”

Amazingly, like me, Tasha never let on back then. Nobody talked about those things in “our day.” We simply kept it to ourselves, figuring nobody would ever believe us, anyway – plus, it would only serve to make us THE reason our families would be torn apart….

Anyway, that secret truly caught me off guard – in part, because Tasha’s family were Sunday church going Baptists. (My adoptive father claimed he was a Christian, too, but he never went to church during the years I was his sex slave….) The very idea that there were TWO pedophiles living next door to each other during my Middle School (Junior High) years blew me away and literally made me sick to my stomach!

Unlike me (I wrote a book about my abusive childhood, naming names and providing details!), Tasha never told anyone about her father, including her present husband. As a matter of fact, she was apparently so terrified at the thought that I would leak her secret to her Facebook friends, that she unfriended me from both her profiles and fixed it so that nothing whatsoever on her profile was visible to the public.

The only good news in this is that she, like me, did everything in her power to have a successful and worthwhile career while her soul remained in total chaos. I was hoping to help her heal, but she never called back. (In my experience, I’ve discovered that many women prefer to hang onto that baggage because it’s painful and embarrassing and it’s easier to just keep it locked away and pretend it never happened.)

I do pray that YHWH will send someone her way who can say that “just right thing” that will prick at her conscience and let her know that God CAN truly heal those things that are deeply hidden in our hearts….I know, because He did it for me.

If you have some secret “baggage” you would love to lose, please check out my article on The Refiner’s Fire:  Suggestions to help you recover from an abusive past.