Witness
I pray to God this helps some of you. I love you all. If you know someone that needs it, pass it on. This is one of the chapters in the book, which I truly hope will set some hurting people free.
I wrote that song the night a friend called me indicating she might kill herself, I was still a teenager.
When I was in Germany in the military after 9/11 I was the one calling thinking about not seeing tomorrow and Sgt. Paulina Mendez pulled me back from oblivion on like an 8 hour phone call.
Rest of the article I wrote tonight. Hoping it helps some people with invisible wounds.
WITNESS
Said to me nobody’s listening
As you scream
You’ve got no witnesses The crimes unseen
And who would really care?
When you’re not here
Will it be the same?
Will it fill the air?
-People you’ve been passing through
Now a piece of you Tomorrow comes to steal you back
Before you go, Just thought you should know
Yeah I just thought you should know
CHORUS:
Not just another day
Not another empty face
You’re a part of me
Your witness here,
I heard,
I see
Not invisible
My arms are opening
To catch you when you fall.
-Midnight melted slow
Once you called
To tell me you’d be gone
When tomorrow comes
Hung up the phone
These rooms are so alone
And you said to me
Who will know?
I’m invisible Nothings gonna change,
home is so alone
Even when I’m here I’m gone
Everywhere is so alone
CHORUS: Not just another day
Not another empty face
You’re a part of me
Your witness here,
I heard,
I see
Not invisible
My arms are opening
To catch you when you fall
Said tonite nobody’s breaking inside
Cause I’m gone
Well you lied
Said you’ve got no witnesses
No one will try To catch you when you fall
I’m witnessing
Eyes are opened wide
I’m never abandoning
My arms are opening
To catch you when you fall
To catch you if you fall
Witness is a song about many hidden heartbreaks all at once. It is in part a lamentation about those hearts who hurt in silence with Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts and all the other invisible wounds that we suffer from. Just because there are no missing limbs this doesn’t mean that something essential to living life isn’t missing, and just like a missing limb, someone cannot simply “decide” to grow it back once it’s gone, even if its happiness or peace or sleep or the ability to be comfortable in their own skin or in their own home or with their own future, which is something most take for granted just like walking down the sidewalk or reaching for a jar of peanut butter from the cabinet in their kitchen. Witness is also about abuse, which is the invisible disease in our culture, so often camouflaged and also so often a black and blue elephant in the suburban living room that like politics and religion are kept hidden from the ear of polite company.
Abuse can often be invisible because there are false victims who ruin the lives of the accused while also causing great damage to those who truly need help but aren’t take seriously because of the false witnesses who came before them. Under God’s Law the false accuser would suffer the fate of the accused, and give validity to the testimony of true victims by giving truth back its value in a court of law, but we live in deceptive times that often reward deceptive people handsomely. Abuse can also be invisible because the abuser doesn’t “fit the picture” society has painted of monsters and madmen, a point best illustrated by our fairytales which are mostly from Germany. In the original versions of Cinderella and other tales, the heroine was beautiful but also the villains and cruelty wasn’t associated with a particular appearance. In the American/Disney version, Cinderella is a beautiful woman with three Ugly stepsisters and the Handsome Prince comes to the rescue, in many fairy tales often from Ugly Ogre. We don’t think of monsters and madmen wearing suits and ties, or serving as deacons and city council members, or chairing the P.T.O. Meeting or sweeping divorced women off of their feet or divorced men for that matter. Sometimes our rescuers and heroes don’t show up on horses but in compact cars instead with bald spots and pocket protectors, and our worst nightmares pull into the driveway with a Cadillac and million dollar smile. We also don’t realize how the artificial society we have created by chasing the mighty dollar has made children very very vulnerable by removing them from the community and family which is meant to protect them, especially by removing one parent from the home and replacing them with a series of romantic interests and total strangers. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and even a father or mother are often in entirely different States, so the children of this generation are perhaps the most vulnerable of the past several centuries of our History as a Nation (Labor Laws aside of course). We have offered our Posterity up for our “Prosperity”.
The most horrendous part of abuse is not the moment that it takes place that the victim’s body often survives, but the essentials organs of the mind and the heart that it kills, such as a sense of security, and identity that includes being worthy of protection, the capacity to trust, the ability to surrender to intimacy, and all the million ways a person can be killed while their heart keeps beating afterwards. It is murder of the heart, murder of the spirit, and murder of the mind. The most awful crime being what it steals from a person’s ability to trust The Creator, their Heavenly Father, perhaps why the Messiah Himself gave this knee shaking warning to those who would harm a child by abuse or by deception “but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:6 (Causing them to sin being to turn against their Heavenly Father) often through an abuse of authority by a fatherly figure. So in other words, it would be far better to have a concrete block tied around your neck and been thrown off a ship into the frigid North Atlantic or a shark filled Great Barrier Reef, than to mar the trust in the word “Father” to any of these little ones. Most especially if they are Church Leaders (double accountability which translates as double justice for how they have marred the Name of the Creator to His child). What can be done with this pain? The beautiful part of pain is that when it is given a purpose pain becomes passion and tragedy becomes strength. You can fight for others in a place of silent terror, you can heal their hearts and walk with them out of the darkness, you can raise your sword on their behalf even if there was no one raising their sword in your own hour of desperation. You can fight for them, you can pray for them, you can stand for them, you can get closer to them than anyone ever has because once they see matching scars the walls come down.
In the lyrics of Tiffany Arbuckle (also known as “Plumb”) “She stands alone, defending her name. All that she’s done, is be who she is. She’s so nice, naïve, and beautiful. Why does she get taken advantage? Why does she live in a world so cold? He took advantage of the nice, naïve, and the beautiful. If you’ve been there you know, if you’re still there hang on, we are all dealt our lumps of coal but what you do with them can turn beautiful. Well there is a life outside of your madness, and there is a face behind every scar, and there is a love overflowing with gladness, so get out of that place that’s restraining your love. I said get out of that place that’s restraining your love”. song is “Nice, Naïve and Beautiful”. https://www.youtube.com/
Whatever you have been through, it has been seen, it has been recorded, and there will be justice administered by the highest court in existence that can measure out more justice than any earthly judge has the power to pour out on the one who took your trust, your innocence, even your relationship with your Heavenly Father. As an Earthly Father of two daughters, if anything were to happen to break their hearts, there would be no mercy offered to the one who dared to harm them. Yet our Heavenly Father has love for us infinitely more than a fallen earthly father such as myself, so I cannot imagine the anger and justice and the wrath awaiting those who have harmed “the least of these”. The strange part of heavenly justice though is that while we hold unforgiveness, we remain in the seat of the judge who will dispense justice on the oppressor, but through forgiveness we let the Creator take His proper seat and let Him unleash whatever He has for the oppressors.
Of all the blessings and protections I have had in my life, one of the blessings I am most thankful for is not having ever experience sexual abuse of any kind. This is in itself a miracle given the vulnerable position that my brother and I were left in after my mother died. I remember the social worker coming to my Jr. High to ask me about “conditions at home”, which included the soles falling off of my shoes so I had to use plumber’s glue to repair them every night, duct tape holding my glasses together, eating molded bread and Kairo syrup for days on end because there was no food, and putting my own 6’2 father in an arm bar to protect my little brother from his drunk driving. My answer to the social worker was “it’s just fine” I said as my hands shook so bad that I had to hide them under the table and I watched her hold back tears because she knew that I was absolutely lying to her across that little metal table in the side room the school had for these occasions. I also remember the disappointment on the teacher’s face when I came back to class.
Why did I lie to the Social Worker? Because while I had never left the one red light town that I had grown up in except for one vacation with my uncle, I knew enough to know that my little brother wouldn’t be safe in foster care, especially in an area that his heart would never recover from if we were inevitably separated and I wasn’t there to protect him. My father had come to fear me enough by the third time that I almost had to take his life or his limbs (beginning with the first and last time he almost hit my mother in front of me and I was in the 6th grade) that I could give my brother some protection. This is also why I pulled him out of a pond while he was unconscious, purple, and floating like a curly hair cork instead of just pretending that he was too heavy to pull out from under the water when I was 15.
This is also why I never simply called the police during one of the multiple drug deals that took place in our living room at the log cabin on a weekly basis, one of which involved his buddy pointing a pistol at me, and another buddy of his putting a switchblade to his throat in a meth induced paranoia. Those are also probably part of the reason why he never killed me either, even in one of his cocaine and tequila induced rages in which he liked to rail like a drunken gorilla at everyone. There was a very sweet lady that could have taken us in, the older sister of one of my 8th grade classmates (my entire 8th grade only had 14 students, all of which were allowed to leave school to attend my mother’s funeral, along with the 6th and 7th grades and their teachers and the school principal), but she had already taken in some special needs children that were much more vulnerable than he or I and I couldn’t sleep at night if I took the place of one of those children. I do wonder though, a lot more than is healthy, if my brother would have struggled with addiction and overdoses and being committed to a mental health institute and numerous arrest and all the rest if I had simply told that social worker the truth???
In the end I think it was the Grace of God and my mother’s prayers before she died that protected my brother and I from a form of abuse that we probably would not have recovered from. I was already not a very masculine boy, and also a very confused boy (never ever confused about whether I liked girls or not, asked out every single girl in 3 grades in elementary school), but very confused as to why I never liked guns or working or cars or football or power tools, just looking for an answer as to why I wasn’t naturally “manly” like all the other boys. That could have been the event to push me into a confusion that I would never escape from.
This protection and grace came in many forms, most of which was how much everyone absolutely loved my mother that they were watching out for my younger brother and I the entire time we lived in that town, as if they owed it to her. One of her best friends actually let my brother live with her, another of her best friends let me live there as well, and I had a place to stay when I ran away from home, and we were given free food or ways to work for food (like picking the trash up at a restaurant parking lot), and jobs (like my job at the grocery store for three years until I joined the Air Force) and calls to judges to get me out of legal trouble. Protection also came from my birth father’s tremendous physical size (he almost became a pro-wrestler in Memphis after the military) and the reputation he had for fighting anyone and everyone up to the challenge, and despite his addictions, he would never allow someone else hitting one of his sons or abusing them to slide. Protection also came to from the man I have come to call not only “Sensei”, but also “Dad”, who took me under his wing after my mother died, who taught me the art of hand to hand combat used by the ninja of ancient japan, who also taught me perseverance and honor and the responsibility that comes with skill and power. He was watching over me and few people were foolhardy enough to risk a confrontation with a professional fighter like he was before I met him, even my birth father changed his demeanor after my adopted dad talked to him one night. The training he gave me would also save my brother’s life and probably mine as well on the many occasions my dad either wanted to drive my brother somewhere drunk, or wanted my pre-teen brother to drive him somewhere to get him a beer.
I did have one close encounter though, and I will close this chapter with this story and thankfulness for the Creator’s protection. When I was 17 I began work at a grocery store for three years, and one of the customer’s at the grocery store was the husband of a teacher that I had previously at school. This man owned a furniture store down the street from the grocery store and since I was always desperate for money (couldn’t get insurance under my parents so I had to pay like 250 dollars a month just to have insurance to drive to work), and this furniture store delivered all over that part of the State. I always found him to be very strange, and he was a hefty built guy and over 6 feet tall which added to the strangeness for a 5’10 very skinny 17 or 18 year old. He was from another town so he didn’t know me that well, and didn’t know my dad or my adopted dad. So this man says he wants to hire me to move furniture for him on the days that I’m not working at the grocery store (I had already dropped out of High School this point because I had failed 11th Grade and had to work to pay my bills) and some of the deliveries were several hours away in different counties. He was always looking at me funny and for some reason, his middle aged female secretary always absolutely insisted that she go to deliver furniture with us whenever we were leaving the store in his van. This infuriated him to the point of cursing her up and down and risking her job.
Finally one day we are loading furniture and he looks me up and down and compliments my butt behind the store and I give him the “one more word and I break your legs” look and quit that day. It still makes me tremble to think about it to this day. I never spoke to him again after that but I did tell the old lady who was my supervisor at the grocery store that knew my mom and called the judge for me a few months later so I could have a ticket dismissed and join the Air Force. She told one of the owner’s at the grocery store who was a gay guy himself, but whom knew my mom in high school as my mom always made it a point to be kind to him, and he had actually bought me some shoes and shirts and pants when I had none that fit anymore and aside from being grumpy on occasion was one of the best bosses I ever had. My boss at the grocery store suddenly wasn’t buddies with the guy who owned the furniture store anymore, which caused him to give me the evil eye every time that he came into the store. One of my best friends at the time was a gay guy as well (I just didn’t know that he was gay) and they suddenly didn’t talk to each other either. But I was very very close to something horrible in those days.
If a nearly grown man with martial arts training, and some very fearsome fathers, and a whole town full of his mom’s friends could come this close to being abused, how could it ever be the fault of a the child that you were all those years ago? How could it be a statement of your worth and what you choose and how “clean” or “good” you are? What happened to you was far beyond your control, but how you let it define you or not define you, and what you deserve, is the choice you have now. What will you do with your past and your pain to give it purpose for others?
Prayer for Those Without A Witness
To the God Who Is Judge,
We ask that You send your Servants and your Messengers
As Witnesses to the Pain, Loneliness and Injustices
That we have endured through all our Years.
We ask that you Write them in Your Book
That all that was stolen would be Recorded for Justice
We ask that the Lonely be Placed in Homes
We ask that the Single be Married
We ask that the Married be Loved
We ask that the Elderly be Visited
We ask that the Sick be Restored
We ask that the Lonely be Embraced
We ask that the Children be Protected
We ask that the Parents be Provided with Wisdom and Patience
We ask that the Broken Hearts be Glued
until they are Beautiful Again
We ask that Beaten Bodies are made Perfect and New
We ask that the Fractured Minds be Healed and Seamless
We ask that Shattered Spirits become Stitched back Whole
“You have recorded my wanderings.
You put my tears in Your bottle.
Are they not in Your book?” Psalm 56:9
Resource: “Justice” Sermon by John Paul Jackson-Youtube.com
Comments
Post a Comment