Much worse than a simple spider

Yesterday I equated a spider in the shower drain with unhealthy, wrong thought patterns which could creep stealthily into my mind and twist and distort my thinking. No sooner had I written that than my daughter Mhairi published her story of assault and abuse. We have talked and cried together about her experience, so none of it was a surprise to me, and yet when I read her story in black and white and looked at the picture of her sweet, lovely  face crumbling in pain, the mother’s heart inside me broke.

The spider lurking down the drain can be memories, horrific or just haunting, which we can’t deal with in our own strength. And so we push them down. Hide them away. Hope that the eight-legged monsters will just disappear, won’t hold us in their webs of pain. I suspect we all have spiders, of various sizes and toxicity, which we fight, with varying degrees of success, to suppress and disable.

There was no spider in my shower last night, so I am keeping the cover firmly over the drain. So trivial compared to trauma, but for me, a picture of a common reaction to deep, deep hurts.

With experiences which distort one’s own self-worth, it’s no good pushing the memory down and covering it over with busyness and distractions. So far, no spider has been strong enough to push the drain cover in my shower off, but with buried memories, some of them are powerful enough to keep pushing up, to keep disrupting, to keep distorting, to keep spinning webs which entangle and hinder the life God blessed us with. It’s just no good trying to keep them down, because they ultimately poison us.

Mhairi is being blessed with many words of encouragement and wisdom and support. May she be protected from some of the vitriol and hate that can appear in social media. One young woman who grew up in an abusive home has shared her story with Mhairi, advising that the only real healing comes through forgiveness. Forgiving yourself for the misappropriated guilt, but also, agonisingly, forgiving the perpetrator(s).

This is such fundamental Jesus wisdom. The only way I know to get that spider out of the drain (the swamp…) of one’s memory is to give it continually to Jesus, asking him to bless with forgiveness.

Jesus came to set the captives free. Memory can be a cruel jailer. My prayer today is that Jesus will set Mhairi, and all the others who have been so traumatised, free. Free from guilt and self-blame. Free from shame and remorse. Free from anger and bitterness. Free to forgive. Free to live, to embrace life in all its fullness.

Jesus is the master gardener who coaxes life from what looks dead. The God of the second chance, the new creation, the resurrection and the life. May he bless all who struggle today under the burden of toxic memories, shining the light of his love into every dark situation.