Posted on by Abe Austin

Perpetrator and Victim: Part Seven

The Place of Rescue)

Yesterday I made the point that both the perpetrator and the victim of abuse find themselves cut off from the presence of God. The perpetrator by their guilt, the victim by their despair. I explained that they do not have the power to bring themselves back into the light, either. Each requires an act of divine intervention to rescue them from the darkness.

It is not in the scope of this series to fully detail this rescue process. This process is outlined in the Gospel, it is conducted through the Savior, Jesus Christ. Anyone that searches for how one is “saved” in the Christian theology will find numerous explanations. For here I will simply say that this rescue or saving comes by accepting Christ as our Savior, and him redeeming us through no special merit of our own. It begins a new life within us, one of discipleship to Jesus.

My focus in this series has been to examine the hard path that precedes this saving grace. All of us have to be lost before we can be found, that is our common pattern in life. All of us are broken by others, and all of us break others in turn. Accepting these realities brings us to the bleakest place in our lives, but it just so happens to be the very same place where Christ’s rescue is waiting for us.

A dear friend of mine understood this concept and would often repeat the phrase “there is sacredness in suffering.” He understood the courage that it took to admit how guilty and broken one was, and he also understood that it was the prerequisite to a transformation for a soul. Nearly four years ago he passed in a tragic accident, leaving behind his young family. They have had their own “sacred suffering,” to be broken, and to be rescued to a new way of life.

New in the Light)

No one is rescued from the hole as the same person they were before they went in. They can be innocent again, they can be whole again, but they won’t be the same innocent or whole that they were before. That might be difficult for some to accept. Most of us spend so much of our time remembering how we used to be and trying to get back to it, but that’s something we just have to surrender.

This shouldn’t be considered tragic, though. The new person that emerges back into the light will not be equal to the person that went in, they will be indescribably better. We rise higher than we fall, our suffering and healing purifies and strengthens us into a purer form.

Of course, this is a transformation and journey that we never plan on. In the case of the victim it comes about entirely against their will. In the case of the perpetrator it does come about by their will, but they are ignorant of the full consequences they are calling forth. Most of us like to think that the greatest journeys of our lives will be ones that we elect for ourselves, ones that we choose deliberately and then carry out entirely by our own power. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those sorts of journeys are the most insignificant of our lives. The greatest journeys are the ones that catch us by surprise, even against our wills, and feature long periods where we are carried by various others. These journeys are far more dangerous, but the reward is far greater, too. There’s a reason why this is the sort of journey that all our literature has been obsessed with for thousands of years.

Parallel Journeys)

Here at the end I want to revisit a notion I mentioned in an earlier post. Many of us view the victim and the perpetrator as being two completely separate entities. We feel that each has entirely different needs from the other, that the only relationship that they share is those isolated moments of abuse.

But the reality is that both of these souls have a parallel journey to redemption. They both are prone to self-deception and false ideology, they both must overcome these lies to accept the hard truths, they both must come to despair so that they can then be rescued by the Savior.

And, indeed, each must deal with the other in their journey many times over. Even if they never see each other in the flesh again, each must come to terms with the specter of the other. No perpetrator will emerge whole without acknowledging the victim and doing whatever he can to make amends. No victim will emerge whole without accepting that the abuser is still their brother or sister and releasing their hate for them.

As I have suggested several times, I have been victim and perpetrator both. I have walked both journeys at various times, and I know firsthand the patterns of these paths. I know with all confidence that the way is hard, but also that it is beautiful.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Perpetrator and Victim: Part Six

Fallen in a Hole)

I’ve spent the last several posts talking about the situation of both perpetrators and victims of abuse. I have considered the various false narratives they start to live, lies that seem more palatable than facing their soul-wrenching reality. I have mentioned how these lies must be surrendered, though, and the harsh truths must be faced. Perpetrators must fully appreciate their wrongness and victims must fully appreciate their brokenness.

With most of our actions, if they take to places that we do not like we can reverse our steps to go back to where we were before. This is not the case with abuse, though, where our steps carry us over an edge and we fall into a hole, and no matter of walking around the bottom of that hole is going to find us a way out of it. Both for the enactor and the receiver of the abuse, they have been carried by choice or by force into a place that they cannot get themselves out of. And it is a damned place, a place that can only be described as godless. In that dark pit we will be made to understand what the very definition of hell is.

That might seem a harsh thing to say of the victim, who has not brought this travesty upon themselves, but it is the reality that they live even so. Like a dark cloud descending, their connection to God seems to be blotted out, and it is not at all unusual for those who experience this trauma to find their faith and core belief systems crushed.

Our Common Fate)

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.- Matthew 5:48

These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. -John 15:11

See in the verses above what God intends for each of us. He calls us to be pure and to be joyful. But pure is the one thing that the perpetrator of abuse cannot be, and joyful is the one thing that the victim cannot be. They cannot live in the light and glory of God because they are in the hole, and neither of them has the power to get themselves back out of it.

At some point in our lives, each of us is going to receive harm from another. At some point in our lives, each of us is also going to harm another. Thus at some point all of us will be a victim and at some point all of us will be a perpetrator. That isn’t to say that we will all receive or inflict harm to the same degree, but each of us will break and be broken in some way or another.

And in that moment we will begin to understand—really understand—why it is that we all need to be saved. We will understand how helpless and hopeless we are on our own, how incapable we are of getting ourselves back up to the light.

We will find that our friends and families, no matter how hard they try, cannot piece back together our broken soul. They might alleviate some outer pains, might provide some worldly needs, but they cannot resolve the inner despair. They have no access and no power in the most secret places of our heart. Indeed, now that we find ourselves down in the pit, for the first time we will realize just how many of them are also right down there with us!

In this situation, whether as a victim or a perpetrator, the only one that can help us is a Savior. The only one that can help us is one who has never fallen into the pit, so that he may lower us a ladder, but one who has leapt into the lowest depths of the pit, so that he can mend our heart where it is. The only one that can help us is one that can take our hopeless and dark truth, swallow it within himself, and in return give us a new and bright truth.

I realize that I’ve leaned heavily into metaphor with this post, and perhaps it’s starting to sound like hyperbole. Frankly, it’s that I am struggling to find more straightforward words to communicate the ideas that I am trying to get across. My own experiences in the dark hole have literally fueled my nightmares, which perhaps lends to the language I have used. I shall finish, though, by summing up what I am trying to say just as plainly as I can.

As I mentioned before, I have been in that hole myself. It was a horrifying place. Without exaggeration, it was my greatest suffering in life, and I was totally unable to save myself from that hell. Even so, and much to my surprise, I was rescued from it by am unseen being. And I have seen this drama play out in the lives of many others, and I know that it can for you as well.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Perpetrator and Victim: Part Five

Fundamentally Broken)

Yesterday I mentioned how some victims of abuse might twist their experience into self-justification. By leaning into their righteous indignation, they will try to dismiss any wrongs that they themselves do. They have created in their mind a sense of blamelessness, such that no matter what they do they cannot be held be accountable for it. The world was terrible to them first, after all, so any wrong they do now is just a well-deserved retaliation.

This is the angrier side of victimhood. It is not the only warped perspective that can be developed, though. There is also the sad, depressed option that we will discuss today.

This sort of victim can be described as being fundamentally broken. After suffering pain at the hands of another they go back and highlight their own failings, convincing themselves that they in some way deserved the pain that they received, justifying the abuser’s crimes for them. They might even call up transgressions that were totally unrelated from the abuse, assuming some cosmic power had been tabulating all of their secret, guilty deeds and sent the abuser as a force of karmic justice.

There are also victims who do not consider themselves as being particularly guilty before the abuse, but now, because they were a participant in such a violent or dirty experience, they feel forever tainted by it. They feel as of some sort of evil was transferred to them by their abuser. Thoughts, once innocent, are now overrun with horrible memories and images. They may be horrified by these images, but they self-identify with them still the same.

Divorced From Reality)

Whether such a person thinks they earned their suffering beforehand, or whether they think that they have been permanently scarred after the fact, the intense demoralization leads them to accept or seek out further injury, because that’s just what they think they belong to now. This creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, where they really do become responsible for the continuation of self-harm, reaffirming to themselves that they just aren’t any good. Thus, they become entrenched in this new, corrupted identity. Left unchecked, this cyclical self-harm and self-loathing behavior can take them to all sort of terrible extremes, even to the premature ending of their lives.

But for anyone on the outside, anyone who knew the victim both before and after the traumatizing event, it is abundantly clear that the sufferer is not living in a way congruent with reality. No number of past flaws can justify another person being abusive to you, neither does having evil forced upon you make you evil yourself. What other people have done is what they have done, it justifies or condemns them and no one else. In an ideal world, suffering and abuse would have absolutely no bearing on how the victim views themselves.

Of course, the victim might even know all of this in their head as well. They might know that they shouldn’t blame themselves, they might staunchly stand in defense other victims, but knowing something in one’s head and treating others a certain way does not mean that the same goes for what’s inside. The victim can believe in their head that they are innocent and deserving of love while feeling the exact opposite in their heart. It isn’t a matter of needing to be convinced, it is a matter of needing a transformation in the heart.

Of course, even if the victim sets aside all the false narratives and self-deceptions, the truth that takes their place is still bleak and tragic. Their heart is broken. Their innocence is gone. They have seen the evil world, and no amount of knowing that that isn’t their fault will change the fact that they have seen it. They should not blame themselves for what they suffered, but even if they do manage to cease doing so that doesn’t mean that everything is fine now.

Stray Hearts)

We’ve spent some time now examining both the situation of the perpetrator and of the victim. In each case we have seen the tendency for them to have a heart divided from truth and reality. The perpetrator is in denial of his wrong or he makes it his entire identity. The victim feels that he is justified in every bitter, angry thing that he does now, or he feels fundamentally broken. All of these states are based upon the person latching onto a lie at their core.

Neither the perpetrator nor the victim should view themselves as irredeemable or incorruptible. They should be able to hold an honest appraisal of their flaws and virtues at the same time. Getting to this place is going to be a process. Core lies will have to be excised, as if by emotional surgery, and truth is going to have to be applied regularly, like a salve.

We’ve also considered that even when the perpetrator and the victim get past their self-deceit, the truth they are left with is still stark and damning. Yes, it is better to embrace truth than deception, but at this point that still does not amount to healing. It is a step in the right direction, though, but we still need to consider the other steps that follow.

We’ve spent quite some time discussing the problem, the ways that both perpetrators and victims wander into strange, forbidden lands. The following posts will now be dedicated to understanding the journey back to wholeness.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Perpetrator and Victim: Part Four

The Victim’s Veil)

In my last post I discussed the reasons why an addict who has hurt others will avoid facing the realities of his crimes. I discussed the difficult questions that come up when one contemplates the wrongs that they have done and what those actions imply about them. I also suggested that while the truth might be grim, it is nonetheless necessary to embrace it if the addict is ever to reclaim their soul.

And I don’t think that anyone would disagree with me on any of these points. I think we can all agree that the perpetrator of abuse is clearly in the wrong and needs to own up to his mistakes. All of us wish that the people who have hurt us would do exactly that.

But what I believe is less universally recognized is that the victim is often also detached from reality. Suffering at the hands of another is a profound experience, one that often shatters the victim’s worldview and introduces some false perspectives that, just as with the perpetrator, divorce the victim from truth and healing.

A common theme in this series is going to be that both the perpetrator and the victim have a different, yet parallel journey to walk. Both need healing, both need reconnection to their Maker, both need to be saved by grace. Many victims might initially balk at the idea that they need to do anything as a result of being hurt by another. They don’t have any guilt in the matter, so why do they have to make any change? This is a completely understandable reaction, and there is great need to be sensitive in these matters, but just as the perpetrator must face the reality of their situation, no matter how unpleasant it may be, so the victim must as well. At least they must if they ever want to be whole again.

Today we will look at one broken worldview that the victim might hold. It may not apply to all victims, but it certainly applies to some. Today we consider the danger of vilifying perpetrators and viewing victims as being incapable of any wrongdoing.

We Are All Perpetrators, We Are All Victims)

I mentioned yesterday how we tend to divide humanity into different groups, and how the most fundamental division is into people that are good and people that are evil. We all have our personal rubric by which we decide which people go into which camp, and I pointed out that perpetrators avoid facing the reality of their sins because their actions have betrayed their own rubric, so the moment they face the full weight of those actions they have to start realizing that that means they are one of the bad ones.

In the victim, these divisions of good and evil are perhaps even more pronounced. Clearly, their abuser is in the camp of the evil, and since they view themselves as being the opposite of their abuser, they must be on the side of good. They may not think this consciously, but the fact that they suffered at the hands of evil becomes an evidence to them of their own rightness and virtue.

But I think all of us can appreciate that this is a grossly oversimplified view of the world. One example that shatters this black-and-white sort of thinking is the fact that “over 75% of serial rapists report they were sexually abused as youngsters.” All of us have our heart go out to those who are abused as children, and rightly so. At the same time, most of us passionately condemn those who forced this abuse upon the children. But rarely do we consider the fact that there is a massive overlap between these two parties. How do you resolve the fact that the poor, victim child is also the sinister, abusive villain? At what point do you stop caring for him as the victim and start hating him as the perpetrator instead?

One example of this blended reality is when we see perpetrators of abuse justifying their behavior by bringing up their own suffering. They had a hard life, they weren’t raised in a good home, they were denied the opportunities that others had, they were victims of family, friends, and society. In the most extreme cases we see people using this sense of victimhood to try and get out of literal murder!

Even without going to such extreme cases, we probably all know people who dodge every-day criticism by holding up a shield of “well you can’t talk, because you haven’t gone through what I have!” They view themselves as above reproach. Their suffering has given them a lifelong get-out-of-jail-free card.

Another example of how we ignore the connection between victimhood and abuse came to me as I served a mission for my church in a foreign land. One day I watched a mother beat her toddler son. I asked her what she thought of boys who grew up to strike their wives and children and she suggested a very particular form of dismemberment for them! I then asked where she thought they learned to hit people that were smaller than them in the first place. She had no answer for me.

The simple truth is that all of us have suffered at the hands of others and all of us have made others to suffer as well. We make a mistake when we view these at two separate camps. Really they are one unified whole.

Two Sides of the Coin)

None of which is to suggest that we excuse acts of abuse. None of what I have said means that the victim should not feel hurt, or that the perpetrator should not face justice. Wrong still remains wrong, and the fact that the perpetrator was wronged before does not justify the wrong that he then perpetuates upon others. But we cannot point out the fact that there are perpetrators who inappropriately justify their crimes by their past victimhood, without also proving that there are victims today who are starting to inappropriately use their pain as a shield as well. The two notions are inseparably linked.

Just as the perpetrator is at risk of living in denial of his past wrongs, the victim is at risk of minimizing their future wrongs. Each of them need to be able to face the abusive transaction between them and make space for the pain that was endured, but do this without enmeshing it with their personal sense of rightness.

The victim that feels justified and exonerated because they have been the sufferer of abuse must recognize this tendency of thought and deny it. They must embrace a broader, truer view of themself and the world, one that allows for both justice and pity for all people, whether they are perpetrator or victim or both.

Of course, there is also the matter of the victim taking the opposite path, and viewing themselves as fundamentally bad and broken because of the abuse they suffered. Tomorrow we will consider this form of disconnection from reality, and how it is just as disastrous.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Perpetrator and Victim: Part Two

Fundamentally Detached from Life)

Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. 

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

Matthew 7:24-27

At the end of yesterday’s post I made the case that when addicts deny or avoid the harm that we have done we are living a life that is divorced from the truth. Sweeping bad news under the rug does not change the underlying reality one bit, but it does detach ourselves from reality. And then trying to live a meaningful, purposeful life while keeping a blind eye to our sins is a vain endeavor. If you want your life to flourish, you have to align yourself with the truth of that life, both the good and the bad. This is just one of those fundamental truths, so basic and atomic that it defies explanation.

Confession, at its core, is therefore all about aligning ourselves to that truth. It brings our secret deeds into the light, acknowledging our problems as they really are, creating an image of ourselves that is harmonious with reality. Even though that reality is one that we are ashamed of, accepting it makes our world more right and whole even so. Everyone, perpetrator and victim alike, need to reconnect themselves to this truth if they ever want to really live again.

Because yes, this step of fully embracing the truth is a requirement for victim and perpetrator alike. Today and tomorrow we will be considering the ways that the perpetrator hides from the truth, and afterwards we will look at how the victim does as well.

Why the Perpetrator Hides)

The fact that the perpetrator tends to run from his crimes should be something we can all agree on. Each of us has seen many others, publicly and privately, who staunchly deny the reality of their moral perversions. We think it is cowardly of them to not face their well-deserved judgment, particularly when we are among those that they have harmed. Yet even as we recognize this behavior in others, we struggle to see how it is true for ourselves as well. We all have our blind spots, whether willful or ignorant. We know it isn’t right for anyone else to makes excuses for their behavior, but when it comes to us, of course, all of our excuses are totally valid!

Why do we live in this denial? Why do we overlook our obvious hypocrisy?

Well, for one we probably want to avoid punishment from others. We also don’t want to lose the things we have. Depending on the nature of our addiction, we might even be afraid of legal repercussions! But aside from any of those reasons, there is another and more immediate cause for our self-deception. We simply don’t want to face our dark reality, because doing so brings up some hard questions that we don’t want to answer. Questions like:

  • What does your hurtful behavior say about you?
  • What sort of person does bad things?
  • What do you deserve for what you have done?

In our minds, we have two clearly-divided groupings of people: those that are good and those that are bad, and the first person that all of us sort into the good camp is our own self. It is the natural instinct of all of us to see ourselves as being the prototype for all that is right and good in the world. We might admit to some flaws, but we immediately follow that up with affirmations that our heart is really in the right place, that we are genuinely trying to do our best, that our good clearly outweighs our bad, that our situation is complicated, and that we’re nothing like all those other truly bad people!

But why then did you hurt someone that you loved?

Any time you bring the introspection back to this sort of targeted, direct question, you’ll catch yourself writhing and wriggling to escape! It’s like seeing a cave-dwelling creature scurrying to get out of the light! We writhe and we wriggle because deep down, one of the most fundamental fears that we all have is that we’re actually not one of the good people. We all dread the possibility that we’ve been the villain, not the hero, all along. Stating that we have so much as a doubt about the state of our soul feels like it is going to kill us. We would rather tell a thousand lies and curse everything that we touch than to say, “I have done serious wrong for which there is no excuse. I have hurt the people I love. I am deserving of death and hell.”

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; -Romans 3:23
For the wages of sin is death -Romans 6:23

These are difficult verses to apply to ourselves, but they really are the truth. Accepting this truth feels like it will break us, but, paradoxically, this truth is the key to our rebirth. As we are told elsewhere in the bible:

The truth shall make you free. -John 8:32

This promise really is true, impossible as it may seem. Later in this series we will see why.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Perpetrator and Victim: Part One

The Victim)

Some justify their addiction by saying that their behavior is a victimless crime, but nothing could be further from the truth. An addiction always has a victim. Obviously, there are those that we use or betray, either directly or indirectly; then there are those who are being deprived of having our full presence and care, even if they do not know it; and finally, even if it were possible to live an addiction without either of those first two categories of victims, there is always the victim of our very own self.

For the addict to turn his attention to his victims is a very hard thing to do. It anguishes his very soul. And, frankly, it should anguish his soul. That is the right and proper consequence for one who has caused harm, and it is necessary for the addict to endure this if he is ever going to have a real change.

But this journey into the dark is not only for the addict. There is a parallel journey that the victim must pass through as well, one which involves coming to terms with his own brokenness and surrendering it. Throughout this study we will take a deep dive on the addict, his victim, and the journey of recovery that they both must follow. Let us start today by taking a closer look at the three categories of victims that I mentioned above.

Immediate Victims)

This is the category that most commonly comes to mind when we think of the word “victim.” If one is a lust addict it might a person they molest, if one is an anger addict it might be a person they strike, if one is a drug addict it might be a parent they steal money from. In short, it is anyone who is harmed as a way for us to get the twisted pleasure or satisfaction that our addiction demands.

Also, there are the victims who were not harmed by the acting out of the addiction, but by its aftermath. These include the nieces and nephews who wonder why we aren’t allowed to play with them anymore, the ex-spouse who can’t get a loan because we ruined their credit score, and the new employee who is never fully trusted because of the cynicism we inspired in our former boss.

There are also victims that do not know they are victims, such as the girls we leered down the shirt of. There are also the victims that we never directly interacted with, such as the kids who started doing drugs because they wanted to be like us. I would even make the case that there are victims who were distressed by the invisible, evil spirit that we brought in our wake.

If we’re honest with ourselves, I’m sure we’ll all be able to identify many, immediate victims of our addiction. We’ll even come to accept that there are undoubtedly many more that we have forgotten or never knew of.

Indirect Victims)

Even after all the types of victims mentioned already, there are still others. These are the victims who suffer from not getting to have our full presence in their lives. Most of the time, these people don’t even know that they’re getting a substandard version of us, and we might not even know it either. Most likely we’ve been emotionally handicapped for so long that we don’t know that it is a handicap anymore. Our loved ones say that we’re just “aloof” or “distracted,” never considering that in reality we are half brain-dead because of our addiction.

Our spouse doesn’t get the partner that they thought we were, our children don’t get the attentive parent that they deserve, and our employers don’t get the employee that they thought they hired. And as I’ve said, we don’t even realize just how much of our real self we are holding back until after we have been in recovery long enough to discover who that real self is. It is only in hindsight that we understand just how much our loved ones put up with that they shouldn’t have had to.

Cheating the world of our best self puts an undue burden on everyone else. It creates a perpetual sense of longing and dissatisfaction in others that they may never understand the source of. They don’t know how to vocalize the ways that we weren’t there for them, just the sense that we weren’t. They only ever got the shadow of us, when what they wanted was the real thing.

Victim of Self)

And, finally, there is the very first victim of them all. The one that suffers more than any other victim in almost every case. Every time we hurt another person, we also hurt ourselves. And even when we don’t hurt another person, we still also hurt ourselves.

We break our own heart, destroy our own innocence, and subject our own selves to misery. Every negative action we project outward also has a negative reaction directed inward. An addict who burns a hundred bridges deprives each of these people of only one relationship, but of himself he deprives them all. Everyone else gets a portion of the pain of our addiction, but we get all of it combined in one.

We lose our self-respect, our health, our optimism, our faith, our friendships, and our freedom. We subject ourselves to punishments that we would never accept at the hands of another person. There are plenty of addicts who may not break a single law, but whose behavior to their own self would be considered criminal if it had been done to another person. And while that addict may never end up behind real bars, inside he is prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated still the same.

Facing the Victims)

So, as I said at the start, addiction always has a victim. It must have at least one, and frankly I have never met an addict that didn’t have hundreds. It’s a grim reality that most of us go to incredible lengths to avoid facing. But denying the existence of a reality means trying to live apart from the truth, and that only tears us apart. Sooner or later, if we ever wish to be whole, the truth has got to be faced. The victims have to be considered and the remorse has to be felt. A little bit later, confession and amends will also be necessary, but first and foremost, one has got to look at their damage unflinching.

Posted on by Abe Austin

The Resurrecting and Enabling Power of Jesus- John 9:1-3, 6-7; John 5:5-6, 8-9, 14

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.
And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,
And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.

And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years.
When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole?
Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.
And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and walked…
Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.

COMMENTARY

Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.
Jesus is not confined to only healing the innocent, Jesus is not limited to only rescuing the sinner. When we are made the victim of circumstance or another’s cruelty it might be easy to assume this is just our lot in life and we have to bear it. When our suffering is due to our own guilty actions it might be easy to assume we have forfeited the right to be healed.
The simple truth is that no one is outside of the healing power of the Savior. The reasons for your anguish do not matter, the depth of that anguish does not matter. The Savior is not the Savior of some, he is the Savior of all.

He saw a man which was blind from his birth.
And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years.
When reading of so many miracles it can be easy to feel forgotten when we have endured our own afflictions without relief. Perhaps we have even asked for healing and still it has not come.
Perhaps it is that lack of healing that has leads us to those thoughts of “well I deserve this punishment” or “this is just my cross to bear.” It is helpful in these moments to remember that those Jesus healed had often been oppressed for a very long while, too. It does seem that God lets us bear our burdens for a time, lets us experience the natural consequences of our actions for a time.
But that doesn’t mean the Savior is either unwilling or unable to heal us. Indeed, we know that in the Resurrection every remaining burden will be unfettered by his miraculous resurrecting and healing power.
One of my favorite scriptures is one full of remarkable pathos, and it beautifully attests to exactly this. From Revelation 21:4 “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”