Olivia McCabe

When It’s Not Some Cheap Grace

Thank you to everyone who read my blog yesterday. I hope and pray that in some small way it has helped you to tell your own stories and that you will know that you are not alone. I am grateful for all of the kind, caring and encouraging messages you have sent in response.

As I sat praying and meditating this morning, my mind focussed on something Matt Redman had talked about in the Let There Be Light documentary. He said he had forgiven Mike, that this was not about forgiveness. It was about accountability.

As a Christian, I have often rushed to forgive people. Not only that, I have often apologised for people standing on my toes! The problem with rushing to Easter Sunday whilst by-passing the pain of the cross is that it becomes a form of cheap grace and can leave me full of self-blame, shame, and lasting resentments that eat me up inside like carpenter bees in the rafters of an old barn.

God doesn’t offer me cheap grace. Through the cross, God offers me a powerful, life-altering, redemptive grace and that can move mountains, give recovery of sight to the blind, and set captives free, including little old me, captive to my own pain.

Let me give you an example. Yesterday, I shared with you that I was raped when I was sixteen. You might think that this is impossible to forgive, and I certainly agree with you, in my own strength there was no way I was going to be able to. But nothing is impossible with God. The resentment and pain I was feeling weighed me down for much of my adult life, but then, a few years ago, I learned a way to walk through this with Jesus, through the pain, shame, and even rage of the cross with him, past the empty tomb to the glorious resurrection of Easter morning.

I began journaling about what had happened to me. There are big blotches of tears in my journal on those pages where the ink has run. I explored which of my core needs had not been met in this situation, and asked God to meet those needs and to heal me. God started to untangle the mess of guild, shame, and blame inside of me so that I could say precisely what was my abuser’s responsibility and what was mine.

It might seem strange to say I asked God what was my responsibility in a situation like rape, but what I actually found was that I was carrying around an enormous amount of shame and that in many ways I was blaming myself for what had happened. I needed to bring this all to God so that light could be shone on it and healing could begin. I needed God to help me to forgive myself. I also needed to pray for my abuser. This is the prayer I prayed over a number of weeks:

God, help me to see X through your eyes not mine. Help me to forgive him. Please give him health, happiness and prosperity. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

This isn’t some kind of cheap grace. In order for that prayer to be answered, I had first to acknowledge the depth of the pain that was caused, to invite God into that pain and suffering, to know that I was heard and seen and that the pain had been acknowledged and believed, and to seek the healing touch of God’s Spirit in my life.

It worked. It wasn’t easy. At times it felt like someone was digging a large needed in the very depths of my soul trying to remove a splinter. On more than one occasion I wanted to give up and go back to the devil I knew and the resentments and pain I had harboured for so long. But I persisted, and eventually prayers were answered.

This is how I knew. My abuser is a friend of a friend on Facebook. One day, their name popped up in my feed. Their mother had died and they had been struggling with their mental health in the aftermath of it, and had gone missing. All I felt in that moment was compassion. I wanted to pray for their welfare, so I did.

This whole experience was a profoundly spiritual one. I felt closer to God in that moment than I possibly ever have. For a fleeting moment I could see that man through God’s eyes and not my own, as the broken, sick, lost and damaged child. In that moment, I became free. In seeing the grace God pours out on others, I also see the grace he pours out on me.

The same is true for Mike. I am on the journey towards forgiving him for what he has done. It is a journey that cannot be rushed. I can’t hit the fast-forward button through all the gory bits. I have to kneel at the foot of the cross for the whole three hours. But I know that God’s awesome, powerful, redeeming grace knows no bounds and that he will, in time, set this captive free.