Religious trauma fractured my faith, but my AuDHD resilience has become a strength, guiding me from hurt toward healing and hope.
The tear soaked Bible I referenced in the previous post is not the only one I had to retire on this healing journey. When God’s Word hurts that is religious trauma.
I bought this beautiful leatherbound Bible and carefully tabbed each Book preparing it and myself for the healing fantasy returning to the place of our harm after 6 years in exile. I invested in that church’s well-advertised favorite version.
ESV. Clueless this was not some ancient old English text, but a new one developed in my lifetime by the Patriarchy I still had no clue about though I was being controlled to believe my faith depended on them and fitting into their well positioned boxes. The bible purposefully male gendered to satisfy this mission.
Anticipating greeting all the older ladies I’d missed while sitting in exile isolated and alone. Irrational to a person not raised in a toxic dysfunctional family system to long for the witnesses to your harm. Once love for them entered into my heart, it was impossible to get out. And I languished for the day I could return to their embraces. These ladies I’d made my grandmother surrogates.
And so going back with the blessing of my family after so long, I embarked on my healing fantasy that would nearly take my life.
Armed with this beautiful specimen of God’s Word, ready to obey to reconcile with a pure heart, I re-entered the church of our harm lasting six triggering months trauma flooded. Not being embraced, but looked on like a Pariah, the devil incarnate, wanting to die.
On the last Sunday when I heard God whisper to my spirit, “You don’t go to church to die,” I put that beautiful leather bound Bible on a shelf out of sight out of mind.
Entered therapy and began a deep dive into what I’d never heard before: Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Oh, I had heard all the names, Piper preached more than Jesus from the pulpit, which always bothered me while desperately looking for Jesus, but never knew of The Movement, The Patriarchy.
I wasn’t raised in the Church. I entered it at 24 years old. Bright eyed and newly Jesus saved.
I had sat through a Mark Dever’s 9 Marks of a Healthy Church summer small group hosted by a church family I was still holding onto threads of community post church trauma explosion. Only to run out of the study weeping because although all the elders in that church wore their 9 Marks lapel pins every Sunday while neglecting every one. We were still missing whole limbs waiting for them to help.
Back to that shelf. I recently took that beautiful Bible down and determined these men do not own the Word of God or my place in it. Though I now can not stand the male gendered voice, the only one allowed, I know was purposefully planted in it to keep women in their place by men still living on this earth, I with God am feminizing the heck out of it and loving every minute. After so many years being silenced, God is giving me the space and inspiration to personalize it for God straight from my heart.
Healing our relationship and mine to His Word.
God meeting me in reclaiming my faith.
No man can take.
I began painting the week I discovered my AuDHD. This was my first Bible Journaling Art page. It remains my favorite. Giving thanks to God for how I was made answering for me so many missing parts.
God wired us for healing. Creativity unleashes it.
How can you meet and connect with God today through Art? Or creative expression that feels freeing and good to you? How can you reclaim a piece of your faith from the hands that had taken it to make it your own?
Let go perfection. When this arises in me because I am learning to mark-make abstract paint inside my Bible, I know it is not from God.
He wants us to come to Him like little children. He welcomes mess. He welcomes imperfection and this is what is making me love and trust Him more. For most my life I was blocked from seeing Him as Father because the conditional example I was given.
God is giving me the space to heal while fingerpainting His Word and giving Him my praise as each new expression unfolds.
I pray for your unique and precious creativity to be unleashed. I pray for your healing.
Love,
Raya
The Gentle Rise 