in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit in over 11 years of priesthood have worked with many broken people many people who' have come to the church who've been disfigured in some way by a traumatic event that's happened in their life something that kicked off a series of responses that ultimately traumatize them always an event usually relating to violence or something that is deeply out of a person's control producing all kind of fears and insecurities anguish people begin to ask questions about themselves am I a coward how did
I let this happen what does this say about me that I'm the type of person that this happened to and then you end up with the memory you end up with the memory of the event and that memory just starts to turn itself into your mind it becomes like a labyrinth you can't talk or think or find your way out of it it's kind of all pervasive it's like that dark Whispering that comes to you at the night when you try to lay down and go to bed or the night terrors that happen when you're
asleep or even during the day when you begin to drift off and think when you're driving and all of these thoughts come fling back into your mind all these memories start to plague you like an illness like a disease but the disease is in your mind and it's everpresent and pervasive I had a particularly difficult case of a young man in his 20s came to the church with a lot of trauma he' grown up in a very dysfunctional home and began uh abusing uh smoking weed and drinking from the age of 14 all the way
through high school and getting into all kinds of trouble and as his life began to spin more out of control into his senior year his parents decided to have him taken away to a military boy home in Mississippi uh the school was called bethl baptist boy home it's actually well documented on the internet now but at the time there was no documentation there were no Google reviews there was nothing like that so he was taken away to this place where they physically and mentally abused him and he saw great evils happen both to himself and
to the other people around him he was kind of a wild but kind of Carefree type of person but when he came back he had that thousand yard stare in his eye he said that he couldn't have people get close or touch his face uh he had an extreme sense of uh fight or flight so that if someone came at him his immediate response was to respond kind of in a life or death manner with uh anger and potentially violence became uh a victim of Night Terrors uh vivid all-encompassing dreams that would put him back
there or put him somewhere else and uh would just would wreck his whole day waking up from one of those and so in his mid 20s he came to the church and had a had basically a realization that he was still drinking but the drinking was taking him to dark places in his mind his thoughts were just so out there that with the encouragement of the priest he ended up putting down the alcohol and that's when his life really got worse because the alcohol had worked as a method of sedating all the pain and the
anger and all the memories and everything else that he was trying to drown and keep locked within himself he was unhinged and I know all this because this is actually my story I was the young man who ended up at this Bethal baptist boy home I was the young man who went through these great evils I I suffered this physical abuse and mental abuse there at the hands of evil men and I came back uh deeply damaged you know my outlook on life was totally warped by that event and I was full of so much
anger and hatred I had that that rage that rage that was inside of me it was like a fire that was consuming my existence from the inside out and I thought by going to the church I would find the healing that I was looking for I thought that this was kind of a last ditch effort of like maybe there's something in the church that can help pull me back from the brink of self-destruction because I felt like I was uh exploding and and and being decimated from the inside out I was walking around all the
time like one foot in this life and one foot in the boy's home at all times and I didn't know what to do about it and like I said once the priest encouraged me to stop drinking that's when my life got worse because now all the pain and the trauma and the anger was no longer buried beneath those feelings it was always right on the surface and it life became borderline unbearable at that point in fact what ended up happening was I ended up diving very deeply into prayer because I couldn't handle just everyday existence
like life just seemed to be more than I could cope with and so it is through this process I ended up meeting my spiritual mother I ended up opening up to her about all this pain and this trauma and the things that had happened to me and she gave me what at the time was Unthinkable but the best advice I ever received which was she said you have to learn how to forget all that happened to you you have to learn how to live with a blank slate see I was living life in this all
the time with the anger with the pain with the rage always bubbling inside of me and she wanted me to erase the whole narrative as if it ever happened and it felt like a scam you know I felt like I was doing a disservice to the people who had been there with me I felt like I was I felt like I was being untrue to say that it didn't happen and she wasn't saying that at all she was simply just saying you can't live in the present when you're living in the past when those memories
are constantly bleeding into your life right now and you're pissed off all of the time and you're full of Rage that anger that fire starts to eat up all of your present life and you can't even exist in a meaningful way and so it was like with just the help of Prayer of forgetting the memories of putting them behind me of trying to stay in the present of focusing on the life that I wanted to have instead of the life that had happened to me I began to live a whole new existence but all of
that hinged around one thing I couldn't let go of the past until I let go of the people and the only way for me to let go of the people was to forgive them see they were the the TR the trigger they were what was sparking everything off my inner hostility towards them the fact that I was walking around with my mind on those people they were constantly feeding into it and I had to switch the narrative number one was I had to see the fact that I needed to have compassion on them these were
disfigured people themselves I mean who abuses children but somebody who has deeply deeply deeply disfigured themselves and I could see that they were hurt and broken in their own ways probably from their own family with their own trauma with their own abuse and they abused others but I didn't want to be linked to them anymore I didn't want to be chained down to them I didn't want to hold on to them and I didn't want them holding on to me and so I became absolutely diligent in this pursuit of forgiveness because I wanted to let
all of this go so that I could live my life in the present and I could have the things that I was hoping for you know I wanted to have a family I wanted to have children I didn't want to raise them as somebody who could not function in life and I sure did not want to hand on to my kids all of the trauma that had been handed on to me and I knew and I could see it as clear as day it's like traumatized people traumatized their children and I didn't want to be
traumatized anymore and so those were the two things I focused on forgiveness and forgetfulness I wasn't defined by what happened to me I didn't choose for it to happen I wasn't a victim because I wasn't going to let it Define me it wasn't going to overshadow my whole life it wasn't going to be the thing that was my story that wasn't my story my story happened when I forgave and let those things go and let those people go out of my soul that's when my story began when my story began it was my life with
my wife having children a family and then later on you know or part of that the Priestly Ministry and all the people that I wanted to help and have helped in my life that is what defines me as my story those things that have happened to me they have shaped me but by the grace and miracle of God they have shaped me into a better man because I don't want to be the man that those things intended for me to be and so it is the greatest gift that you can give yourself the absolutely best
thing that you can do with your life is forgive people and let that trauma go erase that part of your story and start your life fresh and new may God bless you
