[awareness]

My heart deeply goes out to victims of sexual abuse in their youth.

I'm close friends, still, with a sister I've known since the church in Detroit, way back in the early 70s.

As a young girl she was sexually molested by her father. Her parents were Baptist missionary's. You would never expect such behavior out of someone that has committed their whole life to preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, in foreign lands. It's bad enough that the abuser was her father. But it's even worse that he was a missionary preacher, that many others looked up to, with innocent respect and admiration, as their model of what it is to be a good upstanding Christian.

In short, the result of such sexual abuse, committed by a preacher father, is that, it did life long damage to this sister. She's struggled her whole life with the psychological damage. She's spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on shrinks, and has been treated with every psychotropic drug that can be prescribed for such psychological conditions. She's tried everything possible, to deal with it, and get on with her life.

Her son, by her first husband in the LC, was sexually molested by her second husband she was with after leaving the LC. So he's got similar psychological issues as his mother. But he won't admit it, and so he doesn't address it, or the mess it has created in his life, and btw, all the additional troubles it has caused his mother. Admitting it is the first step to really dealing with it. She admits it, he doesn't. She finds help but he doesn't.

That's why my heart goes out to BlueOrchid and NeverfreefromLC. May the Lord bless them, and keep them, wherever life leads them.

By the way, today she considers herself a Hindu. She finds more help in the eastern religions, than she finds in Christianity. Go figure. Whatever works.