In the spring of 2018 I had been on my healing journey for a little over a year. With two traumatic memories revealed and processed, I was hopeful the worst was behind me. At this same time, my mentor and great friend that knows many of the intimate details surrounding my traumatic past and has journeyed with me through the darkest parts of healing, started a weekly bible study/prayer group. As a homeschooling mom of four who’d been going through a rather intense season, I was so excited about this and looked forward to getting together with my “faith sisters” every week.

One afternoon that May, I was nursing my 6 month old baby, getting him down for a nap. As I was starting to doze off, I heard the Holy Spirit loud and clear, “you were raped seven times”. At the exact same time as the Lord said this, He showed me a picture of myself in a cheerleading uniform from when I was in high school. I was stunned and perplexed, while the image I saw I remembered clearly, the words didn’t make sense. I was 15 in that picture. Raped seven times? How could that be possible? I would remember that. While I felt quite certain that what I had just seen and heard was really from the Lord, I just couldn’t make sense of it, and besides, it seemed rather frightening and left me pretty freaked out. So I did what I did the first time the Holy Spirit told me something I didn’t want to hear; I ignored it.

A couple weeks later something strange happened. The exact same picture I was shown while laying down was posted to my Facebook by a family member, the very family member that actually took the original picture several years before. I knew this was significant and that Jesus was trying to get my attention, but I still didn’t understand. I didn’t yet realize that had nothing to do with how old I was in the picture, but everything to do with who took the picture. It was about a month later at one of my weekly get-together’s with my “faith sisters” that things got a little intense as my Heavenly Father started to reveal a significant piece to this mind boggling puzzle. Now, these meetings weren’t your run of the mill, ‘cookie and coffee’ bible studies; rather they included intense warfare, inner healing, and deliverance. As my friend was ministering to me, the number 7 kept popping up, over and over from the Holy Spirit. I said I didn’t know what that meant, and my friend said the Lord was saying I wasn’t ready to know. Yikes.

While I was curious about what all of these things meant, to be honest I was mostly just afraid. I had already been through so much, what now? For a few weeks I tried to ignore it all but deep down I knew that just like the other things had to come to the light, so this would too at some point. So I decided that if Father was with me throughout everything else, so too would He be with me in this. I could trust Him. Though I didn’t want to face it, I had been through enough to know that ultimately the only reason He had to reveal it was so He could heal it. That there was yet another piece of my soul somehow damaged by trauma and letting Him into that place that had me in bondage was the only way to get free.

As I once again mustered up the quiet courage and trust to say, “okay Lord, show me” I was shown several images over the next week that slowly put everything into place and made sense. While at my dad’s, whom I went to see every other weekend, my aunt was asked to babysit while my dad went out with his at-the-time fiance. Oh, that must be why the Lord showed me an image of her being handed cash, babysitting money. It was when he lived in the trailer, I was 7. My aunt, at time time 19, decided to invite a couple guys over.

I remembered a specific beer bottle with a red X, but could’t figure out what it was. A quick google search revealed it was something called “Dos Equis”, the image on the page was the same as what was in my head. Glimpses of me parading around the house in my dad’s fiance’s lingerie, sitting on a guy’s lap being told how pretty I was, and eventually, being given NyQuil came back to me. The tears came as I could see myself lying on the kitchen floor unconscious, while they not only sexually abused, but sadistically tortured, my seven year old body. I could foggily see their laughing faces, not just the men, but my aunt too. I could faintly hear one of the men saying, “how long do you think until she wakes up?”

As I pondered all the ways the Lord had slowly revealed this memory, I struggled with the word “rape.” Can’t that term only be referring to sexual intercourse? Then I found the actual definition on dictionary.com: “unlawful sexual intercourse or any other sexual penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth of another person, with or without force, by a sex organ, other body part, or foreign object, without the consent of the victim.” 

When I counted the various household objects I saw in the memory, and it came to seven, just as the Lord had spoken months before, I wept. I felt dirty. And terribly betrayed as I realized there was yet another family member, on the other side of my family, who violated me in such a disturbing way. Why is it that the very people who had been entrusted with my care seemed to have absolutely no regard for my life? But I think the worst part of healing from this particular memory was the body memories, which is thoroughly and fascinatingly explained in Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Several times my nipples would burn severely as I remembered one of the men holding a lighter to one of my most sensitive areas.

I can now remember what one of the men looked like, though it took several more months for his pale pudgy skin, short black dreads, baggy jeans, and dog collar choker to be seen clearly. As for my aunt, well, it all kind of made sense. She had always been troubled and it was one of those things, like the situation with my uncle, that was a surprise, but yet not really that surprising. The way she started acting extremely suspicious with tons of questions when I came out about having abuse in my past a year before, always commenting strange things on my posts when I would try to share anything about it, and suddenly trying to be “besties” with my dad, well it all clicked now.

When I calmly but firmly confronted her, she freaked out. She apologized but claimed she didn’t remember, and then she blocked me. I hope she knows that because what Jesus did for me will always be greater than what she did to me, I forgive her. And I hope she doesn’t hang out with people like those men anymore. But mostly I hope she seeks forgiveness. Not from me, but from the only One who can heal her of the shame and fear she’s been living in.