This is Part 2 of a look at the difference between humility and humiliation.

My life experience includes two sides of abuse: repeated humiliation at the hands of religious people and systems; and the gift of God to serve as counsellor and coach to people repeatedly abused by other people.

Abusive humiliation comes undeserved. The methods shock anyone with any compassion at all. And almost always the perpetrator avoids justice on the human level.

In news reports I hear victims, or their survivors, speak about retribution, even marching and protesting to get the villain dealt with according to their emotional needs.

dragonMy healing, however, cannot wait for, or depend upon, the abuser apologizing, or even acknowledging mistakes were made. Healing comes from the Healer. My healing and forgiving my enemies does nothing for my enemies, but it does everything for me. Free from living as a victim (or even survivor) looking for revenge, Jesus takes me above the crime and sin.

Allow me to use this example. A woman who had suffered rape twice began having nightmares. In the dream the ceiling of her bedroom opened, vanished, and a dragon swooped down on her. After three nights of this she came to talk with me. I asked her what she thought would stop the dragon. She paused briefly, and then said, “A bouquet of flowers”. So I taught her lucid dreaming, and to repeat before she went to sleep that the bouquet of flowers would stop the dragon. That night the dream returned, and as the dragon swooped down on her she held up a bouquet of flowers and the dragons burst into flower petals. She was ecstatic the following day and never had the dream again.

zinnias

Zinnias in my garden 2010

Her rapists were never brought to human justice, but she began her journey moving from victim to survivor and then graduating to God’s ideal as a thriver.

“What will separate us from the love Christ has for us? Can trouble, distress, persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger, or violent death separate us from his love? As Scripture says:
‘We are being killed all day long because of you. We are thought of as sheep to be slaughtered.
The one who loves us gives us an overwhelming victory in all these difficulties” (Romans 8:35-37 God’s Word).