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It’s Still A Wonderful Life!

Posted by lindasettles at 16 January, 2010, 1:40 pm

A take off from the classic movie starring James Stewart.

I get discouraged sometimes.  Some may wonder why I dig so deeply into the woundings of my past.  Why can't I just let it go and move on with my life?  Why am I writing so many books about neglect and abuse when it happened to me so many years ago?

I'm glad you asked.  You see, I've lived more years in the trauma of abuse than I've lived out of it.  I broke free my the violent man who robbed me of my childhood at the ripe old age of thirty-three.  I understand Ms.F, the 43 year old woman who was locked in a dungeon in Austria by her conniving father and repeatedly raped from the time she was 11 until she finally broke free.

As one psychiatrist who testified at the trial noted (and I paraphrase), it wasn't the locks and bolts that kept Ms.F in the dungeon, it was her love for her children who would be left at the mercy of her deranged father if she escaped.  Three of Ms. F's children born of her father's crimes against her had been adopted and raised thus far by her parents.  They were clothed and sent to school and had a relatively normal life.  The secret, it seems, was well kept and the children appeared to be well cared for.  The other three remained in the dungeon with Ms.F where she schooled them herself and apparently tried to mother them to the best of her ability.

Scientists have questioned the possiblity of an "Austria Syndrome," that allows for such things to happen.  Let me tell you, my friend, it doesn't just happen in Austria, it happens in America.  I know because it happened to me.

I wasn't locked in a physical dungeon, I was robbed of my reason and my will at 5 years old and became the care-giver for five younger children whose well being depended on my submission to a violent man who lived a secret life right in front of them all.  There were clues, many too obvious to miss, but denial is strong medicine and it will make a seeing person blind.

You don't just "move on" after something like that.  It will make you or break you and by the grace of God the tragedy of my past has inspired me to help other women understand and overcome the pain of their woundings.

God is good and I have learned to recognize his signature in the love letters of my life, letters written in the earth and sky, the woods and the wind, the smile of a friend and the joys of motherhood.

After all that I've been through, I am here to tell you, It's still a wonderful life.

My calling

Posted by lindasettles at 18 May, 2009, 6:07 am

To understand my calling you first have to know what a calling is.  It is something that compels you to go and to do beyond your comfort zone, and sometimes beyond your strength.  In order to follow your calling you have to tap into a strength more powerful than your own and let it flow through you. 

Everyone has a calling.  It may lay dormant for many years, or even for a lifetime, buried beneath a plethora of distractions: selfish ambition, worry and other fears. It may be hindered by mental and emotional confusion, severe poverty of a material, spiritual, or mental nature, Such burials are grievous because they smother the calling that would have enriched a life; that would have touched many lives, and made a difference in the world.

Sometimes, a calling changes faces throughout a lifetime, but it never changes forms.  Maybe you didn’t know that a calling could wear the face of sorrow at times, while the heart beats steady in answer to the call.

I faced the challenge of using every ounce of strength I had to hold a failing family together and protect the youngest members of it for a good part of my life.  The form I took to fulfill that challenge was not the best. I surrendered to an evil that threatened to destroy those I loved most and lost myself in the process.  I absorbed the evil in order to use it up, to keep it from spreading to younger siblings and doing to them what it had already done to me.  Like a spongy barrier, I soaked it up, saturating every cell in my mind, body, and soul, with the sickness of it.  That is the only way a child knows to do it. She has no other resources.  She has only her “self” and it is herself that she places in harms way to meet the challenge of the call.

The call is one of compassion. “Greater love has no man than this,” the Teacher, Preacher, Son of God, said, “that he lay down his life for another.” My calling wore the face of sorrow from the age of twelve-- when I first realized I could run away but couldn’t forsake my siblings, until the age of thirty-three when the last of my siblings was safely out of the range of a mad man’s rage, and  I actually did so.  I boarded a plane bound for a state far away from the danger I had faced for a lifetime, and sat trembling in my seat, looking out a window, thinking, “I am safe.”  And for the first time in my life, I was.

My calling, anchored then in the helplessness I had learned in my earliest years and resignation to a fate I thought I could not escape, keep me alive.  I was called to love and protect in my own flawed way those I loved but couldn’t rescue. Some of my siblings saw no need of rescue, they were the ones my mother favored and she offered them some measure of protection.  They were taken under her wings and her feathers were ruffled when the fox got in the henhouse.  The rest of us were desperate for escape. One of my siblings considered the “easy way” of ending it, just as I did.  She too was compelled to a call and she is living it out today and touching lives in a community that leans on her strength and draws on her wisdom.

In their own way each of the children raised in the crucible of suffering that was our home is pursuing the call, reaching out to others—all in different forms but with the same face, that of a survivor who knows that there is evil in the world but relies on a strength greater than his/or her own to pursue the call.

A calling is a cliff that raises high above the plateau of life. It offers many faces to the world and each face requires different skills that must be learned in order to survive the climb.  I have scaled the face of sorrow and learned the lessons it offered.  As I write my books and share my story, I am scaling another face of that same cliff, propelled upward by compassion for those who suffer still in a dangerous climb out of the crucible of suffering.  I shout encouragement to those who follow after, “I’m still climbing and the view is great.  Just keep on climbing and you’ll rise above the suffering.”

Still, there are dangers on my side of the cliff, I am not ignorant of them.  I just know that the same strength that compels me to climb will keep me from falling.