I was molested…
…and Jesus died for my child molester.
I couldn’t have said that a year ago.
But today, I can.
I didn’t tell my story publicly until I was twenty-eight years old (the first time I told it publicly was 3 months ago.)
**To read my story, click here.**
The guy who molested me wasn’t the Pope, he wasn’t a priest. He didn’t have a degree in theology and he hadn’t grown up as an altar boy…
…but he hurt me.
He stole from me. Robbed me of my innocence.
I was just a little boy, and I trusted him.
My parents trusted him.
He wasn’t clergy.
He was the white trash, redneck neighbor, who lived in the trailer across the street.
But the same grace that is available to me is available to him.
The same grace that’s available to us, to him, to you and me, is available to every child molester in the world.
Our hierarchy of sin doesn’t compute into God’s radical, scandalous, marvelous grace.
His
grace
is
deep
and
wide!
Videos like the one above, may be humorous to folks like me, with a sick sense of humor, but they are the very thing that cause disconnect…not only from people and the Church, but from those who have sinned (wait, isn’t that all of us?) and a second chance.
“But they are the church!!”
Yea, I know.
Why do we think that “church folks” will act any different from the rest of us?
We’re all sinners, remember?
The “church folks” are the ones who killed Jesus too, if you will read the Big Book.
But your hatred, your judgement, your criticism makes you a murderer. So who’s worse? The abuser or the murderer?
We are ALL in need of radical, scandalous grace.
It’s messy. It isn’t the God who fits inside your little church box….but God never promised to fit inside your little church box.
Grace is messy.
Grace is for sinners: homosexuals, prostitutes, hookers, drug addicts, wife beaters, sluts, thieves, liars, cheats, and even the a-holes you’d like to see executed for touching little children in the wrong way.
Grace isn’t pretty.
Jesus, dying on the cross, being slaughtered, tortured, whipped, beaten, pierced with a sword, pierced with a crown made of thorns, flesh ripped off, naked…that wasn’t pretty.
And the church did that.
But Jesus forgave them.
Jesus has a Daddy, and that Daddy forgave those church folks.
Jesus’ Daddy forgave the church folks who were WRONG.
The heart of every man and woman cries out for a second chance.
And that second chance is free…
…even to the child molester.
–Steve
