Believe it or not, there can be blessings hidden within trauma. I try to keep that in mind and heart when I see the faces of Gaza’s terrified children.
I was a very frightened child, lost in a world that made no sense, subjected to horrors that I will not repeat here.
Early in life the nightmares started. It actually got so I could wake myself up before they became too terrifying… sometimes.
One night the dream got me and took me all the way. Crashing, face first, into the pebble-dashed wall of a neighbour's house, as I ran from the danger chancing me, unable to change course.
My bed was under the window. I sat up, elbows on the window cill, chin in hand. No more sleep for me that night.
It was summer time, and the moon was almost full. A few unknown stars sprinkled the light-polluted sky. I sat in silence, not thinking, just seeing, just knowing, somehow, that I mattered to God just as much as those stars mattered.
I knew of God and the little Lord Jesus, who apparently wanted me for a sunbeam, from Sunday school. But the God I encountered that night was not the angry man who lived in the clouds, nor his baby boy. The God I encountered that night was the All of Everything that touched my soul, that knew nothing but Love for the All of Everything. The God I encountered that night loved me without reservation or distinction. I felt it deep inside. I was one with the silent stars and moon. Held by Love.
The God I encountered that night sustained me through the remaining years of my childhood. Though doubt crept in once, when I was 13 and my fragile world was turned upside down by divorce and separation. I no longer felt God's love, but I knew it well enough to recall that it was real. So that, years later, when my healing journey began, God's Love of the All of Everything and of me, was at the heart of the journey, the stillness in the storm, a guiding light.
Today, when I see the trauma in the eyes of Gaza’s children and of their parents, forced to accept that I can no more take their traumas from them than they could have taken mine, I pray that in the precious moments of silence, between the falling bombs and buzzing drones, they witness and experience the unmistakable Love of God, and the Light that may guide them to know peace and, one day, joy.