Trusting God After Trauma

Welcome back to Born to be a Butterfly,

where we embrace healing and growth so we can experience true transformation.

My name is Nina Pajones,

and I pray that this episode ministers to you.

Before I begin today's episode,

I want to give a loving warning.

I'll be sharing a very dark part of my story that includes sexual trauma.

This could possibly be triggering for some of my sisters in Christ.

So if this is something that you're not in a place to listen to,

I fully understand.

You can always come back later when and if you feel ready to listen to the episode.

Today's question is one that I know many women carry in the quiet places of their soul.

How can I trust God again after I've endured great trauma?

I'm going to tackle this tough topic with full transparency because in my heart, I believe that is the only way that I'll be able to answer this effectively.

I completely understand how this question comes up.

How in your heart and in your mind and in your soul,

you can wonder how in the world God let something like that happen to you.

And I know.

I know what that feeling is like. Because I felt the exact same way when I was 17 years old.

When I was 17 years old, my mother, Carmen, died.

And even though she had been sick for quite some time,

it was a shock to me.

It was a shock to me because she was in remission from cancer.

And I always thought that if I was going to lose her, it was going to be to cancer.

But that didn't wind up being the case.

My mother, Carmen, wound up having a cardiac arrest and dying.

I couldn't have seen it coming.

Nobody did.

She was in remission from cancer, so we thought we were safe. We thought she was safe.

And then the rug was pulled out from underneath all of us.

I was grieving tremendously, as you can imagine.

And then just a few months later,

I was raped.

And my young mind could not comprehend how God could let that happen to me.

I felt forsaken by God.

And I was so angry at him that I ran away from. From Him.

It's not that I stopped believing in Him.

I knew full well there was a God.

And for most of my childhood, I had a beautiful and wonderful relationship with Him.

But when that happened, my faith crumbled.

It crumbled under the weight of my anger,

my grief,

my trauma, my pain.

My pain was such that I just. I didn't even feel whole anymore. I didn't even feel human,

to be quite honest. The pain was so severe,

I woke up with it every day. Went to bed with it at night.

It was debilitating, to say the least.

And I was furious with my heavenly Father.

It's very difficult for me to talk about this because now I've been through so much with him since I've come back to him, and he's done so much for me.

The Lord saved my life when I was 44 years old,

and he has helped me stay sober for over seven years.

But I have to tell you where I was spiritually back then.

I have to tell you about it, because I know that a lot of people deal with this. A lot of my sisters are struggling with their faith because they have suffered something horrible at somebody else's hands.

And they are telling themselves, and they are telling anybody who might even listen to them that God is to blame.

And even if you're not telling anyone,

even if it's just between you and God and in your heart and in your mind and the words never come out of your mouth, even if you're not talking about it,

if you're thinking about it, if you're feeling it,

if you're struggling with it,

I'm talking to you.

Because back then,

when I was falling apart and my faith crumbled beneath me,

I didn't talk to anyone about it.

And I didn't think I had anyone I could talk to about it.

I was ashamed of feeling that way.

As angry as I was at God, I was also ashamed. I didn't think I had a right to be angry at my Creator.

So I decided I would just run.

Run from him, have nothing to do with him,

pretend he didn't exist,

and hope that he forgot that I did.

That's how I lived my life from the age of 17 till the age of 44 when I came running back to Him.

And I'm talking about this today because I don't want you to make the same mistake I did.

Trauma shakes us to our core.

And it can make you question all sorts of things in your life.

And absolutely, your faith can be one of them.

But I want to tell you what I've learned after all of those years of running,

filled with anger, filled with fear,

filled with pain, filled with sorrow, filled with bitterness, filled with resentment.

After all those years,

trust me when I tell you the Lord is not to blame.

The Lord did not cause the trauma in my life.

God did not want me to get sexually assaulted.

My creator didn't want somebody doing something so horrible and so cruel to me.

He didn't want that for me.

I'm sure His Heart grieved just as much as my heart grieved after it happened to me.

I was angry at God, but my anger was misdirected.

I was angry with him because I thought, well,

you could have stopped it.

Why didn't you stop it? You could have protected me. Why didn't you prevent it from happening?

But the truth is,

this is a broken world that we live in where bad things happen and people have free will.

It's the gift that God gave us,

and it's a blessing and a curse.

It's a blessing because if we didn't have free will, we would be held captive by Christ and our lives would be dictated by Him.

But our God is not a dictator.

He'll tell you the best ways to live your life,

but he won't make you do it like you're a robot.

He wants you. He wants all of us to come to him of our own accord.

And I'm not saying that your free will caused this horrible thing to happen.

That's not what I'm saying at all.

What I'm saying is that someone else's free will did.

Just as they have the option to choose between sin and salvation,

so do you.

And if they chose sin,

that doesn't mean that you choosing salvation was a mistake.

That doesn't mean that your Savior forsaked you.

It doesn't mean that your Savior forgot about you.

It means that somebody who had bad intentions did something bad to you.

It's easy to fool ourselves and think that our God doesn't understand trauma or suffering.

But the truth is he does.

He absolutely does.

And the evidence of that is his entire ministry.

His entire life was suffering.

From the day Jesus was born until the day he was crucified.

He suffered. He suffered mentally, spiritually,

emotionally.

They did everything in their power to destroy Jesus before he ever,

ever got on that cross.

His life was in complete turmoil all the time.

He suffered trauma constantly. Everywhere he went. He left places because they were trying to kill him.

I mean, he was constantly persecuted, constantly ridiculed, constantly lied about,

constantly betrayed.

He knows what suffering is.

We have to remember that we serve a God that understands our pain on a very personal level.

You need God every single day of your life.

But after you've suffered great trauma,

you need him more than ever.

The enemy wants you to stay away from the Lord when you need him most.

Why?

Because the enemy knows that if you get angry with God and stay angry with God, you might just stay away from God the rest of your life.

You cannot believe the Father of lies. When he tells you, when he whispers in your ear,

you're all alone in this.

Nobody cares about you. God has left you all alone. He doesn't love you.

Where was he when this happened?

He's going to say the most horrible and hurtful things to you. And you cannot listen to them because they're lies.

Trust me. Those lies kept me from God from the age of 17 to the age of 44 years. You do the math.

It's a long time and I suffered horribly during that time.

The truth is,

the enemy wants to destroy your relationship with the Lord.

He wants you to question everything and everyone.

Because if you question everything and everyone,

you won't trust anything or anyone.

And then you'll be staying to yourself, by yourself, isolating in your pain. And when you need God and community more than ever.

But the enemy will tell you you're better off by yourself.

You'll just get hurt if you go back out there again.

Let me tell you something.

You stay by yourself in the pain and you don't reach out for help and you don't turn to God in your darkest moments.

And that dark moment, you think it's dark now,

it'll get a lot darker.

Trust me, sister, when I tell you it'll get so much darker.

The enemy wants your faith to be really fragile.

And if you're not praying to the Lord in your pain and through your pain,

your faith will be very fragile and the foundation of your faith will crumble like mine did.

er to scripture now. Jeremiah: 29:11

plans to prosper you and not to harm you.

Plans to give you hope and a future.

I know that's a popular piece of scripture, but I want you to focus on where it says plans to prosper you and not to harm you.

It seems clear when we get harmed, it wasn't part of God's perfect plan.

I'm not a theologian, but that's what was said in scripture. And scripture is the word of God.

And God is truth.

He cannot lie.

So when we get harmed,

it wasn't part of God's perfect plan.

We live in a broken world where we're going to get hurt. It's inevitable.

So what God will do is he'll take whatever it is that you went through and he will, number one,

heal you if you allow him to.

And number two,

he will find a purpose for the pain that you endured.

And we have got to to believe in that truth.

And the reason I can tell you that it's something you can believe is because there is nothing in my story that God has not used for his glory.

He has used every part of my story, and he has taught me something through it, or he has let me use it to help somebody else and to help heal somebody else.

He has done something with it. There has always been something good that's come out of something bad that's happened to me.

And that's the truth.

That's why I could say this with confidence to you. I could say it because I've lived it. And not just once. I have lived it time and time and time again.

He does not fail because love does not fail.

And God is love.

So he will not fail you.

He will not fail to take what was meant to destroy you and take it and use it to deliver you.

He will use the thing that was meant to break you down and he'll provide a breakthrough for you.

That's what God does.

And I write about all of this in my book.

I write about my mother's death,

the rape, the darkness that came over me because of what other people did to me and how I let it affect me permanently.

Not temporarily, not for a season, not for a moment, but for a lot of my life.

I wrote about it because I want women to know that they have got to go to God with these things.

When you're suffering, you need to be running to your Savior.

I don't want you to succumb to the darkness.

I don't want you to lose yourself and your light.

Because if you thought the trauma was bad,

if you thought that was tragic,

and it was,

I know it was.

But if you thought that was tragic,

imagine the true tragedy of losing your relationship with the Lord.

That's loss.

That's loss you might never come back from.

And I can say that because I almost didn't.

I learned this the hard way.

I wound up suffering far more trauma after the rape, after I ran away from God.

Because eventually it became a way of life.

It became a pattern in my life. I became the perpetual victim.

But it was of my own making at that point.

I went from victim to volunteer.

And that's what happens when we don't resolve trauma,

when we don't walk through it,

when we don't declare victory over Will, declare victory over us.

We live in a broken world with a lot of broken people,

some of whom do very bad things.

It's unfortunate.

Just like it was unfortunate that I got caught in the crossfire. Of somebody else's chaos and cruelty.

And that they sexually assaulted me when I was only 17 years old. And after I lost my mother, who was my best friend.

But I should have run to God with my grief.

Even if my anger was misdirected at Him, I still should have gone to Him.

And I regret to this day that I didn't.

I regret that.

Sister,

please hear me when I say this.

Even if you're angry at God,

you can still go to God.

He has really big shoulders.

He can handle it.

He knows sometimes you're not going to understand why something happened and you're going to feel hurt.

He knows that, and he'll walk with you through it.

Faith is all about trust.

It's about trust even when you don't understand.

That's actually where faith lives.

When you don't understand,

when you can't see,

when you don't know.

That's where faith lives.

It's not tangible.

It's not visible.

It is hope you cannot see.

And belief.

That doesn't make sense.

But it doesn't have to.

It doesn't have to make logical sense.

It's your Lord and Savior.

It only needs to make spiritual sense.

That's why we're called believers.

We believe when it's dark,

we believe when it's difficult,

and we believe when everybody else tells us that we shouldn't.

But we know.

We know our God.

We know his faithfulness, we know his goodness.

And that's how we have faith in those dark moments.

Our trust as believers,

as followers of Christ is not supposed to be based on a situation.

It's supposed to be based on our Savior.

You're supposed to have faith in the Lord because you know his character,

because you know who he is,

and because you have a relationship with. With Him.

I want to suggest that you do something.

It's something that I've implemented with my sisters in Christ when I minister to them.

I call it a blessings book.

It's where we intentionally focus on the beautiful ways that God has shown up in our lives.

Those incredible moments where the Lord has shown us his faithfulness,

his goodness, and his love for us.

Where it's inspired us or it's healed us, or it's comforted us,

whatever it was that he did for us in that moment or in those moments.

Your blessings book is like a track record of all the good things that God has done for you in your life.

Because I'll tell you something,

it's easy to forget those things,

especially in a dark moment.

After You've suffered severe trauma.

It's really hard to remember those times because your mind is not in a space of gratitude.

That's not a natural occurrence after you've gone through something like that.

So you have to be able to shift your own mind back to a state of positivity,

otherwise you'll drown in the negative.

And that's where the Blessings book comes in.

Because during those times when you're going through a really rough season,

you can remind yourself of God's faithfulness,

knowing that if he did it for you back then,

he'll do it again.

I often say,

if you want to know how God is going to take care of you in the future,

just look at what he's done in your past.

Because he never changes.

He can't change.

He's God,

so He literally cannot change.

So my point is,

if he was good to you in the past,

he's going to be good to you again.

If he saved you in the past,

he's going to save you again.

And if he healed you in the past,

he's going to heal you again.

That's God.

That's how he works.

He will astound you if you give him the opportunity to.

I assure you the Lord will heal your heart.

When you come to realize that his hand has always been on you and that he loves you so very much,

I'm going to refer to scripture,

Romans 8, 28 NIV and we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him,

who have been called according to his purpose.

And now I'm going to ask you a couple of questions.

Number one,

what are you blaming God for that the enemy actually caused?

Number two,

when was the last time you remembered God's goodness in your life?

When was the last time that you focused on it?

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father,

we don't always understand why things happen the way they do.

We've been angry. We've been afraid.

We've questioned you.

Help us hand you the broken pieces that we've been too scared to look at.

Show us where you've been in our stories,

especially in the darkest places.

Heal what hurts us and remind us who we are in you.

You are our hope.

You are our healer.

In Jesus name.

Amen.

If today's message spoke to you, please share it with a friend and follow Born to be a butterfly so you never miss an episode.

If you're ready to dive deeper into my story of healing and transformation,

you can get my book From Broken to Butterfly on Amazon.

If you have any questions or would like me to pray for you,

Please send me a DM on Instagram, Born to be a butterfly, or email me at ninapajonas@gmail.com. Until next time,

Remember,

the Lord can turn your wounds into wings.

You were born to be a butterfly.