Is God to Blame for a Past of Pain?

Chi felt, “It was God's fault.  He saw all of it and He could have stepped in at any point but didn't.  And that, for a long time, was what I believed.”

Chi says that as a young girl, “field hockey was my life.  By the time I was 12, I made it onto an adult team in my hometown, Oxford, in the UK.  I was at a party that year with my teammates and I met a man who seemed really friendly.  He suggested we go outside to talk.

“The next thing I know he was coming on to me, he was trying to kiss me.  I became quite standoffish, pushed him away.  He started getting a lot more aggressive, and it kinda led from there, led to-to rape.

“I didn’t tell anyone - not even my parents.  I felt dirty, I felt embarrassed.  You start thinking that it was your fault.  I don't know at 12 years old how to turn around and say, ‘Look, Mom, I did this.’  Like, ‘What if she doesn't let me play sport anymore?  What if I'm not allowed to hang around those people anymore?’  

“My mom was a Christian and had taught me about God, but it seemed to me that He was to blame.

“I was already so angry.  I was already at a point in life where I didn't want to know about some God that loved me and protected me.  And, you know, so I never had my own relationship.

“I poured all my energy into competing and tried to pretend it never happened.  Then, just before I turned 13, a man in his 30’s struck up a friendship with me.  Big brother, a cool friend.  Wanted to be a part of his life.  So I think when he started showing me attention, I started feeling a bit special again and like all the other stuff, you know, was left behind.

“I didn’t realize he had other motives.  First, he got me to run drugs for him, and then when I lost some of his supply, he forced me into his other line of work, as a sex trafficker.

“He told me that I had to start modeling.  The first day it was with clothes, the second day it was without clothes, and I think by day three or four, you know, you're sleeping with different men, and it’s this world that you don't even know how you got there.

“He and his friends found ways to stop me from going to the police.

“They-they walked through my house and-and they held my little sisters who were six months old, at gunpoint.  You have such a fear of that that it stops you.  Like, it stops you from doing anything about it.  

“I think I was so messed up in the head at this point that I didn't know what involvement was my fault anymore.  You know, I didn’t know if this was all my fault.  I felt trapped, and you just keep going hoping that at some point, magically everything's going to go back to the way it once was.

“They also forced me to take drugs to make it easier for them to control me.  It started off with them kinda like feeding me cocaine and, you know, I happily took that, because quickly I realized that it numbed the pain.  But then they would inject me with heroin, uh, against my will.

“I was being trafficked several times a week, and no one ever knew.  I kept up appearances at school and at home.  My parents’ marriage was failing and they were busy raising my four younger siblings.  They thought I was completely focused on my dream of playing pro field hockey.

“It was my outlet.  Everything would build up, build up, build up, and that was my identity and my release.

“I had been a sex slave for six years, and I saw no way out.

“I remember having times where I really cried out to God in complete desperate and hopeless times of, ‘Just get me out of this.  If you do exist, take me out.’  And ‘If You do love me, like why are You doing this to me?’  

“Then, when I was 18, my abusers were tipped off about a police raid, and they panicked.

“I remember all the lights coming on, a lot of shouting.  Someone dragged me out the bed and threw me in the back of the van, dropped me outside my house, said, ‘If you ever speak of this, we know where your family is.  We always know where you will be.’

“I was out of the trap, but I wasn’t free, not even close.  I was playing for the international field hockey team.  But I was still addicted to cocaine, and the trauma of the past six years had left me with a disorder where my mind disconnected from reality.

“I'd have absolutely no memory.  I wouldn’t know who I was, I wouldn’t know where I was. I'd be found 30 miles away.  No one knew what to do with me.

“Psychiatric treatment didn’t help me.  I was so angry, and I just wanted someone to blame.

“I've blamed friends, I've blamed people that should have seen.  I've blamed myself.  There's been so many cycles of different people I've blamed and then I think the biggest person I blamed was God.

“Over the next couple of years, I started to open up about my past to people who I really trusted, and many of them were Christians.

“I encountered people that were so full of joy, so happy, on such a level that I'd never experienced.  So for the first time I was like, ‘There's more to life than just what I've gone through and how I feel right now.’  

“By the time I was 22, I was living with a Christian family.  But when they found out I was doing drugs, they gave me an ultimatum that really shook me.

“‘You're either going to Mercy or I'm kicking you out of my house.’  And I think that really, for me, was the point of, ‘I need to start turning my life around.’  

“Mercy UK is a Christian residential home in Yorkshire, England that helps women in crisis put their lives back together.  It was there that I really began to heal, both physically and spiritually.

“So I read a book called Is God to Blame?  And I think for the first time, you know, I really understood that God wasn't some evil man up in the clouds looking at what was happening to me.  God cried with me and-and that pain for him was probably even-even more painful than it was for me.   

“And I fell down on my knees and started crying and I-I asked for forgiveness, and I was just saying ‘Sorry’ over and over again for blaming the God that loves me more than anything else on this-this planet.  I started building up a relationship with Jesus, like, I started understanding who God was.

I saw a Christian counselor for the next three and a half years, and I learned who I really am in Christ.

“You start walking like someone else.  You start walking as someone that wasn't once trafficked and abused every day, but actually someone that has a purpose for their life and, you know, that's going to do great things in life.

“A few years after that, in 2016, while I was on vacation in Greece, I met Ryan, who’s a senior chief in the US navy.  We got married just over a year later.  

“I have peace now because I know God always had a purpose for my life.  I'm accepted.  I'm-I'm at a place today where I'm forgiven, I'm free. I'm without blemish, uh without fault.  And in everything I do, like, you know, He wipes clean.”