witness

On an individual and corporate level the church is learning to love and accept people where they are at on their journey along with providing opportunities and experiences for them to engage relationally with other Christians along with exploring the implications of Christ's teachings. I am a big proponent of the concept that Christianity is more __aught that taught_ and that a person__ meaningful involvement in the process is critical to them experiencing the power of the gospel in their lives. This meaningful involvement takes time and persevering love.

Being here to witness the beauty, to learn, to be astonished, to love - is enough. Being able to create in addition is a delightful honour.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.

People will continue to doubt you until they witness first hand the results of what you have mastered.

If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?

I am one of his witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears. But I shall not know any better than I know now that he is God__ Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.

On the stand, I asked the witness, __hat's your occupation?___ake-up artist.___bjection!_ I replied, __ack of foundation.

All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be 'Girl A' - the key witness in the trial that finally saw my abusers locked up. Girl A - the girl in the newspaper stories who had been through the most hideous experience imaginable. When I read those stories, I felt like I was reading about somebody else, another girl who was subjected to the depths of human depravity. But it wasn't. It was about me. I am Girl A.

I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.

There are casualties in war. Those who don__ make it back to a place of sound hopes and dreams. Some take on their demons alone. They are deceived into fearlessness and trampled by the hooves of their oppressor. Besides intervention, there is little justice for the thousands-upon-thousands hacked to pieces all around us. How dare we try to take life to the next level. Instead of merely protecting ourselves or scrounging up our next meal, we have the audacity to hope for something more__ witness for our lives who will survive alongside us.

For his own unfathomable reasons, God chooses to disguise himself when he comes to this planet, and there have been few disguises better than the church.

If the church is the body of Christ [who was disguised in servant form], why would we think the world would be able to pick us out of a crowd of other well-meaning organizations?

None of these apparent sightings interested Hawksmoor, since it was quite usual for members of the public to come forward with such accounts and to describe unreal figures who took on the adventitious shape already suggested by newspaper accounts. There were even occasions when a number of people would report sightings of the same person, as if a group of hallucinations might create their own object which then seemed to hover for a while in the streets of London. And Hawksmoor knew that if he held a reconstruction of the crime by the church, yet more people would come forward with their own versions of time and event; the actual killing then became blurred and even inconsequential, a flat field against which others painted their own fantasies of murderer and victim.

Slowly, I'm beginning to realise that what happened to me wasn't my fault, that I was taken advantage of by a group of vile, twisted men.

Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried.Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn__ see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves,and for one another. We need each other to survive.I wish this for you: to find the people you belong with, the ones who will see your pain, companion you, hold you close,even as the heavy lifting of grief is yours alone. As hard as they may seem to find at times, your community is out there. Lookfor them. Collect them. Knit them into a vast flotilla of light that can hold you.

The old adage that __here are two sides to every story_ is not true. There is a story for every storyteller.

I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.