It Still Hurts, God: A Narrative Prayer

About 22 years ago, someone I trusted and admired turned on me due to my sexuality. He went so far as to suggest that my relationship with his teenage daughter (I was still a teenager too) was inappropriate. He made it clear that I had no business working with kids and cost me the first job I loved by outing me to the church where I was associate youth director. I always suspected he did this out of fear because he intuited that his daughter was struggling with her own sexual self understanding. Nevertheless, his betrayal created a pain in my life that would be reinforced by my internalization of his and other's homophobic ideas. It would be years before I would allow myself to be alone with a child because of the fear someone else might accuse me of something awful. When I was finally able to disentangle that pain from my pain with the church (which included 7 years of never going to church but still feeling a deep faith and sense of call), I tried my best to move forward from the fear and pain. But it would still be many more years before I could imagine working with children. Even as I began my career as a chaplain, I felt timid and fearful about being with children. At this point, I've been a pediatric chaplain for over 8 years living out God's calling and I still take extra measures to prevent even the possibility of someone making a false accusation. Will I ever heal from that experience? I don't know. But I do know that the man who betrayed my trust has changed his stance on homosexuality (thanks to a whim to look him up on Facebook). In fact, he retired from his professorship some years ago and is now an Episcopal priest posting things about love and growing in faith on his Facebook. This seems hopeful to me. But as the recipient of his fearful slander years ago, it strikes me how easy his path past that moment seems compared to how painful mine still is. Holy One, what is true justice? Please release me from the bonds of shame and fear. Amen.