Ann Maree
I’d like to introduce you to our season six storyteller Carya. Carya and I have spent the past year getting to know one another as I’ve heard and helped her tell her story. We recognized immediately, of course, how difficult the subject matter might be, not just for Carya to relay, but also for our audience to hear. I’ve explained a bit more about that in episode one, the introduction to this season. I invite you to listen to that introduction if you haven’t done so already. So because we are being super sensitive to both our storyteller and the listening audience, we’ve decided to start Carya’s story this season, not at the beginning, but rather at the end. We feel it’s important for the listeners to know some of the details of where Carya’s story landed before you hear the difficult circumstances of her experiences. Now that’s not to say this is the end of her story. It’s just to take the light and the hope from what would otherwise be aired at the end of our season and bring it forward to the front of the season. In “Jesus is My Captain” Carya shares a piece in the process of her healing journey, and as always, Carya demonstrates who the main person is in her story. Let’s listen in on Carya’s healing journey and her desire to hear from her Lord.

Carya
Jesus is my captain. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me when, as yet there was none of them. Psalm 139:16. 

Much of what we call doctrine is also mystery. We want to organize and systematize it, and there is much good that comes of this kind of intellectual wrestling. But at the bottom of the wrestling, paradox remains, and paradox cannot be resolved on paper or with a treatise. The more I allow myself to sit in and with mystery, the less “sense” it makes, but the more powerful it becomes, the more it helps. 

Throughout His earthly ministry, Jesus often told the disciples things that they did not initially understand, but which they eventually laid hold of and were sustained by. In a similar way, God showed me some things early on in my healing journey that initially made little sense to me, but eventually became anchors of hope. 

One of the greatest mysteries that Jesus told His disciples regarded His own death. He told them over and over again that he was going to Jerusalem, where He would be captured, tortured and put to death. Their initial failure of understanding was complete. It wasn’t that they couldn’t comprehend why this would be so, or why Jesus didn’t seem to have contingency plans to prevent it. They did not understand that it was so until the very moment when Jesus was physically taken captive, the disciples didn’t think He would be they so lacked the conceptual architecture to take this in that when Jesus said, “I am going to Jerusalem to be killed” they seem to have heard something like, “I am going to Jerusalem, where people want to kill me– but don’t worry, I’ll defeat them.” 

It was only after Jesus’ death and resurrection that the apostles began to understand what he had been telling them, the mystery became clearer, but I don’t believe it became less mysterious. Something mysterious works in ways that don’t quite make rational sense. They work even as they are puzzling. Doctrinally, the apostles could now understand why Jesus said He was going to die, why He had to die, why this Messiah was so different from what they had expected. But Jesus didn’t tell them in advance, just so that they could have good theology later. He told them to strengthen them, to encourage them. This is mysterious: “be of good cheer,” He tells them, “for I am going to die.” Although they weren’t able to lean into it yet, it’s clear that later they did. Later they were helped not only by the fact that Jesus died and then rose, but by His telling them over and over that He would. Jesus knew of his future suffering and chose it– as evidenced by His statements to His disciples –  and it is this as well as the actual redemption He purchased that offers sustaining hope to the sufferer. 

Mysteriously, the God-man’s refusal to avoid His suffering helps me with mine: not by providing a way out of it, and not even with the future hope that there will someday be no more suffering. That hope is real, but it is not so mysterious. We see in Christ’s embrace of His own suffering that sometimes not having a way out is precisely His plan. And the mystery is that knowing this and knowing Him can bring real comfort when He asks us to walk a similar path.

Late one summer as I stared down the final year of my Ph.D. work and spent long days pounding out dissertation chapters, God began calling me to come to Him with my suffering. Wounds from a lifetime of severe sexual abuse –  by family, friends, pastors, coaches, teachers and strangers –  lay raw and infected under the bandages of denial and dissociation I slapped on them whenever they occurred. Those bandages had enabled me to survive, but had not brought healing. It took a few months – very difficult months – for me to finally understand that God was calling me into a new thing. Eventually, I grasped that He wanted to remove some of these bandages and begin the healing of what they hid. It took another few weeks for me to finally say, “your will be done.” I knew I should, and I wanted to obey, but I was terrified. As I told my Great Physician, I knew He could heal anything. But what I didn’t know was whether I could survive the healing process. Of course, if the patient dies on the operating table, they are not “cured.” To say that I believed God could heal, but I might not survive, was a logical contradiction, but I wasn’t wrong to anticipate that the procedure would be excruciating. 

By mid-winter, my half-written dissertation sat on my computer, rarely opened, while I spent my waking hours clinging to life and sanity with my fingertips. God was walking me into the truth about my past in order to bring His healing there, but sometimes His goodness comes like a storm – I clung to Him, not piously nor with saintly assurance – but desperately thrashing like a drowning woman, my fingers clutching for the only peace still afloat after the shipwreck of my life. I was like Peter who, when hearing a hard teaching from Jesus and then asked by Him whether he would like to walk away (as had many other of Jesus’ followers in response to the same teaching), said “Where else would we go?” I couldn’t handle what God was doing, but I knew there was nowhere better to go. I spent hours in the Psalms, their honest rawness and stubborn faith a balm for my bewildered heart. 

In His kindness, God chose this storm-tossed time to begin unveiling two mysteries that became lodestones in my healing journey. Neither of them made sense at first. Again like Peter –  this time when he rebuked Jesus for saying He would go to Jerusalem to be killed –  I didn’t at first like either of them and argued stubbornly with God about them. Both mysteries offered to take me deeper into suffering even as they also offered to take me closer to God, and suffering is something we instinctively avoid. Plus my mind couldn’t unravel them, couldn’t make them make sense, couldn’t understand how they were supposed to help. But slowly I learned that I needed understanding less than I needed to learn to live in them. Only then was the help unlocked. 

A big part of my problem during those early months was that without ever consciously acknowledging it, rape had always been the thing I most feared. As far back as I could remember, my mind completely shut down if I started to think about it. The word itself was sufficient to make my stomach drop to the floor. One morning, during the months when God was calling me into His healing work but I didn’t yet understand the words, I sat in church watching a video for the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. A woman on the screen simply recounted her ordeal: capture and then repeated rape, for days, by a group of men who hated Christianity. I didn’t realize what was coming, and when the r-word quietly left her lips I felt a sword plunge into my gut. I felt like I was about to vomit. 

It had always been that way, and I’d never really thought about why; I assumed everyone had the same reaction to that word. Now, months later, I understood that my fear of rape faced backward, not forward: it wasn’t that I was afraid it might happen in the future, but that it already had, repeatedly, and had left me undone. My desperate fear was less of it happening than of having to live in the full knowledge that my life was full of it. My worst fears were true, and I tried to figure out how, and why, I should trust God with that reality. I couldn’t believe He allowed this thing to happen to me, this thing that felt like the worst thing, this thing that was not survivable yet He didn’t let me die. And it happened, not once, but often! 

One day, I sat in my living room praying with the two friends who knew my story. As we prayed, Jesus suddenly whispered the first mystery into my ears. He told me that He was there with me every time particular family friends raped me. I could have asserted this truth already, for Jesus tells us in Scripture that He is always with us. But this thing He whispered to me was no theological abstraction. He ushered my mind back to one of the places where it happened, allowing me to see again my small, naked body as it was used by grown men, then showed me Himself there with me in the midst of all that vulnerability, shame and pain. One of the worst things about sexual abuse is that the victim is utterly alone with the horrors they endure. But no, I was not alone! He never, ever, left me there alone with those men. Relief washed over me.

Within days, though, confusion and anger replaced it. I didn’t want God to merely be there while awful things happened. I wanted him to stop them! And He could have. Omnipotent and sovereign, He could easily have prevented it. What was the good of having him there if He didn’t do anything? How did His presence help me if His presence didn’t act? We would castigate a person who stood by, inert, merely watching sadly while a little girl was raped by grown men. Indeed, God sternly rebukes those who fail to act on behalf of the oppressed. Why then did He fail to act on my behalf? And having failed in this way, why was He making a point of showing me that He was there, as though this should help comfort me? 

For weeks, this mystery felt like it only made things worse. If God loved me, why didn’t He stop these horrific things from happening to me? I asked over and over, trying to trust Him, knowing I had nowhere else to go, but not seeing how His seemingly passive presence was worth anything. He let me rail and, graciously, even answered some of my questions. When I demanded that He explain to me why He allowed this most painful of things into my life, He reminded me that He did not spare His own beloved Son from torture, death, and the crushing weight of all the sin in all the world throughout all time. 

I came to accept, theologically, at least, the seemingly paradoxical truths that God was good and loved me, yet chose not to intervene to stop the abuse. My anger dissipated. But I still didn’t remotely understand what good it did me that He was there. What difference does God’s presence make when it doesn’t make the difference – the change in our circumstances –  that we need? All I knew was that God was telling me it does make a difference. It was like a promise hung in the air that somehow, at some point, I would get it. I would lay hold of what it meant and did for me that Jesus was right there –  every time, every single moment –  pressing His fullness into all the places where I was emptied, even though He didn’t seem to stop a single thing. It didn’t really help yet, but I learned to hope that it would, and to wait with expectation. 

Much later –  early summer now –  I sat in my IKEA Poang chair, Bible and journal on my lap, grappling with this mystery once again. I was trying to believe in it, but I still didn’t get it. God had continued His insistent call that I follow Him into places in my own heart and life that I hoped never to touch. At His side, over the past months I’d faced a whole lifetime of abuse that was far worse than I was able to acknowledge or admit when He first started this work in me. The abuse was sadistic, widespread and lasted – oh! – for far too long. I wrestled with the appalling truth that my own family led and participated in a network of pedophiles. They trafficked me to friends, relatives and paying customers, and my father himself raped me regularly. Sometimes my mother did too. 

No wonder my subconscious had slapped bandages of denial and dissociation on these things. I couldn’t have grown up or lived sanely with this knowledge front and center. I survived only by locking them away. But now God was unlocking them, gently drawing me in to stand squarely in the door with Him and face them. As I did, I acknowledged that the things God chose to not stop were worse than anything I could imagine, worse than anything I ever even heard of. And He didn’t just not stop them once. They happened over and over again. He kept on not stopping. Yet also He kept telling me that He was with me there. Every. Single. Time. Always, without fail, Jesus was there, walking through the fire with me. 

I was glad that He did not leave me to endure it alone. But more strongly than before I knew I would be even gladder if He had stopped it. Why didn’t He? Why? My good theology lay crumpled on the floor next to my chair. The refreshing water I gulped at from accepting that suffering is part of life was now gritty ashes in my mouth. This wasn’t just suffering. It was close to hell. Why on earth did God offer nothing more than His presence there? I needed rescue out of the valley of death, not a companion through it. 

Suddenly, God drew back the curtain on a second mystery and began to paint a picture for me. In my mind I saw Jesus as an infantry captain, leading a band of soldiers through a war zone. What if He always scouted out the enemy’s schemes and positions, then carefully routed His band away from danger? His soldiers would be always safe, and likely this would make them glad. But, God suggested, what sort of war captain is that who seeks only to keep His soldiers out of harm’s way? What is the use of a warrior who is not in harm’s way? The captain that soldiers most want to follow is not the one who keeps them safe yet does nothing else. Rather, the most beloved and honored captain is the one who fights, leading his forces into the very heart of the enemy’s strongholds and emerging victorious. 

In the picture in my mind, the captain’s attack was not launched from a distance with overwhelming force and superior arms. He did not “emerge victorious” with a clean face after a short, brilliant attack that cost Him nothing. This Jesus looked a lot like the leader of the small, exhausted patrol in the Vietnam War, one who found one of the Viet Cong’s booby trapped underground tunnel systems. These tunnels –  enemy strongholds –  were claustrophobic, frightening, and deadly places. If the immediate safety of the soldiers was the captain’s primary goal, he would quietly turn his patrol around and get out of there.  But Jesus knows that the cause for which He fights is just, and thus that the battle must be joined. So the captain himself takes off his bulky gear and crawls head first into the stronghold with only a flashlight and a pistol. 

He goes in first, but He does not go alone. I want a captain who is safe, and who sees it as his primary mission to keep me safe. Unless our hearts are trained otherwise, we all do. Every time I demanded to know why God did not choose to exercise His sovereignty, omniscience, and omnipotence to keep me safe, I demanded that He should have acted counter to His character. Jesus loves me, but His primary mission is not assuring my comfort or even my safety. He is at war with the forces of darkness, and through Him, God is reconciling all things to Himself. He is pressing His kingdom into place throughout the sin-sick world, and that is a dangerous mission. Jesus is my captain, and He does not avoid the worst places. Instead, He goes straight into them. Sometimes, He calls His soldiers to follow; sometimes, His soldiers are already there as the captives. 

“Fine!” I sobbed, yelling into my empty room thick with God’s Spirit. “Fine –  go into the very worst places –  but leave me out of it!” I wept and wept, wishing for a nobler reaction, but unable to escape what I really felt. I understood with a new clarity that Jesus is –  and has to be –  the captain who fights darkness rather than avoiding it. It made sudden, piercing sense that He would not route Himself away from the places where unspeakable sexual torture occur, but seek those places out. But I didn’t want that to mean that I had to be there too. He wasn’t yet done unveiling this mystery. As He did so, it sharpened to a surgeon’s knife that cut open my heart, even as it started to help it heal. 

Sometimes, this Captain calls His soldiers to follow Him on rescue missions, leading them into horrible strongholds where the danger is real and sacrifice may be required to set captives free. That is a hard, but valorous, calling. Sometimes, though, this Captain calls His soldiers to follow Him on a different mission: to be present with and bear witness to the devastation wrought by sin. This work requires first-hand experience, not mere observation. It was not enough for Jesus to be made incarnate, just so that He could die for us; He first had to live as one of us, suffering as we do. This did not come only in His final hours under Pilate’s torture and then on the cross. He spent thirty-three years on this part of His mission before He reached that final stage. He is Immanuel, God with us, who lives not only to rescue us from the kingdom of darkness, but to walk with us through the valley of the shadow of that kingdom until the day His rescue is consummated.

He lives also to shine His light into the darkness. This is what I began to understand as I saw Captain Jesus diving headfirst into the enemy’s stronghold. He wants to put Himself there. Yes, He wants to defeat the enemy and to set the prisoners free, and that eventual outcome is certain. But in the meantime, He also wants His presence, His light, there in the darkness, not only to comfort the captives, but also to bear witness against the darkness. And one way He does this is by putting His people there, not as the rescue squad, but as the captives. When His people are present where there is evil, when they bear witness through their costly personal experience, there He is too. The light shines in that darkness.

If Jesus is really a captain like that, following Him is not safe. He wants us to be like Him, and He is constantly doing insane, risky, unsafe things. So I railed and wept in my chair, flailed and pounded, begging and desperate for a different story.

“Fine, you go be present in the places where sexual abuse is like this. Other places, places far away from me. You go there and bring light into that darkness, but don’t ask me to bear your image there! Don’t ask me to be the one who suffers, the one who has to walk through the valley. Pick someone else!” I was ashamed that I would volunteer someone –  anyone! –  else for this assignment in my stead. But the truth was that I still wanted my captain to act according to my logic. I wanted my safety to be His highest priority. So I insisted that my status as His child should exempt me from this mission; that somehow it should not be possible for a Christian to end up in the darkest of valleys. I knew this train of thought ran counter to Scripture and counter to history. I knew it was very bad theology. But right then it wasn’t a theological problem I was wrestling with. It was my life, and I didn’t believe I could actually live in the life the Lord was showing me was mine. 

But instead of rebuke, I heard His gentle and compassionate response. “No child, it doesn’t work that way.” It cannot be that the very worst kinds of things happen only to those who do not know Him. It has to be that some of His own experience the worst, because when they do Jesus is there, right where He wants to be –  in the dark. There, He experiences it with them, applies Himself to the darkness, and accomplishes a victory deeper and more glorious than winning their immediate safety. 

God could have prevented what happened to me, and He hated everything about it. But He did not stop it because He wanted to be there Himself, and in these particular cases it was I who had the costly privilege of bearing His name, likeness and identity. Jesus is my Captain, and He commands me to take up my cross and follow Him. 

I still sat in my Poang  chair, crying hard. But I was no longer fighting, no longer flinging my angry, self-protective “fine!” at God. Somehow, what He showed me helped. Somehow I stopped insisting that I should have been spared and accepted that He calls –  not just allows –  even those He loves to walk through deepest darkness. In that moment, I tasted it as mercy that I was there because Jesus wanted to be there, because He runs to the darkest places, and because He sends His people there too. In that moment, I found peace in the mystery that God chose me for this assignment even though He hated what would happen to me, even though He spilled out His own life to defeat the powers that enabled it. 

Though this was mercy, it was severe, a mercy that carried much pain. I continue, even now at times, to ache and weep with it. But my Captain did not ask me to not hurt. He experienced severe mercy when He cried out to His Father, pleading to not have to go to the cross, then sweating drops of blood as He continued praying, in agony even after being strengthened by an angel sent from heaven. He is the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and He does not rebuke me for my pain. 

But He does want me to trust Him with my story. That day, as I sat in my chair, I had, in essence, been telling Him that He authored it wrong. Indeed, ever since the moment I first honestly faced the rape that filled my days for decades, I nursed a suspicion that God had written my story wrong. Now unexpectedly, I saw that He authored it right, just as the agonizing life of His own Son was authored right. My tears slowly subsided, and I began to rest in the arms of the captain who authored my painful life. 

Mysteries are mysterious. They are difficult to understand, often inchoate, and sometimes nearly impossible to articulate. Even a partial understanding of mystery is one thing; learning to live in it is another. I have never forgotten the intensity of my wrestling with God on that day in my quiet room, nor the bewildering comfort that followed. But since then, my ability to live in that mysterious rest waxes and wanes. At times the mystery becomes opaque again, and my vision cannot penetrate through it to see Jesus. I flail and fight, and must cry out again and again for the grace to live there. Sometimes I even believe again that God has authored my story wrong. 

But He is gracious. He reminds me of the difference it made to know Him as the captain who chose to enter into the worst. When I remember, I find it both more mysterious and yet more life-giving than before. I understand less as I understand more; the mercy seems ever more severe yet it grows ever more joyful; the depth of pain deepens yet the healing grows. 

It’s a battle to trust Him with my awful story. It’s a fight to rest in the severe mercy of God’s mysterious sovereignty. But God poured out on me an extraordinary act of kindness and favor that day in the first year of my healing journey. He showed me a mysterious truth I can cling to and fight for. Why does Jesus’ presence with me make a difference even when He doesn’t intervene to stop horrific suffering? I don’t think I can really explain it, but when I know Jesus as my captain, who goes into the worst things Himself, who sends me there too and is always with me, even there, I can rest. 

I rest even though the pain still sears. But one day it no longer will, when He dries my eyes forever.

Ann Maree
I have so appreciated Carya’s honest and genuine processing throughout her storytelling this 2025 season. I know our audience will appreciate it as well. One of the things she helpfully articulates particularly in this episode, “Jesus is My Captain” is the doctrine; the fullness of Romans 8:17. In that verse, Paul writes, “now, if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and coheirs with Christ—if we indeed share in His sufferings.” This is a truth many of us find difficult to bear, but the quote end of that suffering story is “in order that we may also share in His glory.” The great suffering you will be listening to over the coming months, indeed results in shared glory. We are going to be speaking these words often during this season, but we truly consider ourselves privileged to bear witness, not only to Carya, to her story, but also privileged to share the warmth and the light of His glory as it will be so clearly seen in her journey. Join us next time on the Safe to Hope podcast, as we continue to gently lead into the rest of this story.