A Better Notion of Redemption

The concept of redemption is an important one for processing our trauma and painful experiences as children. Within Christian circles, a common approach to dealing with the pain of our childhoods is to find a way to explain how what happened to us, happened for a reason. The mentality is that if I can find a reason why this happened, I can better accept the fact that it happened.

I have three problems with this. First, it means we’re trying to justify completely unjustifiable actions and events. Some evil is beyond justification. Some of what we experienced can’t be explained and shouldn’t be explained beyond the fact that it’s of the evil one. There’s no good reason that these things happened, and we ought not to dignify it by giving it reason.

Second, it makes God into the author of horrible, tragic, traumatic evil. There are no doubt hard things in our life that belong to the journey of faith that God is the author of. But God isn’t the author of incest, abuse, addiction, neglect, or abandonment.

Third, the notion that God would have us go through something as painful as our childhoods just to say, “but look, I have redeemed you” is a sham redemption. If I force you to undergo some painful experience only to be waiting on the other side to rescue you, that is profoundly selfish and evil.

Instead, a concept of authentic redemption is so profound for our healing precisely because God didn’t design the pain of your childhood, but nevertheless is always in the work of redeeming the pain of our stories.

To “redeem” something is to take something that we thought was lost, worthless, or beyond repair and infuse it with new purpose, value, and hope. God is taking what we thought was the lost cause of our childhoods and declaring—"I want to do something with that pain, I want to heal it and use it for the healing of others.”

God is declaring, “The experience that told you that you were worthless was telling you a lie. You were molded and made under the eye of your creator and the good I placed in you hasn’t been destroyed by the evil done to you.”

God is declaring, “What you thought was beyond repair are the broken pieces I will use. The sacred wounds of your pain aren’t scars but ‘re-birth’ marks, identifying the unique contribution you will make in my world.”

With God, nothing is lost, worthless, or beyond repair. It’s pain waiting on the promise of redemption.