A Survivor’s Fortitude & God’s Gratuity of Grace

Without a doubt the survivor is far more courageous than we ever give them credit for. They have given much more to their living situations where they suffered abuse than would ever be expected. They have gone above and beyond, notwithstanding myriad resistance measures, which under normal circumstances would have bequeathed them favour.

There are nuances of the narcissism in the abuser that are enough to befuddle any counsellor, and even the best counsellors are caught off-guard, and may realise too late that they should never have been counselling this couple in the first place.

The survivor of the abuse, all too often, has found themselves having to account for their actions, having been gaslit, and being completely undone by the drama showing in the person they’re with, not to mention the concessions they’ve been prepared to make, which are ever so unrequited. The abuser concedes nothing.

Injustice is layered over injustice, and the survivor never wins even a cracker from the brief foray (the briefer the better) into therapy for their troubled relationship.

They may well have known all along, but perhaps 10% of their gracious nature won out when their instincts (the other 90%) would’ve gone the other way. Of course, it is too late now. The damage is done, and the seeds are sown.

But all is not lost. Indeed, for the survivor, there is gratuity that is there is for the acknowledging and for the keeping. This gratuity is a grace from the God who knows all. God knows the narcissist through and through. And God knows what the survivor has put up with. God will mete out justice, and via this principle, many times, in this life. Of course, there is a commanding and final justice in eternity.

Long ago, the God of all creation created a system whereby those unacknowledged debts of sin would be transferred to the Lord who counts and never stops counting.

The narcissist can lie all they want; much is their folly that they believe they will get away with it. Nobody gets away with anything. The God who sees everything, sees the wickedness done, just as it is seen, and gratuities are given in compensation for the grotesque things received. Verily this is the situation: such is the transfer of the sinner’s debt to God that God re-transfers a windfall of grace to the survivor.

In as much as the survivor has been sinned against,
the survivor receives grace commensurate with their loss.

For the survivor there is copious encouragement in this; for what they bear and for what they’ve borne. As the Good Book says, “It is to their glory to overlook an offence,” and because overlooking was the only way they could deal with their abusive reality, they now have something of a promissory note that is counted for them, for all the things that they have suffered which counted against them.

This is the aggregated sum of blessing heaped up on the life of the survivor because of the fortitude that has been required of them.

They did not choose courage out of their own freewill. The choice of courage was removed from them, yet courage was required from them, and so God has blessed them with something they could not have bought, for what has cost them that they couldn’t afford to give.

Such is the lot for the survivor of abuse: they gave what they did not have, so the compensation is something they could not earn.

God sees to it that justice is given. God ensures that the more a human being is failed, the more compensation abounds in grace.

The biblical pattern is stark to this degree: Christ suffered, as a survivor or abuse, both persecution and death, and what was counted for Him for the things that counted against Him? The grace of resurrection. A grace of resurrection is available for all survivors. 

Photo by Greg Weaver on Unsplash