Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen. Welcome. Links and other Bleeding Daylight episodes are at bleedingdaylight.net where you'll also find links for Facebook and Instagram. Please share Bleeding Daylight with others. What's the difference between forgiveness and denial? Does forgiveness always lead to reconciliation?
These are just a couple of the questions we'll explore with today's guest. Today's guest is a Presbyterian minister who has authored several books. Reverend Cheryl Kincaid has studied marriage and family therapy and has also facilitated support groups for women who have suffered abuse. Through all she does, she is committed to sharing the love of God in a hurting world. I'm very pleased to welcome her to Bleeding Daylight today. Cheryl, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for inviting me. So often we find that those who are involved in helping others will be serving from a place of understanding and of experience. They're people who have faced the same kinds of traumas that they're seeking to see healed in others. Has that been the case for you? Oh yeah, most certainly.
My whole Christian testimony starts when I understood that God was love and that there wasn't any love that I could ever get from my father because he was a pedophile, and redefining what love meant because of that experience. When God called me to the ministry, as a young kid I even had a gift of evangelism. I loved to tell the gospel story.
But when I started to face the consequences of my abuse, because I didn't really face the consequences until I was of dating age, and I was kind of a late bloomer, so I didn't start to date until I was 18. And I had massive PTSD and tended to date men who were cruel to me. I heard a sermon by a minister who said, our job as Christians is to walk people through the valley that Christ has walked us through. And it resonated with me.
I didn't want anyone else to feel as alone as I did when I first started to feel PTSD and didn't understand what was happening to me. And that's when I started my ministry. Growing through the pain, I was in college still. God continued to use that to draw me into full-time Christian service. It's one thing to end the abuse, to end what's going on that is causing harm, but it's a very difficult thing to try and unwind from all the effects that that has.
Because so often, as you say, growing up in that kind of a household, you would have assumed that there's some kind of normal there. You wouldn't have known the difference between what a loving father would be like as opposed to the father that you grew up with. And I imagine that the trauma from that continues to touch your life for many years to come.
Yeah, I think for me, I understood that not all dads did what my dad did, but I somehow thought there was something flawed in me that brought it out in him. It's self-blame from a clinical perspective. I felt that something was broken inside of me, that somehow I was a participant in the abuse. When I found Christ, I was wondering where love was. I'd gone to Sunday school and heard that when you die, you go to heaven if you believe in God.
So I was thinking I didn't want to face the abuse anymore, so I would throw myself off the second story window. And I got up and tried to do it. I was only about six or five, and I was so scared that I went back to bed. It was too frightening for me. And when I tried to get up again, I had a warm hand on my stomach and heard a voice say, God is love. That was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. However, I did what a lot of Christian girls do.
I thought, okay, now the problem's solved. My father did go to jail on other charges, not on the abuse, and the abuse stopped, and I thought, now I'm fixed. Now I will get to live the life of your typical Christian novel, which I devoured. I read lots of Christian novels where the girl comes from a hard background, but she accepts Christ, and a wonderful man appears on her doorstep, and she lives happily ever after. But that's not how my life worked. I had a great gift of evangelism.
I had a pastor who gave me a great gift by saying if I memorized Scripture, I could go to camp for free. So I memorized a lot of Scripture. I was known as a Christian leader. But when I started to date, I started to have these horrible nightmares. I was living with other roommates. We considered ourselves disciples of Christ. And when I started to have nightmares, we thought they were demons, and we tried to cast them out.
Or they were maybe because I didn't forgive, and I went through rituals of forgiveness. I had a hitting-bottom situation where I couldn't go to work and couldn't go to school. I finally was able to see a Christian counselor for free, and I learned they were post-traumatic stress disorder. I confronted my mom a little bit.
The things that I'd always pushed back in the back of my head kind of came forth, and I had to learn to deal with stuff like righteous anger and deal with learning what's acceptable and what's not acceptable in a relationship. It's been a long journey, but for me, it was just basically learning that not everything is solved with one prayer. Not everything is solved with a conversion.
There's a passage in Philippians that says, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it's God who works in you both to do and to will His good pleasure. Now, notice the Scripture doesn't say, Work for your salvation. It says, Work it out. There's a piece of us that have to work out our sanctification, and for me, working out my sanctification was working out the glitches of abuse and how it had seriously damaged my ability to love and to give love with the opposite sex.
Besides that, I still had this burning desire to tell people about Jesus, so there was all the normal stuff that when you're called to ministry. On top of that was this desire to allow women to know what's the difference between forgiveness and denial, what's the difference between righteous anger and anger that is self-defeating, and what does it mean to have integrity and self-respect for your body and yourself.
These are all things that it's difficult to come to terms with when you've grown up when those things have been absent, when what we might call normal has been absent, and even the fact that you in those times were saying, Well, maybe I haven't forgiven enough. It comes back to that self-blame, doesn't it? And we've got to walk that balance that yes, there needs to be forgiveness, but constantly saying the reason that things are not starting to go right is my fault again.
It just repeats that circle. Yeah, it does. I'll take a second and just say the difference between forgiveness and denial. In forgiveness in the scriptures, we forgive because Christ forgave us. That's a basic Christian teaching. We do it out of a command. We don't do it for necessarily any benefit to us. So please don't tell a survivor that when you forgive, it's going to benefit you. Say you do it because Christ did it for you, but let's talk about what forgiveness is.
In forgiveness, you first must acknowledge that someone did something that was wrong to you, that damaged you, and you must give them full responsibility for that act. You don't take on any of the responsibility. There's a therapist by the name of David Finkelhor. He wrote a beautiful book called The Dark Side of Families. And a woman says, He only hits me when he drinks. And the therapist asks, Does he hit you when he drinks or does he drink so he can hit you?
But whatever it is, him hitting you has nothing to do with you. You don't need to figure out the reason why he does it. That's his issue before God. So you give them the full consequences of the abuse. And that means dragging in the police if you need to. And the response to true forgiveness is caution, which a lot of people don't talk about it. But you know in the scripture, Jesus says he did not trust them fully because he knew their hearts. Trust isn't necessarily a result of forgiveness.
God even himself in both the Old and New Testament holds back trust and responsibility from people who are not at a place where they can receive it. So you don't have to trust that person. You don't even have to reconcile with that person. But you do relinquish the anger of punishing them to God. Because God is just and he is patient. But vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I will repay. And you learn to pray the prayer to say that person belongs to you, God. They don't belong to me.
It's not my job to punish them or seek revenge. But because I know the secret, it is my job if they're going to work at a preschool or work at a church as a Sunday school superintendent to call the police. Denial says the problem was not that bad or worse, it was deserved. Denial says that I must fix this person by praying for them and be an agent of healing in their life. Denial hushes the voice of caution.
And it continues the cycle of abuse by allowing the survivor to expose her children, her grandchildren and her spouse to the toxicity of the abuser. I know several books that have been written on abuse. Some of them have good information, but a couple of them says don't confront the abuser unless you do it for his sake. That's nonsense. That's nonsense. Let God confront the abuser for his sake.
You confront the abuser to protect yourself and your children and the people around you and also to take back your integrity and your dignity. I'm saddened to say that the church, both liberal and conservative, I consider myself a middle-of-the-road evangelical, but I've noticed both liberal and conservative is still misogynistic. It still thinks that women were born to take care of men.
And, you know, in Genesis, in the creation story, the scripture says God created man in his image, male and female, he made them. That's the first account of the creation of woman. And it says that we're both created in God's image. And then in Genesis 2, it has the image of woman being taken from man, but it's taken from man, so humanity can say bone in my bone, flesh in my flesh. In other words, we have more in common as human beings than we have different.
The reality is, is that we're all the same under our flesh as Christians, but we both need dignity and dignity needs to call out abuse. You've explained the difference there between forgiveness and denial, but something you also touched on is the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, because so often it is taught that once someone is forgiven, then everything goes back to normal, which is a form of denial, obviously.
And yet we're not required to put ourselves back in an unsafe place, are we? No, we're not. You know, I just last night re-watched The Devil Wears Prada, and I have some problems with that movie. As most young women, I like the movie because it's the journey of a woman who's growing into a professional self, but there's so many inappropriate things that are legitimized as if this business is normal, whereas a good manager wouldn't do those things.
A good manager would seek to nurture her employees to the place where they can do their jobs, and if you've got a manager treating you like that, you need to quit because no job's worth that. But it's teaching Andrea, the character, that if she hangs around enough, something good will happen. Hanging around in abusive situations, something good doesn't always happen.
In fact, more than likely, something worse happens, because the more a predator takes advantage of you, the more they're going to take advantage of you and learning to set boundaries. So, yeah, the cycle of abuse is learned by constantly trying to stick around and fix the other person or thinking that something good is going to come out of something that's bad, and something good doesn't always come out of something that's bad. Something worse comes out of something that's bad most of the time.
So how do we reverse that? How do we actually reach out to women and say, look, this is what society's saying, but it's wrong. This is what some sections of the church are saying, but it's wrong. How do you point them to the truth? Yeah, well, it's reaching out to men and women, learning that sexist jokes aren't funny. When I was a kid, a very young kid, you could make a racist joke from the pulpit. You can't do that anymore. So praise God, we've advanced some.
I think it should be the same with jokes about women and the differences between men and women. The differences between men and women are differences to be enjoyed, not to be competed with, and not to put each other down for. So if a man comes into my house and he's a friend of mine and he says, I noticed your sink isn't working. And I said, yeah, I just kind of, it doesn't bother me. And he says, no, let's fix it.
And because he's been socialized to know how to fix it and use my tools better, instead of mocking him for that, I say, thank you. And we work together to fix it. And maybe I learned some skills so I can fix my sink better. If a woman comes into a man's apartment and says, gee, it's, you know, I don't know how you operate here. It's not aesthetically pleasing. We work together to say, oh, I appreciate that, instead of putting each other down, which is so heartbreaking.
And so one thing is, it's an old, old lesson. We learned it in preschool. Words hurt. Stereotypes hurt. None of us fit into a mold very well that people put out for us. And then in romantic relationships, we've got to start valuing kindness and courtesy better. I think as much as I love Jane Austen, she'd rather set us up for this than Mr. Darcy, because he's insecure, but he's rude. And his behavior is unacceptable. And I think even she knew it when she wrote the book.
But that trope we built the modern American romance on, and so now it's acceptable to be unkind and rude to each other. And words echo inside of us. After you say horrible things to someone, you don't get to take it back, even after you suddenly realize, oh, they're the real love of my life. You've got to build stuff upon trust and kindness. And I'd love to see more romantic comedies where kindness is a major role in the romance.
And you can present the courtship and sexual tension another way, besides rudeness and putting down and sabotage. There are other ways to relate to each other. Because our society is very much soaked in the sort of stereotypes that you're talking about.
In drama, it's using those stereotypes as the device to push the story forward, and so that those people who are watching a movie or watching a TV program, it's like, oh, we're already clued in because we understand that stereotype and we'll just go along with it. In a sitcom, it's all about, let's get the laughs from those stereotypes of the dumb guy or the woman who's only there because of her attractiveness. Our society continues to be soaked in these sorts of things.
So it seems to be a long road back to actually say, it doesn't have to be this way. One of the gifts that we have that we need to bring back that's been in our society is manners. It seems like a simple thing, but learning to say please and thank you and learning to not say harsh things in public. It's not funny in reality when someone puts you down for who and what you are. To value people as a whole, to value them, their personality and their quirks.
I think that violence between men and women has been justified for 2,000 years plus. So it's not going to be an easy road back. For those of us who watched I Love Lucy, Ricky would spank Lucy on a regular basis. In reality, that was a physical assault. Sean Connery, who is a famous star, once said that sometimes you have to punch a woman. He said that in the 70s, and there wasn't a lot of pushback for him on that. I think now that would end his career.
But just learning to condemn it, to have men as well as women condemn it, to say don't treat her that way, or to say aloud to condemn putting a woman down and to condemn putting each other down in a relationship. Every romance begins by a friendship. That's why God said it's not good for man to be alone, is that we can both share in taking care of the garden. So it's a great gift, this whole idea that we can share. But if we don't practice kindness in that sharing, bad things happen.
Is it time that we go back to what the Bible has to say about our roles as men and women and the way we should be treating each other? Well, I think of Paul's words, Be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Even as Christ has forgiven you, so forgive one another. I officiated at a wedding, and that's always the last thing I say at the end of the wedding, that I charge you by the name of Jesus Christ. And everyone's like, oh, what are they going to say?
Everyone's ears perk up when you say that. They think I'm going to say, whom God has joined together, let no man separate. But what I say is, be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Realize it's a stewardship that you've been given this other person, and you have to answer to God for how you treat them. And we do need to get back to that. We do need to get back to the sense of God loved me, therefore I can love others. And let God be the model of our love.
Let 1 Corinthians 13 be the model of our love, not the latest Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan movie, where they're putting each other down before they realize they love each other. That doesn't work in real life. And it sounds very simplistic to talk about kindness, and yet when there is that kindness, when there is that understanding, hey, we're both on the same side, which doesn't seem to come through in a lot of romantic comedies or romantic movies.
It's more, as you say, there's this tension that is built rather than saying, you know what, we're on the same side. So if there's struggles, let's work it through, because it's in both of our best interests. Yeah, we want peace in our homes, you know. Better a dry crust in peace than a feast with enmity, the Bible says. And peace starts with respect. It starts with waiting for someone to hear what someone's day is like.
It talks about a mutual conversation of what's the most important task in the household. Or listening to someone whose working relationship isn't working out. Sometimes making financial decisions where one person has to leave a job and you know that it's going to be rough on the whole family. That comes from cooperation, which comes from kindness.
One of the horrible tropes in the 70s that was around when I was a little girl that kind of messed me up was the Bill Gothard seminar where there's this authority umbrella. The woman has to stay underneath the man to get God's grace. And our faith is Adamistic. That means, from Adam, that it's us and God. There are other religions and cults that believe a woman has to go through her husband to get God. But that's not Christianity. We go directly to God.
And we don't have to put up with the nonsense. We can say, that hurts me, don't do that again. Or, I don't feel safe when you do that, and if you want this marriage to work, I need to feel safe. And these are the rules that we have to feel safe as a couple, because it benefits both of us to stay together. And it benefits the kids as well, but we have to create safety in this space.
One of the great things that we know from the Scripture, there's a lot about redemption that actually pulls back what has been taken. Tell me about seeing God's redemption in the lives of others. It's remarkable in ministry to see what God does in someone's life when they profess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. It's always remarkable to see God redefine your reality after you find Him.
One of the stories that come to mind a lot, that people don't talk about, is in the Gospel of Luke, there's a woman with chronic bleeding. And the Greek word is flow. So it was feminine bleeding. And the reason I like to point that out is because if a woman had feminine bleeding, she was considered unclean. She wasn't allowed to embrace her husband or her children, so she should have never been in the crowd. So she was illegal, and she was unclean, and she reaches up to touch Jesus' garment.
And Jesus doesn't let her go away and slink away after she's healed. He asked the question in front of everyone, who touched me? Now, He knew who touched Him. He's God. But He brought her out. He called her out. And then He commends her for her faith. Your faith has made you whole. In other words, this woman isn't unclean. This isn't a matter of some sin in her life. She has faith, and her faith has made her whole. Jesus didn't let people slink away in their shame.
He always brought things out into the light. The great joy of Christianity, the great gift that we will miss if we don't say it aloud, is confession of our sins in public. Being able to turn to someone in a crowd and say, I've got something going on. This is my struggle. And someone else saying, hey, that's my struggle, too. And I wish we'd do that more. In the book of James, it says, confess your sins one to another that you may be healed. I wish we would do that more in the church.
We do it sometimes with testimonies, but testimonies often say, oh, gee, this was bad, and then I accepted Christ, and everything's okay. What I'd like to hear more is, this was bad, and I'm still struggling with it day by day. But God is my strength, and He'll get me through it. I know that we've touched on it in a number of ways, but certainly there is this thought in society often that the Scriptures, that the Christian Bible actually puts women down and holds women back.
And yet we see again and again through the story that you've just mentioned of the woman with the issue of blood who shouldn't have even been there, and yet Jesus doesn't chastise her for being out. In fact, He rewards her for her faith and endorses and commends her for her faith.
We see Jesus with the woman at the well, and that was unheard of, because He shouldn't have been alone with this woman, and yet He was prepared to be there to see her life completely changed and then to release her to go and tell others about who He was. We see it with the woman who breaks this expensive bottle of perfume across the feet of Jesus, and she's chastised by the disciples, and Jesus says, no, she's done a great thing.
How much do you think we should spend a bit more time going through and seeing the value of women that Jesus brings to the picture? I think we should. I think authors have. I think there's a division in the Church, and I wish my brothers on the other side would see, and sisters on the other side would see, that beating people up with the Scriptures is never helpful.
The reason why when I've worked with women who survived abuse, they get so angry at some of the Scriptures, to the point that they don't even want them explained, is because people have beat them up with it again and again. The Bible was never meant to beat anyone up with. The Bible was meant to encourage people to the mercy of Jesus Christ. Down the street from us, we have a church that's run by two gay men, and that is not my theology.
I see it as sin, but I've had some phone calls of people who want to go out and protest their church. I said, no, that's not my job. I want to love them into the faith. What do you think those congregants feel when they come outside from the service and see us, they would say, praying for them, but they see it as a protest and a public shaming? So I think a lot of it, we've got to stop using the Scriptures to shame women.
We've got to tell people, both men and women who suffered abuse, that sometimes you suffer because of what other people did to you. It's not because there's sin in your life. It's not because you didn't forgive. It's not because you didn't have enough faith. Sin hurts. Sin hurts deeply. And most of the Old Testament, through the minor prophets, God is screaming at the top of his lungs, stop hurting yourselves. Stop mistreating the poor and the foreigner.
Stop being unkind to the orphan and the widow. Stop hurting yourself with your greed and your sin. And worship me and not these fertility gods who teach you to objectify people. That's a lot of the Bible. It's God saying, stop hurting yourself. Preach that message. Yes, sin hurts. And that hurt may linger after you find Christ as Lord and Savior. But that's okay. Now you have a comforter.
One of the great stories, and I mention this in my book, Carrie's Story, is that after Jesus rises from the dead, and Thomas doesn't believe, and Jesus shows him his scars. I want you just to contemplate that for a moment. Jesus kept his scars. We serve a God who has scars. Scars that were put on him, not because of his sin, but because of the sins of the others. Jesus kept his scars.
And the only thing that would ally Thomas, the only thing that would bring him back was to see Jesus' pain, was to see Jesus' scars. And I want to say to Christians, I know you have scars. But when Jesus went to heaven, he could have had a facelift, and had liposuction, and had those scars removed. And he did not. Because those scars represent the pain of sin. And your scars represent the pain of sin. And praise God you have a redeeming God. But don't be ashamed of them.
The scars because something was done to you that ought never to have happened. And there's healing in Jesus Christ, and yes, it takes time sometimes. And that's okay. We have several stories of healing in the Bible where it took time. The lepers who had to go back and show themselves. That Jesus couldn't just heal them then, or the man who had to dunk himself three times in a river. Or Jesus when he spit on the ground. Why did he have these processes in his healing?
Or why when there was a demon, did he ask, what is your name? Instead of just saying, come out. It's because he knew sin had a name, and it had to be mentioned. There's a process in healing. Be patient with the time that it takes to heal you. And lend someone else a hand up when they need their healing. Cheryl, it's been an amazing conversation. And I know that there are many people that have been listening who think, I need to explore some of these concepts even further.
What's the easiest way for people to be in touch with you? I have a website called Rev, and it's R-E-V without a dot. Rev Cheryl, C-H-E-R-Y-L, K-I-N-C-A-I-D dot com. And you'll get links to all of my books, and links to my sermons, and links to my blog as well. And my YouTube page is there as well. And I've got three books. Carrie Storm has a book about a girl coming out of abuse in a foster care system. The sequel is A Forgotten Door Called Home.
And then there's a book called Hearing the Gospel Through Dickens' Christmas Carol, which talks about the suffering and the redemption Ebenezer experiences in that wonderful tale. And there's two children's books, The Little Play Pot, as well as The Little Candle That Was Frightened of the Dark. And I do hope that you'll check out my books. Cheryl, it's been wonderful talking to you. I want to say thank you so much for spending time with us today on Bleeding Daylight. Thank you for having me.
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