Filling My God Shaped Vacumn

I have been going to therapy with an excellent counselor who I believe God has gifted to help those who have survived trauma. No question about her truth. I learned this week how I have come to meld my respect and high esteem for her into an almost god-like status. I certainly am not proud of that and actually express it with great vulnerability because “I would never do that”, and I am working at staying out of shame concerning it.

This week in a grief support group that I help facilitate, one of the professionals in the video made the statement that every human is created with a God shaped vacuum. In our flesh we have a tendency to try to fill that hole with people. It is only when God removes those people that we become desperate for Him.

In my post rape hopelessness, I was intent on finding someONE that could fix the brokenness and pain for me, to make it all go away. In the beginning when I would have to wait a week in between counseling sessions I would find myself desperate to talk to her again. Then we spread the meetings to two weeks and for awhile that was extremely difficult. Now we have decided to meet two consecutive days once a month. While this has been helpful from a processing standpoint, it removed my security of knowing thinking “if I could just see her, she could fix this wretched problem, fix what’s wrong with me,’ when I would have a particularly bad day in between sessions.

Turns out what was really wrong with me was looking at the world to find and fix ‘what I have lost to this world’. In my desperation I was depending on man for help, not the Lord. In His wisdom, He is removing the person I was trying to fill my God space with, leaving me desperate and searching for Him.

Don’t get me wrong, counseling has and will continue to be a vital part of my recovery, I just need to remember that she is just a person like me. She can guide me, and she can’t “fix” me. The Great Physician, The Comforter, The Counselor, is the only One that can ‘take the pieces in His hand and make me whole again’. Only Christ can ‘make something beautiful out of all this suffering.’


(Nicol Sponberg ~ Resurrection)

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