Tedder's Blog, page 5

Jewels, Gems & Gunpowder

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A Jewel: Is incest a cult?

Merriam-Webster defines cult as a great devotion to a person or idea; usually a small group of people characterized by such devotion. Synonyms for cult are words like audience, followership or discipleship. Sounds just like the family I was raised in and the husband I was married to that my kids grew up with.

A great devotion to a person — YEP! The abuser(s) leads the family (small group) with great discipleship. So much so that after being raped by these people, the family stays devoted to them.

Does this seem like a system a loving God would be any part of?

Gem: From Wild at Heart daily reading, “First, let’s remove the shock and shame of those moments when hard-pressed you suddenly rages, binges, goes faithless, or simply shows up as a very unappealing version of you.

Salvation is a process, not an event.

Metaphorical Gunpowder: I am unconditionally loved. I am not alone. I walk with the Creator of the Universe and he calls me his friend, his child — the one that he loves. Any other identity of myself I am not going to listen to.

Please comment below by leaving your jewel, a gem or something you keep yourself free from with metaphorical gunpowder.

All love!

Fear Not Friday | Do you fear the future?

There was a time in my life when I just accepted the way things were. I let people treat me any way they wanted to. I didn’t believe God had more for me than just survival. But, the truth has invaded my heart. I know different today.

My past can’t harm me any more. My parents are a distant gong that used to bring me strife. The pain that ensnared my heart, guided my steps and made my future bleak — is gone now.

I often didn’t dream of my future because my gaze was fixed on the past. The pain I had come through. The tragedies of the distant battles I had been through left a burnt past behind me that was smoldering.

My hope was deferred.

It took the Creator of the Universe to step in and guide me. He lead me beside quiet waters as He spoke new life into me. He taught me His ways. He told me He had each tear I had cried in His bottle of remembrance.

He spoke kindly to me as he told me my warfare was over; He had battled on my behalf and won the war!

Oh, the scars on my soul, heart and body of those distant battles remain but my heart has been restored. My soul no longer burdened. I have been set free.

If today you find ourself drowning in the pain of what happened yesterday, I tell you I have the answer.

If today you find your soul burdened and half dead due to the tragedies of yesterday, I tell you I have the answer.

If you feel your heart bleeding out as a result of betrayal, I tell you I have the answer.

I lived it. I know the battle and I know what freedom feels like.

I have found a God who tells me I can rest.

I have found a God who tells me He will carry my heavy burdens.

I have found a God who ladles His love into me, guides me, and protects me.

I pray today for you — that you will find Him, too.

Coming Home To Your Body

There are days when I wake up feeling like a house that has been lived in by too many ghosts. The past hums in my bones, a low vibration of old hands, old voices, old wounds that never quite closed. Trauma isn’t just a memory—it is a language the body speaks when the mouth cannot.

I spent years writing my way out of the dark, spilling ink like bloodletting, thinking if I named the monsters, they would leave. And they did, some of them. But the body holds what the mind cannot process. The stomach clenches where shame once sat. The shoulders tighten beneath the weight of ghosts. The hands tremble with stories they were never allowed to tell.

Somatic healing is not just remembering—it is relearning. It is feeling the fear rise up and not abandoning yourself this time. It is touching the scar and telling your body, we survived. It is finding breath where once there was only holding. It is allowing the body to tell its own story in movement, in stillness, in shaking, in sighing.

To be in your body after trauma is an act of rebellion. To listen to its whispers, to honor its pain, to stay when every instinct tells you to flee—that is how we begin again. That is how we make a home inside ourselves, one that no ghost can haunt.

B

Letting Go . . . of . . . D E A T H

Suicide and death are such a common theme among incest survivors. You know why? It’s all murder, that’s why.

I only saw my father a handful of times after that. He had chosen deceit and the battle between us was on.

About six months before this illness, I’d dreamt that my father was milling about his house. The dream began with a man crawling in a downstairs window at my dad’s house. He stayed in the house a long time. The dream finished with my father walking away from the house with a limp. It was strange to me at the time but also something I couldn’t ignore.

I prayed about the dream. I knew that the man who crawled through my dad’s window was evil. It was like death had come in. I opened my bible and ironically read about a six-month period. Strange to me, but notable, I looked ahead on the calendar six months and made note of it. Almost to the day six months later, my father entered the hospital – fighting for his life.

When Dad returned home from the hospital – yep, he walked with a limp.

Was this odd dream a prophecy fulfilled?

From A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own, Chapter 8 – Prophecy

“Death has climbed in through our windows.”

jeremiah 9:21

Incest carries with it a death sentence. It’s design is to destroy. We are in a real battle of life and death. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I win that battle because He already fought and won it for me. And I believe, “that he understands and knows me . . . that he exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth. . .” Jeremiah 9:24.

Let him do the fighting for you. Let go and let God.

Father, today I come to you with the courage to ask you to protect those innocent victims that are being abused by the hands of the enemy. Stop that antagonistic spirit from harming the innocent. Find the brokenhearted and speak words of kindness to them. Call out to them that their warfare has ended and they will receive good things for your hands. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

The Hunger for God

No one tells you healing is lonely.
They say it’s brave, beautiful, even empowering.
What they don’t say is that it feels like exile.

You outgrow dysfunction, and suddenly you’re not invited anymore.
You stop gossiping, and conversations get quiet.
You set a boundary, and people call you difficult.
You say no, and the world gets smaller.
You start telling the truth, and you lose the ones who built their identity on lies.

Healing is holy work. But it’s work done in the wilderness.

So what do you do when you’ve been stripped of false comfort, but haven’t yet reached peace?

You start walking toward God—not the version people sold you, but the real one:
The God who met Hagar in the desert.
The God who strengthened Elijah when he wanted to die.
The God who wrestled with Jacob through the night.
The God who bled, alone, in Gethsemane.

You stop performing. You stop negotiating. You get quiet.
And in the ache, the weeping, the boredom, the rage—you pray.

That’s how you get closer.
Not by faking peace you don’t have.
Not by earning love that’s already yours.

You get closer to God by letting the loneliness crack you open instead of harden you.

By trusting that the silence is not abandonment, but invitation.

And by remembering that healing may feel like isolation, but it’s actually consecration.

You’re not being punished.
You’re being set apart.

B

A Prisoner y by No Crime of My Own ~ The Deception in Incest

After your abuse, how were you lied to?

If you think your story is too hard to tell, read mine.

The Ones Who Carry Light

There was a time when the dark swallowed me whole. A time when I moved through the world like a ghost wearing my own skin, my voice no louder than a breath lost in the wind. But the thing about darkness is—if you wait long enough, if you claw and crawl and refuse to be buried—it cracks. And when it does, light spills through.

I have seen that light in my child’s laughter, in the way small hands reach for mine without hesitation, without fear. I have seen it in the faces of the ones who have survived, the ones who have taken their pain and built something holy from it—love, protection, an unshakable knowing.

We are the ones who carry light. Not because we have never been in the dark, but because we have learned how to make fire from it. We burn with a love that cannot be put out. We do not whisper our warnings; we speak them loud enough to shake the earth.

To those who are still afraid, still searching for the sun—you will find it. You were never meant to live in the dark. You are meant to rise, to be warm, to be golden.

And when you do, when the light finds you, when your voice is steady again—pass it on.

B

Grace in the Ashes

When one’s family of origin is a nest of suffering, it is as if life begins in exile, cast out from the warmth that should cradle the soul. The walls are soaked with weeping; the air hums with the static of unspoken anguish. A child born into such a place grows not like a tender shoot but like a wild thing clawing through brambles, desperate for light. In a home devoid of love, they become a wanderer before they even learn to walk, searching for a place where their spirit might take root.

And then—if they are fortunate, if grace intervenes—God appears. Perhaps not as a booming voice or an angelic vision, but as a whisper in the quiet, a hand extended in the dark. God is not the God of their parents, who perhaps used His name to wound or abandoned it altogether. This is the God of the lost and the weary, a God who enters the ruins and begins to build. They find Him not in dogma but in the silence between sobs, the unyielding persistence of their heartbeat. He does not erase the suffering but promises that it can be transformed.

With God as their companion, they learn that devotion is not a duty but a lifeline. He becomes the architect of their new context, a guide through the wilderness. Through Him, they begin to see themselves not as a product of pain but as a child of divine intention. Slowly, they stitch together a life—a patchwork of prayers, acts of kindness, and moments of wonder. Faith becomes their scaffold, holding them steady as they rebuild.

This new life, shaped by both survival and grace, is not perfect, but it is sacred. With God’s help, they learn to forgive the unforgivable, to trust in the unseen, to love despite the absence of a model. They carry their wounds, but now they glow with redemption. And as they walk forward, they are no longer merely surviving—they are creating, offering their hard-won devotion to a world in need of the same grace that saved them.

B

Shame

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Defined as:

noun

a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior: “she was hot with shame“

verb

(of a person, action, or situation) make (someone) feel ashamed: “I tried to shame him into giving some away”

Victims of incest or childhood sexual crimes live under the scrutiny of shame. The question is: Where was this first imposed on the child?

When you are two or three years old, how can you consciously do wrong? Isn’t the truth that we are taught wrong?

What four year old walked up to his grandpa with sexual advances?

NONE!

The shame ladled into the lives of these abused children is sickening. This is not their shame to carry. It is the shame of the abuser.

Abusers inflict shame onto the lives of their victims!

A child must be taught that the vile acts of sexual predators are not something they own. The child did not do it — the abuser did! It is a distinction to make time and time again.

A victim feels the humiliation and mortification of the crimes of the abuser. They most often meld themselves together with the abuser in a state of complicity, owning the illegal activity. But, those crimes are not the crimes of the child.

Period!

F N’ F (Fear Not Friday)

On the discussion of fear — Do you fear failure?

I certainly do.

When I was a kid I didn’t dream much — at all. I didn’t have time to dream. I merely survived. Today, I actually live, makes mistakes, and dream. Dreaming of what might be brings a risk that I might fail. If I stay put and don’t try anything new, I most likely won’t fail. I’ll be stagnate but maybe that’s better than failing?

Is it really better?

What is failing really? Doesn’t it mean that I first had to try? If I tried, is it really a failure?

Failure is the lack of success or the omission of an expected action. Maybe that’s not so bad. Failing certainly means I did try.

Do you fear failing?

If at first you don’t succeed, try try again!