I had always thought the goal of spiritual warfare was to persuade God’s people to do bad things. While Satan certainly is in the business of leading God’s people into sin, Restore was helping me to understand an even more perverse goal of the enemy. He is daily trying to cause me to doubt God’s love for me.

It has been his goal since the beginning. 

I felt the force of these lies during the early months of my pregnancy. I was plagued with fear about potentially losing the baby. Every twinge or ache caused panic to ripple through my body.

Why did God create me? “God made you, because he loves you and wants you to enjoy communion with him.” That one sentence dramatically changed the way I viewed the assault.

Prior to and during Restore, I was obsessed with God’s role in our suffering. If God was good and powerful, why hadn’t He stopped the rape? That question began to haunt me. I felt tempted to believe Satan’s whispering lies. Perhaps God wasn’t good or powerful. 

But everything changed if God created me specifically for loving communion with Him.

“Pain often leaves us feeling misunderstood. Satan has a way of making us feel as if our struggles are unique.

I had experienced this whenever I shared with someone about the assault. I resented their empathy. “What do they know? They don’t know what it’s like.” My heart could be remarkably callous towards others trying to encourage me from a place of understanding. Since the people caring for me often hadn’t experienced abuse, I easily brushed off their sincere encouragement with “they don’t get it.”

“During our first night of Restore, we talked about the redeeming power of our story.

God uses stories—His story and our story—to make Himself known to us. God wasn’t calling me to merely understand my story; He was calling me to understand my story in light of his story. His story of love and restoration gives meaning to even the confusing and dark parts of my own story.”