When Your Gifts Fail

Most (relatively healthy) abuse survivors I know come fully equipped with a highly developed sense of discernment.

While others kick back and relax at the lighthearted Christmas party, the survivor remains hypervigilant, scouring the room like a heat seeking missile for any hint of deviant relational dynamics. Within a few minutes, we’ve already identified which men are high risk for cheating on their wives, which women are putting on a happy face to hide their misery, and which attendees are just there for the alcohol.

When you’ve been hurt badly enough or often enough, you learn to smell the danger coming and to avoid it at all costs. Hypervigilance is the price you pay for a sense of safety. There’s very little relaxation that happens in this space—only white-knuckled incessant analysis that makes you leery of (and a bit unwelcoming to) others.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when my husband told me that our mostly feral cat reminded him of me in her refusal to relax long enough to receive affection. We’ve had her for over five years, and she still won’t let anyone close. That’s not a good way for a human to be long-term. It will ultimately tax your adrenal system beyond its intended limits, and it will wreak havoc on your ability to enjoy and be enjoyed by others. It generally indicates there’s still more work to be done in the exploration of your own trauma history.

While hypervigilance is both physically and emotionally costly, the discernment portion of it is often helpful and a balm to those of us who’ve had to work really hard to regain the ability to trust our own instincts again after abuse. I’ve often marveled at discernment’s intersection between trauma wound and spiritual gift. It seems to me that high percentages of the people in possession of said gift had to suffer a heck of a lot in order to hone it. But as useful as it is, it can be pretty devastating when it fails us.

I didn’t blog too terribly much about this past election because I wasn’t confident enough to assert my opinions regarding it as things I really felt like God wanted me to share with the wide world. The whole experience was fraught for me. I knew I couldn’t, in good conscience, vote for the party of child sterilization and infanticide. But I also couldn’t shake this gnawing conviction that many Republicans were placing false confidence in a deeply flawed and morally bankrupt leader and taking it to idolatrous extremes while embracing hideous moral compromises that, long term, would make the party almost indistinguishable from the left. I had voted for Trump twice already, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it a third time. There’s something too terribly painful about expecting women who’ve experienced sexual violation to happily sign our names to a guy with this particular track record with women. And now that the GOP had officially dropped its longstanding commitment to the defense of the unborn to accommodate him, it was just a bridge too far for me.

Don’t hear me condemning your conscientious vote one way or the other. You answer to your conscience, not to mine, and I know a great many ethical people who reached different conclusions about this than I did, and I bless them in their obedience to what they believed was right.

But me? I wrestled. And I prayed. And I never really heard a thundering voice from heaven shouting, “This is the way; walk in it” or “This is the candidate. Write him/her onto your ballot.” So I did the best I could and wrote in the name of a person whose ministry I admired. I appreciated his bold defense of Israel. I appreciated his willingness to address the rot in his own camp and his oh-so-necessary rebuke of the prophetic movement’s disastrous Trump prophecies/fallacies during the 2020 election. I appreciated his bold rejection of cessationism. I appreciated his clear-eyed responses and his defense of victims in the context of church abuse. I’ve long been leery of any public church leader, but this man had captured enough of my trust for me to linger a little longer in the presence of his body of work and conclude, “Hey. There may be righteousness behind this door.”

So I wrote his name into the slot for presidential nominee on my ballot this year. Some may say it was a wasted vote, and I’m not really interested in entertaining that debate right now. I don’t think obedience is ever wasted, and I’m grateful to serve a God who weighs the heart.

But this last week, I was pretty devastated to see a report come out naming this man’s history of unrepentant and hidden sexual abuse of a young woman under his care. What immediately struck me about my own response to this news, though, was not simply how betrayed I felt, but how deeply ashamed.

How could I, of all people, with my laser beam precision on abuse dynamics, have been this badly hoodwinked? How could I have missed the signs? How could I have been so foolish as to trust? How did I get it so badly wrong?

I felt like an English teacher who’d gotten caught using the wrong version of the word “too.”

This was supposed to be my area of expertise. I had publicly signed my name to endorse this man’s ministry. Now how could anyone possibly trust anything else I had to say? The self-loathing was immediate and intense.

And it’s not the only time I’ve felt this way in recent history. I felt this way when it was revealed that a pastor I had publicly praised for his courage and leadership in women’s defense against the gender cult had secretly been cheating on his wife for decades.

I felt this way when a family policy leader baited me with romantic overtures only to turn out to be a misogynistic sexual pervert and an actual swinger behind closed doors.

In each of these cases, my spiritual gift of discernment was no match for the woman-hating narcissism pitted against it. And as I cried out to God for some revelation or clarity as to why this was such a problem for me, I heard, not a thundering from heaven, but a still small voice of conviction ringing in my ear: “Kaeley,” it warned me, “You’ve been relying on the gift when you need to be relying on the Giver. You are not your own Savior or protector. You are not the solution to the world’s problems. I am.”

I immediately pictured little David out in the field with his slingshot expecting the small stone to slay the giant without God’s assistance, and the scenario was laughable. It wasn’t the stone that did the trick; it was the power behind it.

I didn’t revert to self-reliance intentionally. I still wanted to be walking in step with the Spirit. I just wasn’t being as intentional about it as I should have been. Defaulting to old habits and patterns comes naturally for a lot of us. We have to be actively asking God to show us how to use our gifts and why He gave them to us.

He didn’t give me discernment so I could build a self-protective cocoon in which I could hibernate and safely sequester myself from the idiots of the world. But that’s exactly how I had been using it. I might as well have said, “Thanks, God, for this tool. I’ve got it now. I’ll let you know if I need your assistance.” That’s never how our gifts are intended to be used. He wants to be an active part of the process, not an afterthought. He will settle for nothing less.

God gave me discernment so I could use it to help protect other people from suffering spiritual, emotional, and physical harm and so that I can use my light to illuminate the straight and narrow for others. I can only do that successfully if I’m constantly plugging back into His power source and centering Jesus in the work. My attempts to take my gifts and run rogue will only ever end in disaster and disillusionment.

I don’t know how this works in the context of other spiritual gifts as I do not possess them, but I have to imagine it’s similar. I remind my kids all the time that whatever God gave them is to be used for His glory, not their own. If my daughter writes a beautiful song, it’s meant to be an offering of praise, not an invitation for others to praise her. If my son dominates at the trivia bowl, there’s others-centered purpose inherent in that gifting, too. It’s so much easier to see this in the context of other peoples’ gifts.

God’s been recalibrating me this week. It’s not my favorite work to do, but I eagerly anticipate the fruits it will produce.

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