One facet of the multidimensional pain carried around by any victim is the humiliating injustice of paying for what was done to you whilst the predator mocks you, repeats the crime, lives in luxurious insobriety, or, worst of all, has forgotten all about you. No matter what, they don’t give a crap that they hurt you and they’re not sorry (They possibly even blame you.). There is a myriad of temptations connected to the victim’s position, including wanting to hold every other person on the planet up on moral trial or making all “bad” people pay for what happened to you.

Christians are not allowed vengeance of any kind. My response to that limitation was to tell God to fuck right off. I want to attack. I want to fight with everyone and submit to nothing. I want to feel powerful. My instinct to not submit probably saved me from insanity or death in childhood, but it was a disaster in adulthood. I felt like a 3-year-old splayed on a bed even when I was 30 and 45 years old so I fought, I punished, I judged and condemned. But I don’t have the authority to do those things. When I gave wrongful privileges to myself, I felt like a filthy pig.

I’m not powerful. I am loved. That condition has to be enough.

No one wants to listen to an adult victim whine about fair and unfair. It helped me a great deal to be living in one of the poorest nations of the world when I recalled what happened to me. In Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, outside the razor wire of the compound where I lived in luxury and safety, I saw starving people digging through our garbage. (My response was to feed everyone who I was connected to, and to overpay, by an enormous amount, those who worked for us. I could not save everyone. I could help 3 or 4.)

Life’s not fair. Thank God I’m not a poor Tanzanian woman with three children who lives in a structure made of cardboard with no access to water or electricity. She doesn’t whine about justice because she has neither the energy nor the time, and she certainly doesn’t blame me for her troubles. All she wants is for her children to be safe and to eat today.

Christianity has taught me about hell and about justice. I needed to know.

Whomever hurt you will die, if they have not already. My mother died long ago. The last words she ever said to me came 6 weeks prior to her death, when I was installing her in a memory care facility after extricating her from a disastrous situation after a lifetime of estrangement. (Someone called me and asked me to step in to save her and I did.) She looked at me with the demonic anger which characterized her face at 72 years old and yelled, “I will hate you until the day I die!” I turned and left her in the facility and flew back to Doha, Qatar where we were living at the time.

A few weeks later, her heart failed and I had to race back. I was sitting beside her when she died. About a minute before her death, I climbed up onto the hospice bed and whispered in her ear, “I know what you did. And I forgive you. Now, listen to me. In a moment you are going to have a choice. You will be heading towards something that will cause you staggering shame. You will want to run from the pain. This time don’t. Don’t try to lie, you can’t. Head into the pain and you might have a chance.” Those were the last words I said to my mother. They wheeled her body out minutes later.

Here’s the thing. My mother died an unrepentant predator. Choice by choice we design eternity. God doesn’t thrust anyone into hell. We do it to ourselves, literally. Hell is what I build when I choose not to acknowledge what I do wrong. We cannot atone for our mistakes; this is a subject that victims need to know a great deal about, and that I will address at length later. But, in short, Christianity asks only one thing, conscious acknowledgement of bad behaviour. Own it, know it, every time you realize you’ve done the wrong thing; that act will be enough to access mercy. Get comfortable with the abjectly humiliating process of being absolutely sickened by what you did wrong, and accepting it. You cannot fix it. You can’t and aren’t asked to atone in Christian life. But you are absolutely required to consciously acknowledge what you’ve done, day in and day out. Sometimes I’m so ashamed of my behaviour that I actually wretch. Then it’s over. (More on this later.)

And what is hell? The quick answer is: the absence of God. Each hell is unique to its human designer, and is the product of the 2 other living creatures who witnessed the crimes against us. God finally says to that person, “Your will be done.” As we speak, my mother, against the will of God, without the benefit of hope, or company, experiences exquisite, eternal consciousness of herself. My mother no longer has choice, delusion, or any kind of numbing agent. She gets to be alone with the truth forever. She has no money, no lies, no slaves, and no secrets. Now she has her own company without a single mitigating factor and without possibility or mercy. This was her choice. Now she knows what she chose not to know and she will never for a moment get to ignore, forget, slither out of, or otherwise escape what is true. We get away with nothing. In that fact there is both warning and comfort. I fear God. My mother did not. That’s justice. I just need to be quite aware of how it applies to both sides of me.