Nina Barnes shares with Susie her story of hope, healing and deep faith.
As a child she grew up with very loving parents. Her oldest brother, however, suffered from schizophrenia and would torment and sexually abuse her and her other brother whenever her parents weren’t home. He would even make her do things at gunpoint.
This trauma made Nina believe that there was something wrong with her. She would ask herself what made her a target.
“That’s a voice I still have to put down.”
In one incident when Nina was a freshman in high school she came home to her brother and a bunch of guys chilling around the house but waiting for her.
“I was disoriented at first as to what was going on and then my brother said, ‘Yep they’re here to do whatever they want with you.’ These guys had apparently paid him. ‘And there’s nothing you can do about it.’ And I was in shock.”
Her middle brother rescued her from the situation, but then walked away before she could get over her shock and express her thanks. This too hurt for Nina feared that she had somehow done something to cause what had happened to her.
She was too afraid to tell her parents what was going on because her brother had threatened to kill her family if she spoke up.
Her brother was arrested for the first of many times when she was 16, and the abuse stopped.
When she turned to God for comfort he spoke to her through the book of Job. She realized that she could rage at God about what had happened to her without having to walk away from Him. She felt his presence and comfort.
“It’s this place of being raw and real and realizing that not only could God take it, he wanted me to get it all out so he could clean out the wounds.”
Nina saw that point as the beginning of an incredible, healing relationship with God.
Key Scriptures: Isaiah 43:1-3, Psalm 121
