When I was six years old, my brother and I were sexually abused by an uncle. At that time some other boys tried to get us to sexually abuse our sister, but we wouldn’t do it.
Then, when I was ten and my brother was eight or nine, we fell into the practice of incest with one another. But later, when we were old enough to understand better, we realized how serious it was. Do you think that God can forgive us? This sin has brought us a lot of pain and shame.
Dear Friend,
When your uncle abused you, he taught you something that you shouldn’t have learned until you were older. However, after you learned that terrible behavior, it was almost inevitable that you would act out or pretend to repeat it yourself.
Childhood is a time to play, and that play often involves pretending to do what the child thinks he will do when he is older. Most little girls want dolls so that they can practice being mothers. Most little boys want toy cars to practice driving or racing and, sadly, toy soldiers to practice going to war. Playing roles that they may fill in the future is a normal and healthy practice for children.
However, when an innocent child is exposed to sexual activity, either through abuse or through seeing it happen in real life or in movies, that child often begins to act out what he has seen. It isn’t because the child is evil; it is because that is the nature of child development.
It sounds like your uncle was an adolescent when you were first abused. If that was the case, he was likely using you and your brother for pretending to do something that he had seen or something that had happened to him. Of course, it was wrong and it scarred your childhood, but he was possibly not mature enough to understand the consequences himself.
God, who created us, also planned for us to have a decade, more or less, in which we could practice life before becoming eternally responsible for the mistakes we made. During this time, the brain is developing by stages, according to the well-accepted developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Before about age seven, a child is not able to completely distinguish between what is real and what is pretend. From about age seven to eleven, the child can understand those things that he can touch and see, but he will only gradually begin developing the ability to understand things that are abstract, such as the consequences of right and wrong.
Would the God who created you, the One who created the process in which the brain develops, not have understood when you practiced what you had learned? Of course He understood, and therefore doesn’t hold you responsible for what your brain couldn’t understand.
The Apostle John wrote that if we confess our sins, God will forgive those sins.(1) Of course, confession requires true sorrow for what we have done. You have expressed true sorrow for what you did, even though you now know that God didn’t hold you responsible at that stage of brain development. So the answer to your question is yes, I know God has forgiven you for anything that you were held responsible for.
We wish you well,
Linda
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1 1 Jn 1:9