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Forgiving Love
Written by By Dave Roever
A baby boomer — that’s me. I’m part of that generation. We were also flower children. I don’t know if that means we were blooming idiots or just a growth on somebody’s shelf. We were and are a generation that changed the destiny of a nation.
I’m in somewhat of a reflective mood as I write, remembering how God has saved me from death, saved me from sin, and saved me from myself. Sometimes I think I’m my own worst enemy. In reality, that’s true of us all.
From the mid ‘70’s through the ‘80’s while my children were growing up, so was their dad. After my injury in Vietnam I had to start all over again. I was trying to find myself. During those years my wife and children endured some of the hardest days a family could know.
Telling you this requires two things of you. One, that you understand that this is not easy. Two, for some of you, there will be comfort in these words and you’ll know that you're not alone in your suffering. Other people have faced some of the fears and anxieties of life that you are facing.
In public I learned to make people laugh, but, in private I could only remember how to cry. I would sit in front of a mirror looking at myself with immense hatred and rejection. I despised my scars and abhorred everything I saw. I would berate myself with immeasurable disdain while my wife would weep and try to hold me. I would push her away saying, “Baby, you can't understand. It’s not me anymore. That thing in the mirror is not me. I want my face back. I want my fingers back. I want my life back.”
There were times that I would load a pistol and hold it to my head and beg God to please kill me before I killed myself. I had been raised to believe that if I killed myself, I would go to hell. I felt that if somehow I could talk God into killing me, I would go to heaven.
I wanted somebody to do something quickly. I just couldn't take it anymore. But somebody was doing something.
Little did I know, my baby girl was standing outside my bedroom door during these episodes. She would hear me reject her mother’s pleas. She heard me curse myself. She would run to her room, crawl up in her bed, and pray, “Jesus, help Daddy not to hurt himself.” What I assumed was behind closed doors, was being laid at the gates of heaven through the prayers of a child.
In 1993 I traveled back to Vietnam, back to the bank of the river where in 1969 my face was ripped from me by a hand grenade explosion, where fingers were left dangling on tendons, where my chest was ripped open and I could see my heart beating. Forty percent of my skin and 60 pounds of flesh were blown off my body. When I returned to the site of my injury, my eyes searched the ground, almost as though I would find my ear. There, maybe by the tree, I could find my thumb; surely in the tall grass, an eyelid. I was trying to close the gap of the vicious circle that my life had been on for 25 years. How could this have happened to me? How did I survive? Just being there brought a healing.
When I returned home from that trip, my now teenaged daughter met me with a song that she had written. The song spoke of a little girl standing by her momma and daddy’s door “hearing things that she could not ignore.” The song went on to say — it was a forgiving love and a forgiving grace, “the kind that held my momma's and daddy’s love firmly fixed in place.”
As she sang to me, I realized that all the things I thought were so cleverly hidden had been exposed to my family.
I’d be a thief if I didn't tell you the reason I don't think of suicide any more or continue to curse and berate myself ─ the reason I have filled so many pulpits, spoken in so many schools and traveled all over the world speaking to the military. It’s not because I'm a good man. It is simply because God answered the prayers of my wife and family. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous “wife” availeth much (James 5:16). I realize that God spared me from certain death in Vietnam and He spared me from self-destruction by the loving support of my family and friends.
I fear that an unfair image has been cast of me as a man who sailed through personal injury and disfigurement without marital stress and without deep scarring of the soul. My spirit was battered and my marriage suffered greatly, but God. God intervened! God gave me tremendous victory! Out of my chaos, peace was restored. Perhaps now, you can understand my passion to reach out to our young, wounded warriors. If God can take this beat-up, burned-up piece of clay and restore me, He can do that in their lives too.
Just for the record, you don’t have to be blown-up in Vietnam or injured in Iraq to be a wounded warrior. Some of you live with great physical pain every day. Some of you have had your very heart ripped from your bosom by the loss of love either through death, divorce or infidelity. Some of you are haunted with memories of the past. Many of you experience such emotional trauma that it would be easier to quit than to go on. Let me remind you that Jesus endured the stripes on his back for your healing and that He was sent to heal your broken heart and bring deliverance to your captive spirit. How do I know that God will help you? He came to me and I am a living example that God intervenes in man’s affairs. Trust Him today. Don’t Give Up!
Dave Roever is a Viet Nam military veteran who was severely wounded and permanently disfigured by an exploding grenade during the Viet Nam war. As president and founder of Roever Evangelistic Association, he speaks in churches, universities, high school assemblies and conferences in the U.S. and abroad. Through the Roever Educational Assistance Program, he has funded medical clinics and benevolent projects throughout Viet Nam. He is a regularly requested by the U.S. military to speak to and encourage wounded soldiers deployed in Iraq and has established the Eagles Summit Ranch as a ministry to “wounded warriors.” M. Wayne Benson, president and CEO of EMERGE Ministries is a member of the REA and REAP boards. |
