What Can Be Done?

A friend of mine had a disturbing experience yesterday. I don't know the details, but what she told was that she witnessed some creep of a dad berate, humiliate, and bombard with violent words, his young daughter. She can't get the image of the sadness in the girl's eyes out of her head.

What can a person do when experiencing something like that in public? The man was "agitated", and my friend had her precious little granddaughter with her. Her first priority was to protect her granddaughter, so what could she do for the stranger child? I suspect the dad was much more than just "agitated", so to have stepped forward would have put herself and her granddaughter in danger.

I'm sure my friend would have risked herself, had she been alone. She is that kind of person, not taking guff from others. But that was not how she found herself at that moment in time. Now she can't seem to let go, replaying the experience in her mind, wanting to change what happened.

What can a person do? How do we rectify such an experience?

When I was going through child abuse recovery, sometimes I felt so vulnerable, so exposed, so helpless. I desperately wanted to feel some kind of control in my life. As an abused child, I had virtually no control over my life. I was humiliated, berated, beaten, molested and abandoned almost on a daily basis. As an adult, those experiences haunted me, often subconsciously, and I couldn't seem to be able to stop those experiences from dominating my behavior in the hear-and-now. In recovery I was beginning to find sanity among the chaos, but I still felt so sad that others had, and were in the present, experiencing the hell I had survived.

So I did the only thing I could think of doing... I prayed... Not for me, but for some unknown little girl somewhere. Would Heavenly Father find a girl somewhere, who was in danger of having a horrible, traumatic experience, and protect her? Would he stop, before it started, a night of hell so that, for at least this one moment in time, she could have a peaceful night?

I knew I couldn't stop it all, God has to let man exercise his free will, even at the expense of innocence, in order to pronounce a fair judgment. But I could do my little something in my small way, to make a difference for someone I would never meet.

That prayer always left me with a feeling of peace. I was comforted that my prayer was heard and acted upon. Somewhere, some little girl had a pocket of peace in her life.

I will pray for both my friend, and the little girl, that Heavenly Father will comfort them both. May that little girl, somehow, find a pocket of peace. I will pray for the father too, that he may come to realize what he doing. That he is working to destroy a precious daughter of God and he just can't do that anymore. It has to stop. And if he doesn't stop on his own, then I pray that the authorities will intervene and protect that precious little girl.

Please remember them in your prayers too.