TESTIMONY
Wendy Blight: Trusting God After Rape
By Amy Reid
The 700 Club
CBN.com
– It was June 7, 1986. Wendy Blight had just graduated from college. That afternoon, after relaxing by the pool at her apartment complex with friends, she went upstairs to change.
“As I got to the top of the stairs, I looked up and there was a masked man with leather gloves and a very large knife,” Wendy tells The 700 Club.
The man forced her to lock the doors and close the blinds. Then he dragged her to her bedroom.
“I was begging him to leave and that seemed to make him more and more angry, so I obeyed what he said. Then he spent that next part of the afternoon just sexually assaulting me, raping me. When he was finished, he said, ‘If you tell anybody that I’ve been here and what I’ve done to you, I will come back and do worse to you.’”
Wendy ran to her fiancé’s apartment, and they called the police. Evidence was collected and reports were filed, but for Wendy the nightmare was only beginning.
“I wouldn’t sleep at night, and if I ever did become so exhausted that I slept, I woke up sometimes screaming, because I had that vision of him standing over me with that knife. I would never want to walk up a set of stairs, walk into an empty room, an empty building. Fear just controlled my entire life.”
Wendy struggled to piece her life back together. She married, started law school and a family. On the outside, everything looked great. Underneath, Wendy was angry at God and looking for answers.
“I remember many times yelling out saying, ‘I hate you, God. You aren’t the God that I grew up knowing about. I don’t understand how You could sit on Your throne in heaven and look down and watch a little child of Yours have what was done to her done to her.’ I got to a really dark place with God.”
Wendy talked to her grandmother about her struggles. “She said, 'Wendy, you’re not going to heal from what happened to you until you forgive this person that attacked you.’ For years those words just sort of tumbled around in my heart and in my brain about forgiveness.”
Then, Wendy learned about the use of DNA as evidence. She went to the police, but they told her the evidence from her case was missing and couldn’t be tested. With all hope of prosecuting her rapist gone, Wendy made a decision.
“I took the Scriptures and I remember saying, ‘I forgive you, whoever you are, I forgive you.’ I named all the things that he took from me: my security and my dignity and my worth and my value. As I poured all of those things out, it was like I was being washed. I can’t explain it, but it was so freeing. When it was all over, I just felt this burden had been lifted from me.”
While the bitterness faded away, fear kept a strong grip on Wendy. It affected everyone around her, including her husband and his career.
“Things would be asked of him that he wouldn’t do because of me. Him saying no probably made a difference in the eyes of bosses, but he never made me feel bad. He never made me feel bad. He always put me first.”
Fear overwhelmed Wendy, even after she finished law school and took a job at a prestigious firm. “I would get on an elevator, and I would always make sure I got on with women. If any of those women got off to where I’d be alone with a man, I would get off. For some reason, I reached this melting point where I thought I can’t do this anymore.”
Wendy decided to talk to her pastor, who pointed her to the story of the man on the mat in the book of John.
“In this story, Jesus says to this man who’s been lame and lying on a mat, ‘Do you want to get well?’ Jesus heals the man and the words that He uses in the end are: get up off your mat and walk. The pastor looked in my eyes and he said, ‘Wendy, do you want to get well? I don’t think you do. I think you are comfortable on this place of pity on this mat. God has an abundant life and an amazing plan for your life, and until you get up off this mat, you will never know.'”
Wendy began studying the Bible, where she learned that fear was a stronghold on her life. “For the first time ever, my prayer changed. Instead of praying, ‘God, take away my fear.’ It became, ‘God, help me overcome my fear.’ Now I realized God had empowered me with His Word to begin to read it, pray it, memorize it, and speak it.”
The next time her husband was out of town, Wendy carefully checked the house, lay down, and began to pray.
“I just had this impression from God that was telling me to turn the television off. I remember thinking, ‘I am not turning the television off, because I will hear every sound in the house.’ But it was very strong. Finally, I obeyed. Instead of feeling fear, this amazing sense of peace rested on me. It was a calm and a peace that I had not felt in over a decade. I remember falling down next to my bed, and I felt this wall of angels around my home.”
Wendy says that night, God freed her from her fear. Today, Wendy is a confident wife, mother and Bible teacher. She wants others to experience the healing she found in God’s Word.
“Being a believer and sitting in a hard place with God, where you are angry and resentful and you cannot see how any good can come from what God has allowed in your life is a tough place to be. But you have to be in His Word to receive the truths that He wants to teach you. What happened to me, it will always be there, but God has taken it and He has used it in a way that has made me a better, different, stronger, more useful person for His kingdom. He is our hope. He is the anchor. He is the one that will carry us through. ‘He will work all things together for good for those that love Him and are called according to His purpose.’”
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