By Sharon Mager
BCM/D Correspondent
COLUMBIA, Md.–Author Lucinda Mills, a pastor’s wife, tells a brutally, honest, personal story in “Let Yesterday Go, Finding Grace in the Midst of the Storm.” Mills shares openly about her tortuous childhood and youth as her father repeatedly raped her and her sister and purposely caused Mills to miscarry. There eventually is redemption and forgiveness, but it’s not an easy road. It’s a road fraught with severe emotional trauma.
Though the book deals with a tough subject, it’s very readable because of Mills’ profound honesty–she holds nothing back. She freely shares her mixed emotions of hatred and love towards her father, wanting him to die, yet acknowledging him as her daddy. She feels bitterly betrayed by her mother who does nothing to stop the abuse. Mills also has deep resentment towards a God that she feels abandoned her in her time of greatest need.
“I feel like God was a bystander, watching and doing nothing while I was raped,” she writes. “Sometimes I feel like going to church is like thinking about going to the dentist. Church represents the needles and prayer is the drill.”
She shares how these struggles affect her marriage and her relationship with her children and she tells of the long climb out of a deep hole to finally find Christ, be healed and to ultimately minister to other abuse victims.
The book is eye opening, chilling, heartbreaking and compelling and it will stir the compassion, sympathy and possibly empathy of the reader.