Ruth Everhart > Quotes

“Once you survive trauma, outrage is the warning bell that sounds when you hear truth being distorted by those who haven’t passed through shadowed valleys. Because you have endured trauma, you can detect their lies. Maybe it’s like having survived the measles or the flu. Your body now has some small measure of immunity and recognizes that same poison when it tries to invade again. I wish you would never have to know trauma. But when trauma does appear in your path, don’t fear it. There are things you can’t fight. Still, by God’s power, you will prevail. Our God brings life out of death. Sometimes there is no option except to let the waves of trauma engulf you for a time. Just trust that they will recede again. What’s left in you will rise up afterward, and that will be enough. More than enough! There’s more to you than you know. There is more to God than you know. Trust that the trauma will leave gifts in its wake—hard gifts like outrage and perspective. Maybe this is what faith is: this trusting that God will bring something new and beautiful out of the pain.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“...outrage is one of the gifts a person receives after enduring trauma.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“You are more than your virginity. You are more than your sexual history. You are more than what happens to you. You are immensely valuable. No wound can ever make you less than whole. Wounds become scars, and scars make a person beautiful.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“I knew, piercingly and beyond a doubt, that my mother had always loved me, just as I already loved my yet unnamed daughter. Imperfectly, but fiercely.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“...trauma happens to everyone, sooner or later, to some degree.

Once you survive trauma, outrage is the warning bell that sounds when you hear truth being distorted by those who haven't passed through shadowed valleys.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“Whether our will conforms to the will of God is an important factor in the shape of our lives.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“Her belief God had intentionally spared her obviously gave her some comfort. Who knows? Perhaps in her shoes, I would have felt the same. But Cheryl seemed unaware of the back side of her belief. What did it mean for the rest of us, who had not been spared?”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“...we are all more than what happens to us. We are all more than our worst decisions.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“This is the simplest indicator of rape culture—that, given the opportunity, it is considered normal for men to rape women.”
― Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church's Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct

“More precisely, what David did with Bathsheba is an abuse of his power. David exploited the enormous power differential that existed between men and women in general, and between himself and any vassal, in order to have sex with a particular woman. The word for that crime is RAPE.”
― Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church's Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct

“In other words, sexism is a “logical” system springing from the belief that males should be dominant, whereas misogyny is the heat and emotion that powers this thinking, and creates backlash when it is opposed. Manne summarizes: “Sexism is scientific; misogyny is moralistic.”
― Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church's Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct

“God always works for growth. Growth is often unpleasant, even painful. Yet anything that happens can produce growth if the Spirit of God is welcomed and allowed to operate. At the same time, anything that happens can produce bitterness and decay if the Spirit of God is perceived as being absent. Our orientation to the Spirit of God determins whether we grow or decay.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“I needed a man who wasn't afraid of some dirt.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“Rape culture mandates that women and men have very different sexual responsibilities. The assumption is that it’s normal for men to rape women, which means that victims are to blame. By her action (or inaction) a woman creates an opening that allows a man to do what’s perfectly natural for him to do—assault her.”
― Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church's Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct

“I liked the word ruined, a perfect descriptor of my life. To my ears it had a ring of truth. My name is Ruth, and I am ruined.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“The remedy to being lukewarm is to add some heat: reproof and discipline.”
― Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church's Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct

“I learned that when church courts are modeled on civil courts, they treat offenses as violations of rules rather than betrayal of relationships.”
― Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church's Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct

“This crime was not personal, nor was it entirely random. Instead, this crime was one violent act in the long history of violent acts that men heap upon women. This is how the world works. This is how men treat women. Our blinders had been torn away, and we had been enlightened. We took a strange comfort in this perspective. We had joined a club we never wanted to join, a club that women from around the world joined against their will. At least we were in it together.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“Let me be clear about another thing: I am not a liberal feminist. I am a radical feminist. Which is to say, it’s not enough that individual women can thrive in a patriarchal culture. As long as women as a group are treated as less than men, it doesn’t matter that individual women can experience success. Inequality is not what God intends for human society.”
― Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church's Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct

“Years passed before I understood why people do it - why they blame the victims. It's a simple defense mechanism. Random violence is hard on the psyche. It's bad enough when terrible things happen. But when terrible things happen randomly, it's quite threatening. What's to keep that random bad thing from happening to me? So the brain looks for a reason. An explanation - any explanation at all - proves that the terrible thing wasn't random after all. If it was a deserved consequence, then there's a wall between me and the victim, because I will never deserve that same consequence. I am still safe in my world, my little walled world.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“God will fulfillHis purposes in ways we don't understand. So yes, whatever God gives us on earth is a blessing. Even if it's not what we want.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“Let’s hope that churches lose the right things: an addiction to cultural power and authority, a self-righteous clamp on the idol of sexual purity, an attachment to secrecy and silence as effective means of control.”
― Ruth Everhart, The #MeToo Reckoning: Facing the Church's Complicity in Sexual Abuse and Misconduct

“How could I bear it if something or someone ever hurt this child? I was suddenly cognizant that there were innumerable ways that my world could be shattered now - ways I'd never imagined. I could count the number of minutes my daughter had been alive, and already I glimpsed that love holds in itself the seeds of great suffering.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“So I said, “I’ve kept that page all these years because the article is about my life, in a way. A long time ago I was the victim of a crime.” “Rapist-robber? Oh, Mom”—your face twisted up—“you mean you weren’t a virgin when you married Dad! Poor you!” It was a shock to realize that your understanding of sexual violence was being filtered through the language of sexual purity. I felt that I had failed you. The church had failed you. Women are not merely virgins or victims. There’s more to living in a woman’s skin than staying a virgin. So you and I had more conversations after that.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined