Six months ago, I had a friend who was in prostitution. She got beat up by her pimp really bad in a hotel room one night. He beat her to the point where she has kidney problems and PTSD. I was out here and I tried to take her off the street and help her out. Well, you know how when you have PTSD your mind sees different things. I was giving her four or five 400mg ibuprofen to sleep every night, so she wouldn’t fight in her sleep, which she did on a nightly basis. There was one time we had a fight. I knew it was coming and we broke up. There was this guy and I told him “Don’t take advantage of her. It isn’t right.” You know, she has mental problems. So he laughs in my face and he takes advantage of her. Six days later she tried to jump off a bridge. So I made a bargain with God. I said “God, listen. I don’t know where she is and I don’t know if she is o.k. but if you save her life and don’t let her jump off a bridge, I will marry her. Regardless of how I feel and regardless that I can’t trust her, I will marry her if you save her because she means that much to me.” So, she’s alive. And my question is, what does that mean for me? I haven’t told her about the promise I made. She is trying to practice forgiveness and I’m not ready to forgive this guy yet. Every time I see that guy, I think about throwing him in that water right there (pointing to a deep river.) It would have been different had he not known what he did. But when he laughed in my face and said he was going to do it anyway, that’s when it became personal. Everyone says that God will handle it in his own way. I believe in God but what am I supposed to do with the hate that I have for the guy? If I kill him, I’m breaking one of the Ten Commandments, I’m breaking one of my deals with God. But if I let him live, it’s a constant reminder that I had to bargain with God because of something that he wanted to do. So it’s a Catch-22. How do you believe but not be able to practice it? He left her on a bridge to die after he got what he wanted. How do you forgive that? How do you have compassion for that? I can’t not believe in God but I also can’t give forgiveness for that. And I can’t say that I support her and continue to watch him rub it in my face. What happens when your religion and reality hit up against each other like that?

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