Grooming

Part 1

Recently, a pedophile was featured on the Oprah Winfrey show. He acknowledged that he was a sexual deviant who had molested his two step-daughters, one of whom was mentally handicapped. He decided to appear on the show because he wanted parents to get a handle on the perverse inward workings of the mind of a child molester so that they could be on the lookout for others of his ilk.

He described the process of setting a child up for eventual molestation as a gradual one. He referred to it as ‘grooming’. Child molesters often don’t simply attack their victims outright. Typically, they worm their way into a child’s confidence by being a ‘pal’, a confidante or by showering him/her with gifts. The ‘grooms’ frequently seek children with emotional wounds or who come from a broken family. They’ll begin the molestation by assessing the child’s comfort level with such seemingly harmless activities as patting the child’s shoulder, stroking his/her hair, etc. Later, they’ll advance to engaging in rough-housing or tickling. If the pedophile can sense a child is comfortable with that, s/he’ll begin to touch the targeted victim in more familiar ways. The molester comes to know the child so well, that s/he will back off if the child objects in any way but will then try another tactic (or look for a more compliant victim).

I began to think that this is exactly the way Satan operates in us from birth, if not before. He ‘grooms’ us. He knows the circumstances into which we were born, for example into a single-parent situation, as a result of a rape, into a loving two-parent family, etc. Were we born in poverty or in the lap of luxury? Where did our birth place us in the family dynamic – first? Last? Middle? What were our caregivers like? Did we have siblings and how did they treat us?

Because we were ALL ‘born in sin and shapen in iniquity’, Satan was there from the beginning to deceive, distort and beguile. It is his modus operandi. He knows us intimately from the inside out. His deception is so alluring that ultimately we become convinced that black is white. His fiendish desire is that we never come to the realization that God exists, or if we do manage to become born-again, to make us ineffective as believers. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he whispers, “Yay, hath God said?” He is the father of religion – he convinces us that by our works we ‘can be like God’. He soothes us with comforting scripture. He does not want us to know that there is absolutely nothing in us that can make us acceptable to God because the truth is, by nature of our birthing, we are irreparably corrupted. Only Jesus’ sacrifice, obliterating Satan’s handiwork, can set us free, but of course, the Father of Lies will do anything in his power to keep us from seeing that. He hides the fact that he is in it for his own monstrous gratification – our ultimate destruction.

Mgo