childood abuse

I’m flying home from Toronto today after a wonderful weekend of conversations about how Jesus wants to show up for us, and how we might be more aware as he does. As I’m on the plane today, I want to share something with you.

I am watching a miracle unfold right in front of me. It isn’t a flashy, instantaneous change of circumstance, but the best kind of miracle—the deep, slow work that shifts a lifetime of pain into a gift of freedom.

For most of my friendship with Luis, I’ve watched him fend off night terrors. His youth was shaped by violence and abuse in Michoacán, Mexico, and later by military training with Captain Herrera to resist the drug cartels. If you don’t know Luis’s story, we told it a few years ago in a limited series podcast called My Friend Luis.  It’s an amazing testimony of God intervening in the life of an abused boy growing up in Mexico.

His past still echoes in his mind in the form of frequent night terrors where he dreams of hordes of monster-like creatures coming to kill him. Luis responded in the only way he knew how. He would fight with whatever weapons he could find until the ammunition ran out and he was overwhelmed.

He lost every time, often waking up screaming and lashing out, terrifying his wife and children.

We knew the terrors were expressions of the traumas he suffered, and we prayed that God would take them away. They persisted. We didn’t know it at the time, but he had something better in mind. Five years ago, to Luis’s utter surprise, Jesus began showing up in his night terrrors.

At first, Jesus just stood next to him in the middle of the battle and told him, “Put down your weapons.” Luis couldn’t. His fear was too strong. But Jesus kept coming back, night terror after night terror. “Put them down, Luis,” he would say gently. ” The only weapon you need is love.”

When Luis told me about those dreams, he would shake his head. “Doesn’t that sound stupid. How is love a weapon? That makes no sense.” His whole life had taught him that when danger comes, you fight. If you feel threatened, you overpower the threat before it overwhelms you. Fear quickly becomes aggression because aggression has always helped him survive.

These dreams repeated hundreds of times. Luis never remembered the previous dream while he was in the next one, so he kept going through the same struggle.

A few months later, Luis dreamed that Jesus was on the cross high on a hill while a horde of creatures rushed toward him. Luis raced up the hill, stood between them and Jesus, and began firing. The creatures kept coming.

“I don’t need you to do this,” Jesus said from behind him.

“I’m trying to protect you.”

“And yet, you’ve turned your back on me.”

That stopped him. Luis turned toward Jesus and dropped his weapon. The enemy vanished. He was beginning to learn.

But when new night terrors continued, Luis found himself fighting again. Jesus would come again and again to tell him to put down his weapons. But overwhelmed with fear, he couldn’t do it. He fought to the last bullet and lost again. And again.

Then one night, in the middle of a battle, he noticed Jesus sitting beneath a tree beside a table filled with food. Jesus smiled and waved Luis over. “Come eat with me.”

Luis couldn’t believe it. “We can’t eat now. I have to fight, or I’m going to get killed.”

Jesus kept inviting him until Luis finally went and sat down. As he did, the battle disappeared. Later, he remembered Psalm 23: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”

As Luis shared these dreams with me, I could see something changing, not just in his dreams, but it was shaping his waking life as well. He was learning to trust Jesus even in the places where fear had always taken over.

In another series of dreams, Luis had slaughtered hundreds of werewolf-like creatures when Jesus told him to touch one of the bodies. Luis was disgusted, but eventually he did. Then he noticed that the creatures themselves had been horribly wounded, with barbed wire, wood, and metal embedded in their bodies. As he touched them, they came alive and became like little puppies that wanted to lick him and be held.

That reminded Luis of the night when, at fifteen, he defended his father’s body from coyotes in the mountains. By morning, one wounded coyote lay helpless nearby, and Luis wanted to make it suffer for everything he had endured during the night. Then he looked into the animal’s eyes and saw fear. He could no longer torture it. The coyote had been doing what coyotes do, just as Luis had been doing what a son would do to protect his father.

Even then, underneath all the fear and fight, there was compassion. Jesus seemed to be drawing it out of him.

More recently, the dreams changed again. Luis would arrive on the battlefield without a weapon. In one, he was assigned to be the medic under a commander whom Luis thought was completely incompetent. Luis spotted an assault rifle on the ground and tried to grab it, but it was as if the weapon had been cemented in place.

“You’re the medic,” the commander told him.

“I’m not the medic.”

“Yes, you are.”

Luis was furious. He thought his talents were being wasted. “Who gave these orders?”

Then he heard a familiar voice behind him.

“I did.”

It was Jesus.

Suddenly, he was in the middle of the battle. People fell wounded and dead on both sides. Jesus told Luis, “Go heal my brothers.”

Luis soon understood that Jesus meant everyone—not just those on his side. Reluctantly, he moved across the battlefield, touching the wounded and the dead. They came back to life, and their injuries disappeared.

They were so grateful to Luis and thanked him profusely.

“It wasn’t me,” Luis said, pointing to Jesus. “He did it.”

Then something remarkable happened. The healed people could see Jesus, and they turned to him.

Luis had an idea. Maybe this would end the battle. He rushed to those still fighting. “Stop! Jesus is here. Look at him!”

They turned around to look, but could not see him.

Eventually, Luis realized that, in the dream, those who had been wounded and healed could see Jesus in a way the others could not.

Just a couple of weeks ago, his team was once again preparing to meet the beasts. Then, like a drone, he began to rise into the sky and drifted over the battlefield. As he approached the enemy’s encampment, he could hear them yelling and screaming, psyching themselves up for battle. But those sounds were soon muted as he began to hear the unspoken thoughts of the beasts. Inside, however, they were terrified.

I don’t want to do this.

I don’t want to get hurt.

I don’t want to die.

Then Luis looked at his own army and heard the same thoughts. They were terrified, too. Beneath all the bravado, neither side wanted this.

Jesus pointed toward the enemy and asked, “Now, are these the people you want to kill?”

When Luis told me that part, tears filled his eyes. They were just like him.

That realization has helped Luis identify what happens inside him whenever he feels threatened. His chest expands, his muscles tighten, his jaw drops, and his whole countenance changes.

“Like the Hulk?” I asked.

He laughed. “Exactly like the Hulk.”

That part of Luis has protected him his whole life. It helped him survive childhood abuse and dangerous situations, and it still rises whenever he feels the need to protect his wife, children, or someone vulnerable.

But Luis doesn’t want to live there anymore.

“I tell him to go sit in that chair over there,” he told me. “I don’t want my wife to see him. I don’t want my children to see him.”

So I asked, “What happens if you are threatened and you’ve told that part of yourself to sit down?” We were sitting in my front yard. “Suppose gunmen were coming up the street right now. How would you respond?”

He thought for a moment.

“I don’t know.”

Neither did I.

Then something clicked for both of us. The Hulk wants to destroy the threat, but perhaps love would seek to disarm it instead.

There is a huge difference between destroying your enemy and disarming him. Fear and vengeance seek destruction. Love looks for a way to disarm and transform.

Two weeks later, Luis had another dream. Jesus was sitting with him on a park bench, and the Hulk sat across from them. Jesus asked Luis, “Do you remember when you were hungry and I brought food to you? Do you remember when you were lonely and I comforted you? Do you remember when you were sad and I gave you hope?”

Luis responded with an excited yes for all of them, thinking back even to the days before he knew who was behind these gifts.

And then Jesus turned to the Hulk. “Do you remember when you were terrified and I delivered you from danger? Do you remember when you thought you were going to die, and I gave you an escape? Do you remember when you were so angry you wanted to kill, and I stopped you?” The Hulk answers yes to all of them with a sigh of relief.

Then Jesus stood and embraced Luis. He invited the Hulk into the hug as well, and as the three held each other, the Hulk seemed to merge back into Luis in the presence of Jesus. Luis awakened filled with peace.

I hesitate to make too much of the mechanics of all this, but God is reshaping those deeply worn pathways of fear, threat, aggression, and survival formed in Luis over decades. For most of his life, fear meant danger, and danger meant he had to fight.

These dreams are showing him another way. The angry person may actually be terrified. The monster you fear may be a wounded and lost child of God, needing healing more than vengeance.

The beautiful part is that Luis is already living this out with the young people in his boxing gym. Many come from difficult or abusive homes and can see a road toward gangs, crime, or prison more clearly than they can imagine a meaningful future. Luis understands them because he has lived close to that world himself.

He could simply teach them to fight. Instead, he loves them. He teaches discipline and character, holds them accountable for their schoolwork, listens to their pain, protects them, and helps them see possibilities they cannot yet see for themselves.

He is laying down a warrior’s weapons and picking up a medic bag.

We were praying for the dreams to go away. Instead, Jesus showed up inside them and began to transform Luis through them.

The process is not yet complete, but Luis is sleeping more peacefully these days. The terrors are less frequent. He is discovering another kind of strength—the ability to see through anger and find fear, to heal instead of wound, and to disarm instead of destroy.

Love turned out to be the more powerful weapon after all.

And that leaves me looking at my own challenges differently. Instead of simply asking God to remove the difficult places, perhaps a better prayer is this:

 Jesus, how do you want to show up here, and what do I need to know that will turn the tide?

I pray that for you, too. Jesus never intended for us to live our days thinking of him only as a distant figure watching over us.

He wants to show up in the midst of that which concerns you most. It may take a while for him to settle our hearts enough for us to be aware of how he is present with you, but when you see him, then he can show us how to follow him.

He will show up for you, too, probably in ways you’re not expecting.