Everhart - Ruined: a memoir

Advance Praise for Ruined

Riveting.... Forthright, compassionate, and expertly crafted everything readers should want from a memoir.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

Ruined is one of those memoirs that sticks to your heart, helps you understand the power of a story, and gives you a framework to understand God when terrible things happen. Honest and beautifully written, Ruths story will help readers discover the love of God in unexpected ways.

MARY DEMUTH, AUTHOR OF WORTH LIVING

Mostly I wish this book never needed to be written. But it did, it was, and its powerful. With heart-wrenching honesty and a refusal to leave the chaos, Ruth Everhart shows us the raw courage necessary to emerge both wounded and healed. Alternating between fury, hurt, fear, and rage, we journey with her to find God and her way back to life.

NANCY ORTBERG, AUTHOR OF LOOKING FOR GOD AND SEEING IN THE DARK

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Ruined

Copyright 2016 by Ruth Everhart. All rights reserved.

Cover photograph copyright Jekaterina Nikitina/Getty Images. All rights reserved.

Designed by Dean Renninger and Julie Chen

Edited by Stephanie Rische

The author is represented by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary, Inc., PO Box 1316, Manzanita, OR 97130.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New King James Version, copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked ASV are taken from The Holy Bible, American Standard Version.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Everhart, Ruth, author.

Title: Ruined / Ruth Everhart.

Description: Carol Stream, IL : Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045856| ISBN 9781496413925 (hc) | ISBN 9781496413161 (sc)

Subjects: LCSH: Everhart, Ruth. | Christian biography. | Rape victims Religious life. | Rape Religious aspects Christianity.

Classification: LCC BR1725.E925 A3 2016 | DDC 277.3/083092 dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045856

ISBN 978-1-4964-1479-3 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4964-1317-8 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4964-1480-9 (Apple)

Build: 2016-05-31 11:58:59

To Doug, who believes that nothing is wasted a belief that works on a person like love, like water.

To Hannah and Clara, our children, in the hope that these pages enlighten where they came from and with the prayer that their own stories never include such dark and violent passages.

And to all victims of sexual violence.

There are too many of us.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

ISAIAH 43:18-19, NRSV

Publishers Note

Dear Reader:

The story you are about to read is true. The events depicted include violent situations and vulgar language that typically dont appear in books we publish. But after careful consideration, we decided to include some descriptions and dialogue that, though potentially offensive, are accurate, help to capture the intensity of the events in an authentic way, and give a truthful illustration of the human condition.

Some of the names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

PART 1

THE CRIME

November 56, 1978

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

PSALM 23:4

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

LEO TOLSTOY

1

I T HAPPENED ON A S UNDAY NIGHT, even though Id been a good girl and gone to church that morning.

My older sister, Mary Lynn, had picked me up and then dropped me off after the service. She went home with her husband and young son, but I couldnt join them. I had studying to do. I was working on a paper about Buddhism for my World Religions class. The problem was that I couldnt grasp what I was reading. At the center of all things there is a great emptiness? I could hardly conceive of such a thought. Wasnt God at the center of all things? Id been taught for as long as I could remember that God was sovereign that nothing happened outside His will. I had no pocket in my mind that could hold a concept like Buddhism.

I lived in a house off campus with five friends: Marty, Teresa, Cheryl, Karen, and Lisa all of us seniors at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After supper some of us housemates sprawled across the living room, talking. Thirty-seven years later, I cant say with certainty what we talked about. We may have ranged from Spinoza to Descartes, because Marty and Teresa loved philosophy. No doubt Cheryl talked rapturously about Spain, because she was planning to spend her spring semester in Seville. And Im sure I at least mentioned the name Jim casually since I was trying to figure out if he and I were friends or something more. Karen and Lisa had each spent the weekend with their parents, who lived in the area. At some point that Sunday Karen returned, but Lisa called to say she was staying with her folks one more night and would see us on Monday.

We were a talkative, opinionated bunch. We cooked and ate supper together most nights and discussed every subject imaginable. Could radical Christian community actually work? Would the Bob Dylan concert be worth the ticket price? What happened with the recent Camp David Accords anyway? And whose turn was it to buy groceries?

On that particular Sunday night, in our house on Alexander Street, we must have talked about groceries, because our cupboards were bare, and that mattered. The intruders were hungry. But Im getting ahead of myself.

It was early November. I was the youngest of the group, not quite twenty-one. Graduation was still safely distant, some six months in the future. My main goal was to leave every door open. Everything seemed possible.

My bedroom, which originally had been a sunporch, was just off the dining room. Between my bedroom and the dining room were double French doors with window glass the kind of doors you could throw open in a dramatic way if you were in the mood for that sort of thing. The room was small, but that was part of its charm. It was big enough to hold everything I needed and nothing more: hooks where I hung my second pair of jeans and a few tops, a desk where I stacked my textbooks, and a single bed with four posts, covered by a flowered yellow comforter.