Free Woman Thou Art Loosed! 20th Anniversary Expanded Edition by T. D. Jakes Page A

would have been had it not happened.
    Have you ever had anything happen to you that changed you forever? Somehow, you were like a palm tree and you survived. Yet you knew you would never be the same. Perhaps you have spent every day since then bowed over. You could in no wise lift up yourself. You shout. You sing. You skip. But when no one is looking, when the crowd is gone and the lights are out, you are still that trembling, crying, bleeding mass of pain that is abused, bowed, bent backward and crippled.
    H ave you ever had anything happen to you that changed you forever?
    Maybe you are in the Church, but you are in trouble. People move all around you, and you laugh, even entertain them. You are fun to be around. But they don’t know. You can’t seem to talk about what happened in your life.
    The Bible says Tamar was in trouble. The worst part about it is, after Amnon had abused her, he didn’t even want her. He had messed up her life and spoiled what she was proud of. He assassinated her future and damaged her prospects. He destroyed her integrity and self-esteem. He had changed her countenance forever. Afterward, he did not even want her. Tamar said, “What you’re doing to me now is worse than what you did to me at first” (2 Sam. 13:16). She said, “
Raping me was horrible, but not wanting me is worse
.” When women feel unwanted, it destroys their sense of esteem and value.
    Some of you have gone through divorces, tragedies and adulterous relationships, and you’ve been left feeling unwanted. You can’t shout over that sort of thing. You can’t leap over that kind of wall. It injures something about you that changes how you relate to everyone else for the rest of your life. Amnon didn’t even want Tamar afterward. She pleaded with him, “Don’t throw me away.” She was fighting for the last strands of her femininity. Amnon called a servant and said, “Throw her out.” The Bible says he hated her with a greater intensity than that with which he had loved her before (2 Sam. 13:15).
    God knows that the Amnon in your life really does not love you. He’s out to abuse you. The servant picked Tamar up, opened the door and threw that victimized woman out. She lay on the ground outside the door with nowhere to go. Amnon told the servant, “Lock the door.”
    What do you do when you are trapped in a transitory state, neither in nor out? You’re left lying at the door, torn up and disturbed, trembling and intimidated. The Bible says she cried. What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Filled with regrets, pains, nightmare experiences, seemingly unable to find relief…unable to rise above it, she stayed on the ground. She cried.
    She had a coat, a cape of many colors. It was a sign of her virginity and of her future. She was going to give it to her husband one day. She sat there and ripped it up. She was saying, “I have no future. It wasn’t just that he took my body. He took my future. He took my esteem and value away.”
    Many of you have been physically or emotionally raped and robbed. You survived, but you left a substantial degree of self-esteem in Amnon’s bed. Have you lost the road map that directs you back to where you were before?
    There’s a call out in the Spirit for hurting women. The Lord says, “I want you.” No matter how many men like Amnon have told you, “I don’t want you,” God says, “I want you. I’ve seen you bent over. I’ve seen the aftereffects of what happened to you. I’ve seen you at your worst moment. I still want you.” God has not changed His mind. God loves with an everlasting love.
    N o matter how many men have told you, “I don’t want you,” God says, “I want you.
    When Jesus encountered the infirm woman of Luke 13, He called out to her. There may have been many fine women present that day, but the Lord didn’t call them forward. He reached around all of them and found that crippled woman in the back. He called forth the wounded, hurting woman