Thin Places

Every two minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted and of the millions of sexual abuse and rape victims, 15 percent are under the age of 12, according to a 2007 study by the U.S. Department of Justice. My friend Mary DeMuth is among the millions of adults who are victims of childhood rape and are living with the emotional scars of the haunting abuse.

DeMuth shares her story in a new memoir, Thin Places. Repeatedly raped by two neighborhood boys, DeMuth details her disturbing childhood. Raised in a broken home, she lost her biological father when she was ten and was stripped of her innocence growing up in a drug-filled environment.

But Thin Places is about hope and healing more than it is about the traumatic events of DeMuth’s childhood. According to DeMuth, thin places are “snatches of time, moments really, when we sense God intersecting our world in tangible, unmistakable ways.” After she encountered the love of Jesus Christ at a Young Life camp, DeMuth’s life changed. God reassembled the pieces of her emotionally fragile self, which initiated true healing and peace.

“Folks may wonder why I’ve spent all this time looking back,” says DeMuth. “This is my way of...telling the stark truth on the page so others can be set free.”

DeMuth’s desire is to see readers set free from their family secrets. In light of that, she’s started a blog for readers to anonymously share their family secrets. Since the blog launched a little over a year ago, more than 200 survivors have emailed their family secrets for DeMuth to anonymously post. For more information, visit: http://blog.myfamilysecrets.org.

Learn more about Mary at http://marydemuth.com.