Living Beneath the Wrong Eyes
- 20 hours ago
- 6 min read
A Christian perspective on stalking, people-pleasing, and protecting your God-given dignity
A Gentle Note Before You Read
This article speaks about difficult realities — stalking, cyberstalking, and online harassment. If you’ve experienced this, know your story matters and so does your safety. You are not alone, and there is help and hope and healing available.
What you’ll read here is meant for reflection and encouragement. It is not meant to replace professional, legal, or emergency help. If at any point you feel unsafe or fear someone may be harming you or desire to harm you, please reach out right away for support.
If you are in the United States and in immediate danger, call 911.For confidential help or someone to talk to, you can reach out to:
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or thehotline.org
VictimConnect Resource Center: 1-855-4-VICTIM (1-855-484-2846) or victimconnect.org
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative: cybercivilrights.org
Stalking Resource Center: victimsofcrime.org/stalking-resource-center
If you live outside the U.S., please contact your local emergency number or a trusted organization that supports victims of violence or harassment in your area.
Please read compassionately. God sees you, and He cares deeply about your safety.
I didn't ignore the warning signs because I was naïve.
I ignored them because I thought that being a Christian meant being endlessly available, endlessly forgiving, endlessly accommodating. I learned to call self-sacrifice "godliness," even when it required abandoning the person God had asked me to steward first: myself.
Looking back, I wasn't just slow to recognize stalking.
I was slow to believe that my safety mattered to God.
That I mattered to God.
It didn’t strike me as weird that he knew my work schedule. No red flags went up when she mentioned where TR + I had traveled to in the past month. I dismissed the usernames that never followed me and always watched my stories.
I didn’t know something was wrong until he showed up in my hospital room – I had not told him I was in the hospital, and I definitely did not give him my room number. It wasn’t until she quantified the number of times we’d been to see my family that I realized my online activity was being catalogued. It took multiple messages from multiple people before I began to wonder if this constituted harassment.
He continually ignored my “nos.” She started pretending I didn’t exist, hoping I would die from my latest diagnosis. They felt entitled to my online spaces because they had known my husband since childhood.
And I did nothing.
I didn’t report it; I didn’t pursue a restraining order; I didn’t document it as it happened; I didn’t take screenshots.
The harsh reality of my choices is this: I sacrificed my own safety and dignity, believing there was no other option, fixated with the eyes that scrutinized, abused, and accused me.
I eventually learned what I was experiencing had names. Stalking. That online monitoring was cyberstalking. Harassment. Naming it mattered because unnamed suffering is easy to dismiss – especially when you believe that love means absorbing whatever someone else chooses to do you and accepting their definition of love.
That acceptance caused post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic attacks, and the need to be medicated. I was not safe – not in my room, not on campus, not in my body.
Absorbing it meant I became the lies they told about me, the gossip and rumors they spread about me, the names they called me. I was the villain, the problem, the woman who trashed an entire family.
And leaving it unnamed allowed “Christian family and friends” to send threats into my inbox over and over again, wishing all sorts of unspeakable suffering upon me, bullying me and browbeating me with their warped “Christian love.”
Their surveillance became my normal. Everything I shared publicly (and sometimes privately) was filtered through the lens of, “what is Jane* gonna tell Lori* when she sees this? Is sharing this worth the trouble it’s going to cause us?”
Even my family began thinking this, trying to protect my husband and I from the jealous abuse and vitriol that would certainly come.
My reasons for living under (and for) the eyes of others were long and numerous, ranging in variation from “I want someone to love me” to “They are supposed to love me” to “I can change them” to “I just want to belong.” I think deep down, though, this was easier.
Easier than honoring myself. Easier than self-respect. Easier than making a boundary. Easier than communicating and enforcing the boundary.
It was easier to shrink myself than it was to expect other people to rise up.
I’m a woman who has never been afraid of conflict – just ask the boy I punched in elementary school for bugging my sister! But I’m also the woman who has spent a lifetime being told to be less – less bold, less opinionated, less intimidating.
Sacrificing my safety was less confrontational.
In college, it took a near-miss car crash for me to realize “this is not how God intended for me to live.” When it came to my in-laws, it was a year-long identity crisis culminating in me being unable to name a single good thing about myself.
And I finally realized.
I had spent years arranging my life to appease the eyes of people who despised me. Every decision. Every social media post. Every celebration and every silence was chosen with them in mind. I was no longer living for God.
I was living beneath and for the scrutiny of people who had already decided who I was, and nothing I was doing was going to change how they chose to see me.
It was a choice I no longer had to make.
I started this article long before I was pregnant with Lila Anne. Long before she was born and long before she died.
Before I labored for her, prayed life into her, panicked about her toes, held her. Before I let her go and said goodbye in front of 200+ people.
When I came back to this idea of “safety”, my lens was different.
When it comes to boundaries, it’s no longer about protecting myself, my family, and my children from terrible things and terrible people. Those things are going to happen. It’s just a fact.
Safety is not the absence of suffering. Safety is about not participating in our own dehumanization.
See, God doesn’t call abuse “love.”
As a matter of fact, some of His strongest words in the Bible are to people who are using God to defend their dehumanization of those that don’t do it their way.
Today, safety starts and end with our agreement with God.
We are His portion, His inheritance. That’s how precious we are.
Plus He gives us armor to defend ourselves! We decided that if God is going to hand us a sword and shield, we’re gonna use ‘em.
So we name abuse. And we eject it from our lives, forcefully. We grieve honestly, and we set boundaries. We refuse lies. We accept belovedness. We tell the truth, and we pursue the shelter our Strong Tower offers freely.
God’s Love for me goes hand-in-hand with His desire for my safety, physically and spiritually.
Each experience of stalking, online monitoring, and harassment is different and nuanced. Your willingness to entertain it is also a spectrum, and your context and circumstance will determine your logistical decisions about safety and boundaries.
What isn’t going to change, though, is God’s view of you and your safety.
You are precious. Something to secure and protect and defend. Worthy of safety. A rich and glorious legacy. A priceless gift.
I spent years and multiple situations beneath eyes that measures, criticized, monitored, and condemned. I thought if I was compliant enough, quiet enough, holy enough, they would see me differently. Maybe then they’d choose to love me.
And they never did.
I got so focused on those eyes, though, that I forgot about the other pair.
The ones that saw me completely and still called me “Beloved.” The eyes that never looked at me with disappointment or anger. Eyes that have never once asked me to become less human, less myself, in order to become more like Him. Eyes that refuse to abuse their authority in the name of love.
Following Jesus has never required pretending that evil is merely inconvenient or just hurtful.
Love rejoices with the truth.
Truth names evil for what it is.
And perhaps one of the holiest things some of us will ever do is lift up our own eyes, meet His, and finally agree with God that we are worth protecting—not because we are fearless, not because we are strong, but because we belong to Him.
*Names changed for privacy and security.