Can I bury my head in the sand?

Wow my world was rocked today and I am still reeling from a seeming less innocent conversation.  Early this week I was contacted by an attorney from Kansas City about an old case I had worked.  After a week of phone tag we finally connected during my lunch hour today.  He asked me questions and I confessed I didn’t remember the case at all.  No big deal, he would send me the report so I could read through it and see if that jogged my memory.  About an hour later the report sat in my email.  I innocently opened it thinking I was the same girl I had been, if only I had realized.  I read the Sexual Assault report and was deeply saddened by the events I read about that I am sure, destroyed this young mans life.  I emailed the attorney and told him I was sorry but I still didn’t remember the case. 

As the minutes ticked on, my stomach got very quesie and my head began to ache.  When I tried to go upstairs my legs felt like rubber weighted down by the entire world.  I sat at my desk and began to cry and suddenly realized where all this emotion had come from.  I was so emotionally shut down when I was a cop that I never felt anything for any of the victims I worked with.  But this time I felt everything.  His shame, his guilt, the agony and despair he must be facing, the fear of reporting it and then having to tell a female cop about it.  Even now 5 hours later I am numb with emotion.  As if 5 years of police work just came crashing down on my physical frame.  And I don’t know what to do with it. 

There are wolves in this world and there are days like today I remember how many.  So why did God bring this back now, and for the case to be a crime I am passionate about.  Am I just to finally process the horrors I saw or is there more to this and His timing.  I don’t know, but right now I ache with sadness for the billions of victims of sex crimes.  The devastation these crimes have on your body, mind and soul are like no other crime that man can commit against another man.  Even murder can no destroy a persons soul so wholly and completely as someone taking advantage of you sexually.  Such a perfect and wonderful thing created by a perfect and loving God, destroyed and mutilated by a sinful man.