Abusers aren’t the ones who leave a marriage. They don’t
leave. They are invested in keeping the subservient person with them, with
maintaining the status quo, with not losing the control they have over the
other person. Not always, but quite often, the person who leaves a marriage is
the person who has been being abused. And the church oftentimes focuses their
reproach on that person – for leaving. And the person clinging to the power and
to the destructive dynamic is treated as holy – as the wronged, longsuffering soul
attempting to protect the sanctity of their marriage.
Untold damage can be done, and has been done, by
people speaking out of turn, by giving rote marriage advice without knowing a
great deal of the things that are actually going on. I can think of few areas
but divorce in which people are so often frowned upon, chided and whispered
about. And the people bearing the brunt of this are often the people who have
been struggling for years within a raging sea of toxicity against their self
esteem. These are often people who have spent years being told or treated as
though they are less than, valueless, worthless. These are often people who
have prayed and prayed and struggled and prayed and finally decided that it
would be worth the risk of everyone looking down on them in the hope of
maintaining a modicum of what’s left of their self-respect, their health, their
life…
I don’t believe that God wants marriage to be a jail,
a dungeon, a place of chains and no choices and no way out. In God’s love for
us, He puts us into no obligations, no binding contracts. He has done
EVERYTHING to maintain our free will, our ability to choose Him and love Him at
will. Nothing about Him is forced, nothing is coerced, there is never no way
out. So why would we think that He wants our marriages (with incredibly flawed,
broken people) to be more constricting than His love for us? Why would we think
that the God who sets the captives free wants someone to be bound within the
most intimate of relationships on earth with another person who, in whatever
fashion, is mutilating their soul, making them feel the exact opposites of all
of the things we are told to believe that God thinks of us?
I absolutely believe in the sanctity of marriage,
and I believe that the ideal would be for two people to marry, to remain
faithful, to love, support, help, and bless each other for the rest of their
lives. But the reality is that there are many sick people in the world, and
they do many sick things to each other. You can never know for certain what
someone is like behind closed doors. I believe that couples should value the
bond of marriage to the utmost, and never take it lightly in any way. I believe
that they should do everything in their power to make those relationships work,
but if one person (or both) in a marriage continually harms the other person, despising
who God made them to be and hindering the things God wants to do in them, they
should not be forced (we should not be forcing
them) to remain in chains. Love always wins. Love is always first.
Oppression is the opposite of love. What happens in many marriages is the
opposite of love. And what we as a church do to these people is much more
judgmental, much more condemning, much less accepting, much less helpful and
much less loving than what Jesus demonstrated.
Everyone ought to make each one of their life
decisions with much care and a great amount of prayer. And in our interactions
with other believers, as long as they are truly seeking God and His will, the
obligation for the rest of us is to zip it and love them. And with nonbelievers
our obligation is the same. You never know the damage of ill-placed words on a
person’s life – or on a whole family of people. You have not walked in their shoes.
NEVER forget that He loves them. He is gracious, and He sees all. There are
many things we don’t understand. People’s life experiences is one, and what God
is doing within individual people is another. We need to stop spending so much
time opining on what other people do. Talking can do all the damage, and love
can do all the healing. Stop talking and love.
