Bewitching

     I note that the book of Galatians speaks of two deceptions: 1) that "Christians" could be bewitched to return to the curse of trying to get to God through the Mosaic law, and 2) that Christians could be tricked into denying that a man reaps what he sows. Galatians 3:1-2 admonishes, "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?" Galatians 6:7 warns, "Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." (Both NIV.)

     Common church policies dealing with domestic violence and family abuse are violations of these Scripture warnings. The suffering victims are expected and directed to obey bewitching rules that curse their lives. The abusers are able to mock God - to repeatedly deceive.

     HEADS UP SISTERS! The following is a list of stumbling blocks set up by churches across this land. The consequences are extremely destructive and even deadly. These stumbling blocks start out like a sign of hope: "We will take care of everything". They end up an epitaph: "FED TO THE LIONS". Here is a list exposing the secrets and taking away their power to trip you, bewitch you, or deceive you.

     Let is be said that God is not to blame for unwise church policy or people. Christ is the Head over every power and authority and Christ does not promote cruelty and evil. When we speak against cruelty, we do not blame God. We implore people to stop causing Him to be blasphemed by what we do under His Name.

     1)     MARRIAGE COUNSELING: Abusers very rarely truly change their hearts towards their love of abusing. Do you really want to be married to someone who is always fighting the urge to abuse you, not just hurt you? God ordained marriage as a relationship of loving support and with an abuser this is not possible. It is not possible for abusers to provide their offspring with anything of value relationally. If your children admire the abuser, they will pick up on the warped cruelty or they will be emotionally damaged. Children do not need everyone to love them, but they do need family love, not family perversion. Marriage counseling can only serve to reveal to a counselor or Pastor that abuse is indeed occurring. In so doing, however, any honesty from the victim can put her in danger when she goes home with the abuser. His declarations of learning from his counselor do not necessarily carry over in private.

     2)     MARRIAGE COUNSELING AFTER SEPARATION: Warning! Do not let a church leader speak "kindly" to you of doing everything in his power to help you by fixing your marriage. If you have become separated, you have likely reached a critical point in saving your own life from slow murder. Perhaps your husband has been arrested. Any man, much less a so-called Christian leader, who thinks so highly of himself as to "put you back together" is severely lacking in wisdom. He does not qualify for Christian leadership. A wise man would at least first get to know the victim. He would get to know that she is most likely a person of more spiritual fruit than he has ever needed to achieve himself. He would find that she has already tried all the "respect" tricks, the "love" tricks, the "serve" tricks, the "patience" tricks, and, especially, the "self-control" tricks. If he thinks he could get her to try the "tough love confrontation" tricks, he may be ignorant of the fact that this could put her in great danger. Or maybe he doesn't care. Maybe "his" church is not allowed to suffer the stigma of being anything less than strict about keeping families glued. Maybe he is not aware that the world looks on and sees the deceit behind hidden family abuse; they are not impressed.

     3)     REFUSING COURT SUPERVISION IN FAVOR OF CHURCH SUPERVISION: As Christians, we want to think of the church as it should be - "The entire law is summed up in a single command: 'Love your neighbor AS yourself," (Galatians 5:14). My purpose is to encourage the church-at-large to become that vision towards the abused. Abused women and children need protective and secure loving environments as well as opportunities to be. (Sadly, Church, do you know that we are denied this need?) If you are asked to go to court in order to request your No-contact order be lifted for the church leaders to "help" your marriage, THE PRICE YOU PAY WILL DEVASTATE YOU! You will lose the ability of the courts to protect you from your abuser. No matter how "repentant" he may declare to be, he will prove to be only as deceiving as always. If he truly is repentant, he will offer to stay out of the way so that you can heal. God has demanded that the sowing of abuse requires the reaping of consequences: the removal of the victim until she decides otherwise.
     If you waive the court's pursuit of your case against the abuser, you may be BLACKLISTED by the local court and you may be unable to beg, borrow, or buy their help later on. Believe me, the abuser will appear publicly to co-operate with the church's efforts to "fix" your marriage. Remember, he was not unhappy with the abusive relationship. He is likely addicted to you as his object of abuse and not much more. Gifts and efforts and romance are, to him, bait to keep you hanging on with hope. Most likely, your church counselor is unaware and may be manipulated by the abuser: a master manipulator. Your abuser will quickly get "inside" the buddy system of the men of the church and will use his romantic side to charm the women. Both sexes will find you an embarrassment as you continue to "complain" of his secret harassments towards you. Now, the church will not take you seriously and the court will not either. The church cannot protect you and they will not put themselves on the line to do so. They are not heroes in this opportunity. Even the ones who are "on your side" will declare they must sadly submit to the policy that favors the abuser.

     4)     CONTINUING TO ATTEND THE SAME CHURCH: You will probably believe that your church leaders are "godly" men with "tender" hearts, as they should be. The unfortunate truth is that these men commonly do not feel they need to spend their tenderness or protection on the abused wife. There really is a belief that it is her responsibility to stay married and that if God wants her to be forever tormented by the abuser, that must be God's will for her: maybe she needs it? This will not be said in so many words because those words do not look very Christian: they obviously are not Christian. Pastors may have degrees, but they are often subject to other church leaders. Overwhelmingly, church leaders have knowledge of Scriptures but are not commonly intimately acquainted with the mind of the Scripture in its entirety themes and attitudes.   Jesus' teaches about the NEED to violate the Sacred rituals in order to save the life. He would allow the Holy Spirit to do His work in the hard individual choices.
     So, if you continue to attend your abuser's church, do so with the knowledge that you will not change policies dealing with marriage. You will be more and more the problem and your abuser will become more and more the trophy. Church will become a safe place for your stalker to accost and spy on you and your children. You will be rebuked by little old ladies and large men with testimonies of the "nice" things your husband did for them. You will think you are healing and then will find yourself being called "worthless" once more. You will find yourself the subject of sermons on "forgiveness", as if trying to make a wise choice about safety is "unforgiveness". You will not hear many prayers for the huge percentage of abused wives, but you will hear prayers for "your marriage". You will be excluded from serving as a part of the Body of Christ. You will finally go there grieving rather than worshiping.

     5)     THE GOAL OF RECONCILIATION: Scripture shows us that reconciliation is a good thing IF IT IS A GOOD THING. Scripture also teaches NON-reconciliation, scattering, escape from persecution, even hiding, etc. Wisdom is very much the issue. Is it wise to reconcile or wise to stay away? Simple. Do not feel pressured to believe that the Bible makes a blanket statement about reconciliation magic. Who has bewitched them that teach such dangerous things? Such a belief would take away our ability to warn our children about stranger danger and risky relatives. Actually, such teaching would mean that my child has not properly forgiven her kidnapper/rapist until she has somehow formed a friendly bond with him: it is on her shoulders. RUBBISH!
     The truth is that God is responsible to change hearts and enable safe reconciliation. We just watch for what He is doing. The truth is He is not changing the hearts of abusers except for very rarely. Church leaders tend to be asking women to participate in their agenda for reconciliation even though God is not there. Nearly always when they push reconciliation, the abuser has not changed his heart, even if he is a church-goer or church leader. The women are repeatedly endangered, murdered, and maimed. In fact, the women are not just sent back, but they are repeatedly sent back. Hopefully we will begin to get the message that GOD IS NOT IN IT. God is in refusing to be bewitched and deceived. "Thank you God. You are Good."

    

The Worse Kind of Better

     "Your Dad is so much better!" I told my daughter over the phone. "He is agreeing with the Pastor in our marriage counseling. He is going to church every Sunday and is really excited. He even buys all the sermons and listens to them repeatedly through the weeks." My statements were a blatant lie with disrespect for human life.

     Abused wives and partners hear so much advice for "normal" relationships and we make the mistake of applying it to our own warped non-relationship marriages. One piece of advice of this sort is the admonition to restrict comments about your husband to highlight the good, especially as you speak to your children. When we apply this rule to habitually abusive parents we end up teaching our children to be confused about good and evil. Our collusion teaches (in essence) a warped morality, ie.: that Hitler was okay because he stood against a lot of immorality - a "good deed" buys the right to practice cruelty on family members; that repeating "I'm sorry" can enable you to destroy people repeatedly; that your trauma and the children's trauma is not worth consideration; that crime is not crime when committed by a father; that violent people get what they want and gentle people are worthless punching bags; that lying is allowed to protect criminals so they can repeat the crime.

     What we should have said to our children were the things that free them from their prison. A home that is the most dangerous and hellish place they know is not a home, but a prison. We join the ranks of those who do not seem to care when we ignore the pain and its cause. Too often these children grow up to find that drugs are less hellish than memories, worthlessness of heart, and warped ideas of marriage. My sin was in the declaration, "Your dad is so much better." I should have said what Jesus said: a whitewashed tomb can be painted all clean, but it is full of death. Jesus did not want those full of death to have His approval on their secret agenda. He wanted His people to recognize blind guides of whom the Lord would say at last, "I never knew you." Jesus' aim was not to just "be mean" but to protect us from evil examples by exposing them: "Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them" ( Ephesians 5:11). How strange are religious policies when they promote the protection of darkness as a means of salvation for those trapped in darkness. The abuser needs the darkness exposed in order to have the chance to see. That is truth.

     When I told my grown daughter and my grown son that their dad was "better" I was giving them false hope and binding them to his example, which was frighteningly deceiving and aimed to manipulate. I was taking away their freedom and aiming them for more emotional abuse. It has resulted in emotional abuse of the worst sort and in efforts to destroy their relationship with me. I also said some horrible things about myself and God's children in general by calling him "better". While he was better at public christian acts, he was worse in his private abusiveness. So, I was calling myself and others like me "trash people" because it could be "Christian" to "do church" and then brutalize your wife as a relaxing sport. This was no different than saying Ted Bundy was "better" if he was a glowing church actor even though he could not stop the serial-killing. At the point I told my children that my husband was "better" I knew I was not long for this world and I was glad. I imagined (wrongly) that they needed a parent when I was gone. I did not think about the fact that the Scriptures define "father" in ways that do not include "cruel abuser who really does not feel guilty". My children needed the truth that his heart was empty of real father love and compassion so that they could deal with him from the standpoint of truth. My children needed to turn away from an example of atrocity. Pretending did not help them and it did not help him. "Forgiveness and reconciliation", repeatedly, for decades did not touch his heart. Kindness and mercy and compassion did not touch his heart. Confrontation did not touch his heart - it made him attack more violently. These things did sometimes produce more impressive public mannerisms, but in our bedroom he told me what was really in his heart. My heart may break for such evil in a man, but only God can deal with such a one.

     There are good reasons that Jesus said Christians will often need to leave their birth families and make the real church their new family.

     "For better or worse" from the marriage vows is a phrase often used to manipulate abused wives to stay married and even to remain together with the abuser. This is a gross distortion of the intention of the marriage vows. The vows are promises of faithful relationship, one to another. They are a picture of two people facing the world together, each standing with the other for the benefit of each: "two are better than one..." The "for better or worse" statement is a picture of the two facing circumstances in life, good and not-so-good outer circumstances, with that stronger and supportive loving togetherness. It is not a clause that buys one partner a free pass to turn into the personal destroyer of the other. It is a hopeful attitude that promises someone beside you to support you when you are weak and to rejoice with you when you are well. It does not require one to enable the other to practice evil. It is two facing the better or worse world together, not two facing each other and attacking.

     Back to my conversation with my daughter, there was another wrong thing that was going on revealed there. The wrong thing is that my abusive husband and I were in marriage counseling. My pastor was aware that our marriage was abusive. Marriage counseling is for relationship problems. Domestic violence or even the worse aspect, emotional abuse, are not relationship problems. They are solely the problem of the abuser, who must deal with the issue alone if there is to be any hope for change and real relationship with God. Our marriage counseling served only to teach my abuser the language of "looking better in public". It taught him to speak the lingo of deception even better. For me, that meant it would be less likely that I could get anyone to believe the hell of my home. The marriage counseling revealed to me as well that knowing the right way did not help my husband to gladly follow the right way. He could not do it. He could not stop the abuse. I finally saw clearly that he loved the abuse process and was miserable when he tried to stop. He felt good the day after the "relief" of abuse. A true Christian has a conscience that recoils at brutality and cruelty. Abusers do not recoil. The abuse in my case became increasingly dangerous and murderous in its overtones and actions. Death became close and I began to be concerned about the children left in the home. I knew that saying "good" things about their father was not good. They were suffering through the long nights of horrible noises. My husband threatened to take them from me if I tried to leave. Thank God that God Himself caused my husband to get caught so that I could start leaving with credibility and some little legal trail.

     I started telling my young children the truth. Their hearts gave up trying to please someone who could not truly have love and compassion for them. They realized the good in forgiving with walking away. They became able to feel that they had a right to protection in a loving home. They felt safe to be who they were created to be and personality blossomed at last. They felt safe to process the horror of trauma-healing in a loving home. It still goes on years later, but healing is working. The sad, sad thing in this is the constant pressure from church leaders to manipulate them backward instead of forward. They are pressured to do all the things we tried that did not work for 30 years and that feed the darkness.

     Dear sister, Scripturally you have the right to walk away from persistent evil action: family abuse is most evil. You have the right under God to protect your children. You have the right to love yourself just as you would any child of God. You have the right to recognize nullified covenants so that your life has time for purpose, not futility. You have the right to make a way to live to fulfill the Great Commission, which you can't do under the absolute control of the dominion of darkness. You have the right to tell the truth that evil action is not good action, even though you may feel bad for the actor. You have a right to lead your children to follow good and not evil, to forgive without reconciliation with darkness, and to let God be God. You have a right to the life that God gave you to live for Him. For better or worse, the Lord faces hand in hand with you towards the life-road He gifted to you in love. That's the best kind of real better.