The Religious Leaders gnashed their teeth at Jesus when He healed on the Sabbath. How dare He break their Sabbath Laws? Today they gnash their teeth at Christian women when they flee destructive marriages. How dare they tell the truth about the broken marriage vows they lived with?
We erase mistakes. We delete irrelevant material. We edit out unimportant points.
But have you ever been erased by someone?
There was once a Christian woman who got married. Shortly after her wedding day, she was attacked by her husband. He took her dignity and reputation, shamed her, blamed her, treated her like his property, and left her half-dead, alone in her home.
The whole “God Hates Divorce” mantra is just that, a modern day catch phrase often used to keep women stuck in destructive marriages.
If you are tangled up in a confusing relationship, one effective strategy to gain a solid footing (and eventually a voice) is to write things down. It doesn’t matter if you are a good writer or not. Your purpose isn’t to win a Pulitzer prize. Here are three important things you can record on paper (or on your computer) that will be tremendously helpful to you over time.
Can you have a healthy relationship where there is lying, covering up, pretending, overlooking, and ignoring? Does that foster intimacy? Of course not. Healthy relationships are grown in the soil of vulnerability and safety. When two people are open and honest, they can get close and experience authentic acceptance and love. Anything less is dysfunctional in some way.
A repentant person will not make excuses, blame you or something else, rationalize their behavior, or justify what they did. If a person is doing any of those things, they are not repentant. Period.
We want to believe we live in an advanced civilization—one that has risen above the base prejudice of our unenlightened ancestors. Human beings have a bent to marginalize other people. We want to be the best Sneetches on the beaches, after all.
There is one key component of every single emotionally destructive relationship. If this one thing is present in your relationship, you are being emotionally abused. Period.
I’ve been posting links to articles about the whole Saeed-Naghmeh thing over on my Facebook page. For the most part, the comments have been sympathetic toward Naghmeh, but there are some comments that I feel a strong urge to talk about over here on my blog. I’m not going to be Smucker’s Sweet, more Sriracha […]
