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See what I mean about gaping holes in the storyline? I don’t know if Chris got into the accident leaving the hospital or trying to come back later in the day. I don’t know if he was so distracted that I’d left him that he wasn’t driving safely, or if it was one of those bizarre coincidences.
Someone who hasn’t lived through the ecstatic beginning all the way to the explosive end of a tumultuous marriage might expect me to feel relieved.
I actually had a counselor suggest that once. “Did you feel safer knowing he couldn’t bother you or your child anymore?”
Yeah, last time I talked to that quack.
Because my husband died thinking I’d walked out on him. Which is what I was planning to do, but in the back of my mind I knew there might eventually come a time for reconciliation.
I’ve turned my back on you and your stupid church and leadership team who left me alone to suffer through my confusion and grief, but I haven’t turned my back on God. You may think I’m an unrepentant sinner, that my marriage failed because of my innate stubbornness, but you never lived with Chris. You never found yourself lying on the floor, unable to get yourself up without his help because he knocked you down when you were thirty-seven weeks pregnant and forty pounds heavier than normal.
You may judge me — in fact, I’m sure you still do — for walking out on Chris that day. Maybe in your mind, I caused him so much psychological despair that he got himself into a wreck and died.
You know what? Go ahead and think that. I’m done trying to prove to you that I’ve made the right choices. Know why? Because I’m humble enough to realize that I might have made the biggest mistake of my life that day I walked out on Chris. You never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? That’s because you deluded yourself into imagining you had me all figured out. Labeled me as a rebellious wife, all but left me to rot in hell if I were to turn my back on my God and my husband.
Well, guess what. I may have left my husband, but that doesn’t mean I’ve walked away from God. And it certainly doesn’t mean I wished for Chris’s death like that one counselor suggested.
You have no idea what sort of hell and confusion I went through after he died. How could you? In your mind, everything is so black and white. Husbands are good. Wives are supposed to submit. Your pastor is God’s mouthpiece so to disobey him is to disobey the Holy Spirit even if your husband is going to lead you into sin. You said it yourself so many times when I was crying in your office. You told me that even if my husband ordered me to abandon my own child, my job was to listen to him, and if what he wanted me to do was outside of God’s will, then God would have it out with my husband, not me.
Want to know something? That line of reasoning didn’t work out too well in the book of Acts, did it? Or have you forgotten about Ananias and Sapphira? Have you forgotten the way they lied to the apostles about the money they’d donated? If you were their pastor, you know what you would have said to Sapphira? You know what you would have told her? “Go ahead and lie about the money because your husband is the head of your home, and your job is to submit to him as you would to the Lord.” Want me to tell you what’s wrong with that logic? It’s that my husband isn’t the Lord and never will be.
Ananias died for lying to God, but the apostles gave his wife a chance of her own. “Is this the correct amount of money you got from the sale of your house?” they asked, and she said it was. Of course, we both know what happened next. She died because of her own sin. Not her husband’s sin. See the difference? According to you, all she should have had to do was agree with those apostles, because anything otherwise would be to cast doubt on her husband’s honesty. What self-respecting, submissive, or godly wife would do a thing like that?
“Yes, that’s the amount of money we sold the property for,” she should have said. And according to your gospel, that should have been enough to save her. Except it wasn’t, and she was struck dead and buried next to her lying husband.
You think I’m being extreme, but I’m not. Do you know how dangerous your kind of theology is? Do you know how many innocent women and children end up dead like that church secretary and her mutilated twins? Do you know how many wives become complicit in their husbands’ sins and crimes because they’re told that to do otherwise is to disrespect their husbands’ God-given authority?
You’ll accuse me of exaggerating, but I’m not. And I’m not talking about people who lived millennia ago like good old Sapphira either. I’m talking about the wife who knows — who doesn’t just suspect but knows— that her husband is molesting their foster daughter, but she doesn’t tell the police because to do so would be to step outside of her role as a godly submissive wife. I’m talking about women like my friend Mel, single women who maybe aren’t even saved but the minute they step foot in your stuffy little church, they’re going to feel the full weight of your hypocritical judgment, as if getting a divorce is enough to cast you out of heaven forever.
I don’t mean to preach at you, Pastor, I really don’t, but somebody’s got to tell you this stuff. And if it’s not me, I don’t know who would have the guts to do it.
So go ahead. Prepare your best lecture. Pour out your worst guilt trip. It’s nothing less than I would expect. But if my experience happens to save the life of even one innocent woman or child, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.