Tea in a Beer Mug

The purpose of this post is to add my voice to what I hope is, by now, the clamor of Christian voices speaking up against abuse in the name of our Savior.
This bit of news shook me to the core. A seven-year-old little girl is dead. The little girl had been adopted three years ago from Liberia. Apparently, she was repeatedly beaten with a length of 1/4-inch plumbing supply line, as Michael and Debi Pearl of No Greater Joy Ministries teach parents to do.

A swift swat with a light, flexible instrument will sting without bruising or causing internal damage. Many people are using a section of ¼ inch plumber’s supply line as a spanking instrument. It will fit in your purse or hang around you neck. You can buy them for under $1.00 at Home Depot or any hardware store. They come cheaper by the dozen and can be widely distributed in every room and vehicle. Just the high profile of their accessibility keeps the kids in line.

In the same article, we find that the number of “licks” they recommend to properly satisfy a child’s need to experiece payback is ten to fifteen. Pearl says that is being kind.

If you have trained properly, this may never happen to your child, but if it does come to this, you are not helpless. The soul of your child needs to be punished. He feels the need to suffer for his misdeeds. What I am telling you is well understood by the most reprobate of modern psychiatrists and psychologists. They call it a “guilt complex.” Children and adults in this state of mind often do harm to themselves. Their anger is turned inward because they hate the bad person they know themselves to be. Their soul is crying out for justice to be done to the self. They don’t know what is happening, and they will not voluntarily seek punishment, but their soul needs judgment. When your child is in the first throes of this debilitating condition, be kind enough to punish him. Care enough and love enough to pay the emotional sacrifice to give him ten to fifteen licks that will satisfy his need to experience payback.

If you don’t agree with him, you don’t love your children.

If you do not see the wisdom in what I have said, and you reject these concepts, you are not fit to be a parent. I pity your children. They will never experience the freedom of soul and conscience that mine do.

In another article, Michael encourages the mother of a four-year-old who runs away when she knows she’s in trouble, to sit on her if necessary, and to discipline until she gives in.
Yes, he emphasizes control, but he encourages to start with five licks, add two for the fit, and keep adding on until she gives in, threatening with more and harder blows.

The issue is not one of control, or not disciplining in anger. Nothing tells us that Lydia’s adoptive parents were angry at her, or disciplining her out of control. You don’t have to lose control to abuse a child.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of their teaching is that they claim it’s God’s way.

When is a marriage no longer worth fighting for?
When disrespect creeps in?
When one spouse is unfaithful once?
When unfaithfulness becomes the norm?
When one spouse wants out?
When one (or both) spouse(s) is not committed to the marriage?
When one spouse disregards the other spouse’s desires?
When the couple have no sexual life any more?

In Christian circles you’ll hear a lot about how God hates divorce. I believe he does. But I wonder, is divorce an event, like a wedding, or does it creep in slowly, as two people who promised to be one start drifting appart, or as one spouse sets something else above the marriage even if that something else is a threat to it; Or when both spouses lose respect for each other.
Sure, divorce papers, like a marriage license, are formalities that make something final. While people are not legally married or divorced until they sign the papers, the commitment to each other begins and ends before papers are signed.

One spouse may have left the marriage and be treating the other as a meal ticket or a servant. There’s no respect, no love, no commitment. I think that spouse needs a paper in the hand that legally frees him (and the abused spouse) to go on with life.

Some people will hang on to a defunct marriage for decades believing that not divorcing is what it’s all about. Like the engaged couple who don’t have sexual intercourse before marriage ( but indulge in everything else), believing that “abstinence” makes them sexually pure.

This is a reply to a very long post on No Longer Quivering discussion board made by Arietty. She nails it on the head.

I believe the real problem is the idea that there is a perfect decision you can make about any issue and that making that prefect decision is being in God’s will. Making the wrong decision makes it harder for God to make sure stuff works out right.

In my Christian view God is concerned with people’s hearts not people’s offspring quantity or real estate choices or jobs. Just get on with life and make decisions based on the information available at the time, what seems best to suit you and yours.. God does not have a perfect car, job, house, mission, partner for you. You don’t have to decide which one is God’s will. God is not following you around waiting for you to magically pick the right car to buy.

It’s such a 1st world way of looking at God.. we are RICH in choices, absolutely luxuriously rich. Most of the world does not have the kinds of choices we do and has to make do with what is right in front of them, not buy books all about discerning God’s will so they can revel in the mega-mart of choices we have.

For some people there is a lot of fear that if they make the wrong choices bad stuff will happen because they will not have discerned God’s will. This is not spirituality, this is superstition.

I’ve some trouble with people who claim “God has told them to….”, especially when they believe that this plan includes me. There are people who claim to constantly be hearing from God, and will tell you what to do, authoritatively, no matter what you ask them about (and even if you don’t)

How do you brush it off if someone says God told them that this is the thing to do?
How do you lovingly, politely, yet still firmly tell them that you haven’t had any such revelations yourself, so you assume the plan must not include you?

Like Arietty on NLQ, I tend to think logically. If I want to know what God has to say about something, I’ll turn to the Bible where he will have said it directly or indirectly. Prayer helps too, but it doesn’t always tell me whether I should take house A or B. Things usually just fall together neatly, and you realize as you look back that God must have orchestrated the whole thing.

Believing that there is one perfect plan, one perfect place, one perfect job/ministry, etc… must make for a life of much anxiety. What if you missed a sign? What if you got it wrong?
Paired with the belief that if you are following the perfect path you ought to be enjoying blessings upon blessings and no tribulations, then if anything goes wrong you’ll be breaking your head once again.

I’ve done that. Thankfully for very short periods of time. I don’t want to go back to thinking that way.

I had to laugh hard when I read the paragraph in bold. She has a sense of humor!

Have you ever hung up the phone or finished a conversation with someone and felt dissatisfied, like there was something you really wanted to say but didn’t know how to say it?  Have you gone back and forth in your mind, wanting to express your thoughts about something said, wondering whether it even makes sense to say something, and whether you are making a mountain out of a molehill and you’d be better off forgetting the issue?

I had one of those this afternoon.  And one just a week ago.  With the same person.  Two remarks, made about a young woman who just married a very close friend of mine.  Both remarks would have hurt if they had been made about me.   Both were made by someone who, I’m sure, loves this young woman deeply.  Both remarks reminded me of remarks that people made about me regarding my marriage to my husband, and that hurt like a knife stuck in my heart.

I think it’s very sad when a parent (or close relative, or in-law)  suggests that a child has married up (or down, for that matter).   That they don’t “deserve” the spouse they chose, or that the spouse they chose is not good enough.

It’s also very sad to imply that one’s wedding day is the day one loses his/her freedom.   My brother used to dress in black for weddings because he said he was mourning the death of the groom’s life of freedom,  or something similar.  I never thought it the best of jokes, but I find it very distasteful coming from a pastor who’s been married for decades.

Maybe I really am making a mountain out of a molehill.  Maybe.  It feels better to have that off my chest!