Reality for Breakfast

And we sat there at breakfast with Dee talking to us. She is the director of the NOAH project for battered spouses and their children. She was telling us stories of the abused, trying to get us to care about them in our souls and in our churches. We were ministers of churches in town. She said that some ministers don’t know and some churches don’t care. I just stared out the window into the morning sun mourning all the conversations I’ve had with those beaten by the loves of their lives. I wasn’t ignoring Dee. I was hearing her through years of pain. I was hearing her knowing that every Sunday I shake the hand of a man — the hand that has beaten his wife and his son. The not-at-all-right hand of fellowship.

Dee quoted a statistic. They always have stats. More than twenty percent of homes have some form of violence going on in them. Can that be? In a church like ours that ratio would mean be a hundred homes in violence. Surely in a Christian community the number would be smaller, but halving the number means fifty homes that know violence. I feel like Abraham bidding with God for Sodom. What percentage would you be willing to take, Eddie, to feel like the number is acceptable?

I am unable to convince myself that we are totally immune because I know we are not. I know now of ten homes where some form of violence is common. I can find two percent off the top of my head.

And we are not alarmed. We have committees meeting to redecorate meeting rooms. We have committees organizing for world missions. We have children who cower while daddy roams the house drunk. We have women who endure emotional and physical abuse. We have men whose wives treat them like dirt. No committees are meeting to plan strategies of salvation for the abused. It is too hard to deal inside the circle of privacy — a place we have decreed safe for the abusers and deadly for the abused.

Dee told the story of the man who would sit in church with one arm around his wife. With the other hand, he would pinch her in the side continually through the worship service. Sing and pinch. Pray and pinch. For her, pain joined her prayers.

I stared out the window into the morning sun and wondered if we in the church are like that man: singing the praises and inflicting the pain. As long as we do nothing, say nothing, advocate nothing, we enable the abusers, creating their safe place and cheering them on.