submission

Divorcing: Orange-handled scissors cut apart a marriage certificate with a long-stemmed orange-yellow rose lying across it.

Divorcing: When God does what he hates

Post published:July 7, 2023
Post category:Knowing and Going with God Trauma and Grief
Post last modified:March 10, 2025

Once, in Malachi, God may have said that he hates divorce. Repeatedly, in Jeremiah, God reveals how much he hates divorcing. Repeatedly, he laments the nonstop betrayals that did, and could, bring him to do it.

Battered boundaries: Closeup of wooden, split-log fence, compromised, leaning, with two small clusters of tiny lavender flowers growing up between the boards.

Case of the battered boundaries

Post published:August 6, 2021
Post category:Healing from Toxic Church My Story
Post last modified:March 12, 2025

Why, in midlife, did I suddenly find my boundaries battered and my adulthood denied? The answer hinged on the skewed view of womanhood in my church culture.

Church service 1901: Men and women sit on wooden benches in their Sunday finest, facing each other from opposite sides of the preacher, who stands behind a massive pulpit on a high platform above them all.

Adulthood and the church that rejects it

Post published:July 23, 2021
Post category:Healing from Toxic Church
Post last modified:March 10, 2025

Frustrated, exhausted, I realized: I would never count as an adult in my church system. Free at last, I’m embracing the adulthood God works in his own

Bucking the system: Pencils neatly lined up on a paper point to a row of empty check-boxes. But one red-lead pencil points the other way, to a red outline of a heart.

Bucking the system: Shunning, submission, Jesus

Post published:April 2, 2020
Post category:Healing from Toxic Church
Post last modified:March 12, 2025

Jesus grew up in a religious system God had instigated, and people had hijacked to use for their own ends. Jesus’ life shows us when and how to buck the system.

Woman standing, turned, her hand up to block falling debris, in what appears to be an ancient block structure that is crumbling around her.

Submission and Sabbath

Post published:June 20, 2013
Post category:From: What About Women?
Post last modified:March 16, 2024

To help us grasp the stark contrast between God's view of submission and the way some religious people view it, let's consider the contrast between God's view of Sabbath and the way some religious people have viewed it.

Closeup, hand in hand: As a woman and her husband apparently walk together, her outstretched left hand and his outstretched right hand are clasped.

Love and honor go both ways

Post published:June 6, 2013
Post category:From: What About Women?
Post last modified:March 16, 2024

In a marriage that reflects God's nature and his kingdom, love and honor go both ways.