Lookahead: (According to her daughter, who spoke up a few years later) “Mom did whatever he told her to do” with the abusive behavior described as including “a lot of name calling, yelling, putting her down, a lot of control over her…” When she tried to get out of the marriage, the husband begged for one more chance.  While they were ostensibly working together to save the marriage, he snapped, killed her, shoved her in a suitcase, and made good on the river threat with the wife now being the tragic victim.     

You never know what will pop up on the YouTube side-panel, and sometimes it may seem like I’m going down a rabbit hole…sometimes even inappropriately.  But an unsolved (gruesome) murder account caught my eye.  It was actually about a woman in the 1960’s who had an abusive husband.  While she was still married to him, she began an affair with a man who was exponentially more abusive and who eventually murdered her in a torturous way.  It took 40 years for her body to be found. Her daughter, who never gave up on her, describes Abuser #1’s treatment (of both of them ☹) this way: 

“She (the mother) was physically abused and verbally abused…He had the upper hand, picking her up by the neck and throwing her up against a wall, cussin’ at her, and he did the same thing with me (the 11 year-old daughter)…He was a bully.  He was a brute.  You were scared stiff of him…You were afraid, afraid of everything you said, everything you did.”¹ 

The wife had two major characteristics—she was enslaved by incapacitating fear, and, for whatever reason, she felt that she deserved the abusive treatment, i.e., she deserved to be punished. 

What about present day?  In the seemingly idyllic marriage of two highly educated, upwardly mobile medical professionals, barbaric abuse went on behind the scenes.  As the wife’s colleague later said, “She was very clear early on that her Facebook profile didn’t reflect reality.” And in fact, she called it Fakebook. ☹ A comment about the abuse, in the wife’s own words, just after the birth of their first child: “I feel like I’m walking on eggshells in my own house…he tried to choke me on the sofa…”  A few weeks later, the abusive husband slugged his wife in the mouth and, referring to the infant, said, “I’m going to throw her into the Ottawa River…and it will be my word against yours.”  The wife’s mother described her daughter’s response after a reconciliation attempt:  “She would do anything and everything not to jeopardize his career and his happiness…(According to another colleague) “she would cry quite a bit at work…everybody had a sense that something else was going on at home.” (According to her daughter, who spoke up a few years later) “Mom did whatever he told her to do” and described his abusive behavior as including “a lot of name calling, yelling, putting her down, a lot of control over her…” When she tried to get out of the marriage, the husband begged for one more chance. While they were ostensibly working together to save the marriage, he snapped, killed her, shoved her in a suitcase, and made good on the river threat with the wife now being the tragic victim.²    

And in another modern-day account that one woman provided about the spousal abuse of her sister, Jacque, (….abuse that continued until the abuser killed Jacque…) she goes on to describe second-hand/collateral abuse that resulted: 

“What Jacque endured wasn’t just physical abuse like most would think.”  For years Jacque was the victim of terror-inducing mental and emotional abuse:  “At one point, (her husband) told her that she had thirty days to live…One time he told her to take  pictures of the kids (triplets) when he was going to take them fishing because she may never see them again…she would go back to him because she was afraid of him…she would stay with relatives to get help and sleep—he would ‘blow up her phone’ the whole weekend, threatening and manipulating her.  And she’d go back to him.”³  After her murder, the abusing husband threatened to kill Jacque’s sister!! Before he went to jail, she lived in fear, wondering if he would hunt her down.  

Again, what these women all had in common was that fear held them in bondage.  But, even worse, each one put up with that terrible existence because she thought, “I deserve to be punished.”

In another nail-biting account, one Christian woman took things full cycle, and allowed the LORD to come in and defeat the fear.  In her book entitled, Healing Well and Living Free, it appeared that she was actually allowing her husband to manipulate and control her through guilt and lies and toxic legalism.  I was reading her testimony thinking, “What are you doing?  What on earth possessed you to keep going back?”  And the last time she moved back into the house with her husband, I was flat out confounded—after reading about the preceding rounds of life-threatening abuse—against her and the children.  But the LORD had always intervened and saved their lives.  And over time, He had set the wife free from fear.  During this last time, she let the husband know—mainly through fury-infused words—that she didn’t come back because she was afraid of him.  She came back because she wasn’t.  She had been set free!  Then she left for good, and the LORD gave her a powerful, global ministry that informs millions of women, “You don’t have to take this!”  And, over the course of fifteen chapters of her book, she identifies every single demonic trick that an abuser might use—the cat is out of the bag for good. 

Side note:  I don’t want people to feel that I’m singling abusive men out in this example.  We have been aware for many years, as a culture, that females can, just as mercilessly, abuse males.  (Case in point, was just marathon-viewing the JAG TV Series; and two episodes in Season 8 addressed this very topic….so there was a well-developed social consciousness about this 20 years ago).  The above references merely represent the example that I believe the LORD led me to use. 

So how would this slave mentality prevent someone from being a Kingdom Occupier (KO)? 

Anyone who is enslaved by fear does not have the main pre-requisite ingredient required for Kingdom Living—LOVE.  How do I know this?  Perfect LOVE has the power to cast out fear (1 John 4:8, 16).  But if the person has been convinced that they deserve to be punished, they cannot fully accept the gift of LOVE that God offers them. 

Why on earth would someone think they deserve to be punished?  Back in ancient Egypt, as well as in 2021 in the Good Ole USA—people with a slave mentality have been brainwashed.  And if you trace the thread back to its origin, through all its ugly twists and turns and layers of subterfuge, we will find—every single time—that the thread was originally instantiated by the enemy of our souls. 

I heard a gifted evangelist today (Hillsong, Touch of Heaven) talk about how, as a child, his parents followed their long-awaited dream of living a rural life—and made the big move to the country.  What should have been the best time of their lives turned into the absolute worst time, as overpowering anxiety (fear of destitution) overtook and consumed the mother of the family.  “Fear sucked the absolute life out of their lives and relationships.”  This happened because they did not have the revelation that God would provide according to His (incomparable) riches in Glory (Phil 4:19).  The family could only see in the natural.  If they had just been like Elisha’s servant in 2 Kings 6:16,17—who was permitted an eternally life-changing glimpse of…chariots of fire.  A host of Assyrian warriors with horse-drawn chariots had surrounded the little 25-acre city.  But hundreds of acres of hills that surrounded that city were over-brimming with those heavenly chariots accompanied by God’s host of warriors—providing unequivocal evidence that “Those that be with us are more than those that be with them!!”

Our mind-renewal end game? 

I know You love me

I know You found me

I know You saved me

And Your grace will never fail me

And while I’m waiting

I’m not waiting

I know Heaven lives in me (Hillsong Music)

++++++++++++

¹YouTube website:  /watch?v=ztKUIYGuWdw

²YouTube website: /watch?v=iRahFF_hEx8&t=1027s

³Daily Journal Online website:  /news/local/jacque-wallers-family-speaks-out-on-abuse/article_47320fc9-0321-5228-905b-cc4e83bc0652.html