Abandoned women need as much care and support as widows, maybe more.
When a woman’s husband dies, the church comes around her with food, compassion, and support. She has lost her husband, and that is tragic. No one would ever dare blame her for her husband’s death (“Well, if she hadn’t fed him so many cheeseburgers, maybe he wouldn’t have had a heart attack.”)
Now take the woman whose husband has left her. She has lost her husband, too, but she will get no meal train, no compassion, and very little support. She won’t have a life insurance plan to draw on so she can take time to grieve, and child support, if he pays it, is never enough to raise a child. She will have to keep plodding on, dealing with her own grief and that of her children, and being held to an impossible standard; if she tries to tell people the truth about abuse or infidelity, many won’t believe her or will say she is trying to make him look bad. She may even hear things like, “If you had kept yourself up, he wouldn’t have left you” or “If you had prayed harder, maybe your marriage would have been saved.” Her job that she left to raise children won’t be there waiting for her, and even if it were, she may have been out of the workforce for so long that her skills have become irrelevant. She will likely go from middle- or upper-middle-class comfort to poverty in a few short months as she pays attorney fees and tries to maintain a home on her own. Friends and family may not want to take sides and may abandon her as well, and her social support, one of the most important aspects of dealing with trauma, will dwindle quickly. Her kids may even turn against her. She will desperately need her church. She has lost her protector, her defender. Who will stand for her now?
Will you be there in her time of need, just like you are there for the widow?
While most pastors and church leaders are not qualified to counsel these women through their trauma, they can provide spiritual counsel and practical help. These women will need meal trains, listening ears, and above all, child care. In the same vein that the church has authority over the congregation, it should also have the same level of protection for the abandoned.
Divorce, in itself, is not a sin, but the behavior that causes the divorce is the sin. If a woman is being abused, sometimes she has to separate or divorce in order to protect herself and her children. It’s time for the church to start acknowledging that men who leave their families or abuse their wives are not being Biblical husbands, and that the women need care and compassion from Christ-followers instead of judgment and blame.
My hope is to provide some insight for church leaders here, and I will continue to build on it with my upcoming guide to helping church leaders deal compassionately with abandoned women.
Chances are these women have been on their knees for their marriages for a very long time. Let’s care for them and keep these prayer warriors in our churches.