Alas! I Don’t Know How to Get There

I love the model of living and witnessing discussed in a previous post. We don’t have to be missionaries in a foreign land to do this. All we need to do is learn how to be a family that worships, prays and celebrates God together and who extends hospitality to those they know—from the kingdom or from without.

Alas! I can’t do this. My marriage is so broken that my husband and I can’t even eat together. Oh, we do at times but I’ve noticed that I avoid it as much as I can. I don’t want to eat with him. Eating is a time of sharing and I can’t share. I don’t trust him with my heart. And if we’re unable to eat together in harmony, how in the WORLD can we worship together? We can’t. There are too many barriers. And with this kind of tension in our home, how can we invite others to join us? Join us in what? We certainly wouldn’t be able to invite them to share in the joy we have because, as a couple, we have none. You can sense the climate of a home when you enter it and it would be no witness to others to bring them to a place of tension.

This was a matter of great grief to me—a grief that continued through the seminar as I saw more and more how practical, useful and incredibly full of blessing this model of witnessing can be. My witness is not as effective when my home and marriage are broken. Please hear me on this. I’m not saying I can’t witness because I do. I’m not saying that witnessing can’t be effective outside the walls of a healthy home because of course it can be but I’m beginning to see how much MORE effective a healthy family can be the milieu in which witnessing occurs and I don’t have that.

I would find a clue that weekend at a different conference.