What If the Enemy Doesn’t Have to Destroy a Gifted Woman?

An uncomfortable conversation about faith, abuse, and the women we were called to become.

Unpopular opinion: What if the enemy doesn’t have to destroy a gifted woman? What if he only has to keep her so consumed with surviving one person that she never has the energy to become who God called her to be?

I have been sitting with that thought.

Because for years, I struggled with something I heard often from women of faith who were living in unhealthy, toxic, and sometimes abusive marriages:

“God hates divorce.”

“I made a covenant.”

“I have to keep my family together.”

“I need to forgive him.”

“Maybe God is using this to teach me something.”

“I have to stay for my children.”

And perhaps the most heartbreaking:

“I’m just going to keep praying for him.”

There is nothing wrong with prayer.

There is nothing wrong with forgiveness.

There is nothing wrong with believing in the sanctity of marriage.

But I believe there is something profoundly wrong when those beautiful principles are used to convince a woman that God requires her to remain somewhere she is being destroyed.

And I think we need to be brave enough to talk about that.

When Faith Becomes a Reason to Stay

Christianity did not invent abuse.

But certain teachings within Christian culture can unintentionally create fertile ground for women to remain in abusive relationships far longer than they otherwise might.

Be submissive.

Forgive seventy times seven.

Turn the other cheek.

Honor your husband.

Keep your family together.

Don’t give up on your marriage.

Pray harder.

Love him through it.

Individually, many of those teachings have deeper theological contexts and meanings.

But put them into the hands of an abusive person?

They can become weapons.

Suddenly, forgiveness means there are never consequences.

Submission means silence.

Grace means tolerating repeated harm.

Commitment means you aren’t allowed to leave.

And a woman’s faith—the very thing that should remind her of her worth—can become the thing used to convince her to endure her own destruction.

That doesn’t sit right with me.

It never has.

Maybe Staying Isn’t Always the Godly Choice

We talk so much about the courage it takes to stay committed to a marriage.

I think sometimes we need to talk about the courage it takes to leave one.

Especially when leaving means disappointing your family.

Your church.

Your friends.

Your children.

Maybe even the version of yourself who believed marriage was forever.

Women are often told that leaving breaks the family.

But I want to ask a harder question:

What is happening to the family while she stays?

What are children learning while watching their mother become smaller?

What are daughters learning about love?

What are sons learning about power?

What does a home teach children when everyone learns to measure the emotional temperature of one person before deciding whether they’re allowed to have peace that day?

Sometimes preserving the appearance of a family requires sacrificing the people living inside of it.

And I don’t believe appearances are sacred.

People are.

Your Gifts Were Never the Problem

This is the part that changed something in me.

Women who survive abusive relationships often possess some of the very qualities we celebrate as beautiful, even sacred.

Empathy.

Compassion.

Loyalty.

Forgiveness.

Hope.

Patience.

The ability to see goodness in people even when they cannot see it in themselves.

The ability to love deeply.

Those aren’t weaknesses.

Those are gifts.

But gifts can be exploited.

Your empathy can keep you understanding behavior you should be confronting.

Your compassion can make you more concerned about his wounds than the wounds he is creating in you.

Your loyalty can keep you committed long after the other person abandoned the responsibility that should accompany that commitment.

Your forgiveness can become an endless reset button.

Your hope can convince you that the person he could become matters more than the person he repeatedly chooses to be.

And eventually, nearly every beautiful thing inside of you becomes directed toward one person.

Understanding him.

Forgiving him.

Helping him.

Calming him.

Protecting him.

Explaining him.

Praying for him.

Recovering from him.

And surviving him.

Imagine the amount of energy that requires.

Now imagine where that energy could have gone.

What If Your Gifts Were Meant for More?

What if your empathy was supposed to comfort hundreds of women?

What if your voice was supposed to advocate for someone who didn’t have one yet?

What if your creativity was supposed to become books, businesses, art, ministries, movements, organizations, or ideas that changed people’s lives?

What if your compassion was meant to raise children who knew what emotionally healthy love looked like?

What if your story was eventually supposed to become the flashlight another woman used to find the exit?

What if there was an entire version of you waiting on the other side of survival?

Not because God needed you to suffer first.

But because you were always more than what happened to you.

And then ask yourself the uncomfortable question:

How much of that woman can exist when nearly every ounce of her emotional energy is being consumed managing one person’s chaos?

Maybe the enemy doesn’t always need to convince a gifted woman that she has no gifts.

Maybe sometimes it is enough to keep her too exhausted to use them.

When Survival Becomes a Form of Orbit

There is another part of this conversation that may make some people uncomfortable.

We talk about idolatry as deliberately placing something above God.

But abusive relationships can create something that looks eerily like an involuntary version of that dynamic.

Your entire existence begins revolving around another human being.

What mood is he in?

What did I say wrong?

How do I keep him calm?

Should I bring this up?

Will that make him angry?

How do I explain this?

How do I fix this?

How do I keep the children quiet?

How do I prevent the next explosion?

How do I get back to the version of him I fell in love with?

You aren’t intentionally worshiping this person.

You’re surviving him.

But survival has forced him into the center of your universe.

His moods determine the atmosphere.

His reactions determine your behavior.

His approval determines whether there will be peace.

His anger determines what everyone else is allowed to do.

There is very little room left to hear anything else.

Including your own voice.

Including, perhaps, God’s.

And that is what makes the spiritual weaponization of abuse so cruel.

A woman can be told she needs to “put God first” while living in an environment that requires her nervous system to put her abuser first simply to survive the day.

That isn’t spiritual failure.

That is survival.

“But God Can Change Him.”

Yes.

If you believe God can transform people, then you believe God can change him.

But somewhere along the way, women were taught a dangerous addition to that belief:

That God needs you to remain available for the mistreatment while He does it.

Why?

If God is powerful enough to change another human being, surely He is powerful enough to reach that person without requiring a woman to serve as the collateral damage.

You can pray for someone from a distance.

You can forgive someone and still have boundaries.

You can love someone and refuse access to you.

You can hope someone heals without volunteering to be hurt while you wait.

And leaving does not prevent another person from changing.

Sometimes consequences are the first invitation to change they have ever been forced to accept.

Maybe Leaving Can Be an Act of Faith Too

I cannot tell another woman what God is telling her to do.

I wouldn’t dare.

But I will challenge the idea that staying is automatically more holy than leaving.

Sometimes leaving requires enormous faith.

Faith that there is life after this.

Faith that your children can heal.

Faith that you can rebuild.

Faith that you can survive financially.

Faith that you are still worthy.

Faith that your life isn’t over because your marriage ended.

Faith that the unknown might actually contain more peace than the familiar.

And faith that perhaps God isn’t waiting for you to become better at enduring pain.

Perhaps He is calling you toward freedom.

Imagine Her Free

This is the woman I keep thinking about.

The woman whose energy isn’t spent anticipating someone’s anger.

The woman who sleeps peacefully.

The woman who laughs loudly again.

The woman who creates.

The woman who dreams.

The woman who has opinions without rehearsing how someone else will react to them.

The woman who discovers what she likes because she is no longer organizing her existence around what someone else wants.

The woman whose empathy becomes service instead of survival.

Whose compassion becomes impact instead of permission.

Whose forgiveness releases her instead of repeatedly excusing someone else.

Whose voice reaches women she hasn’t even met yet.

Imagine what happens when all that energy comes home to her.

Imagine what she builds with it.

Imagine who she helps.

Imagine who her children get to know.

Imagine who she finally gets to know.

Maybe that is why leaving can feel so terrifying.

Because sometimes you aren’t simply leaving a relationship.

You are reclaiming the woman the relationship required you to abandon.

And perhaps the most dangerous thing an abusive person could ever encounter isn’t an angry woman.

It’s a woman who remembers who she was before survival became her full-time job.

A woman who realizes her gifts were never given to her so one person could consume all of them.

A woman who stops asking,

“How much more can I endure?”

and finally begins asking,

“What could I do with my life if I wasn’t spending all of it surviving?”

Maybe that question isn’t selfish.

Maybe it’s sacred.

And maybe—just maybe—the woman you were called to become has been waiting for you to ask it.

Finding 40

For the woman finding herself again—not because her life is over, but because she’s finally realizing how much of it is still hers.