Titus 2 Men And Women

Princess In A Glass House
Danette's Personal Biography
Danette Tucker

By the time I reached adulthood I believed I was blessed to have grown up in about the most perfect family on the face of the earth.  I was the oldest of five siblings in a Christian home.   Not only were my parents believers, they were involved in full-time ministry most of my life.  My grandparents were believers, as were all my aunts and uncles, even all the cousins as far as I knew.  I accepted Christ as my Savior when I was five.  When I was nine I reached a new level of understanding and committed my life entirely to following God.

During a lot of my growing up years, our family was on deputation in preparation for going to the mission field.  As a result, we spent a lot of time with other ministers' families -- and when pastors get together, they just can't resist talking doctrine.  I loved to listen in while the women swapped birthing stories and the men discussed doctrine!  There was a lot of focus on the children memorizing Scripture, which resulted in me tucking away large amounts of the Word over the course of about ten years.  I went to Christian schools during most of my school years and then attended and graduated from Bible college.

All in all, I was very proud of my family and spiritual heritage.   By the time I graduated from Bible college and got married, I believed my husband and I were ready to be launched on the world for the cause of Christ.

But the princess was living in a glass house, and it had some serious cracks.  Within a short time after my turning-point with God when I was nine, I began to notice that the Christians around me at church said one thing with their mouths but their lives told another story entirely.  I watched and wondered and started to question what I was seeing.

Then when I was fourteen, we met some other Christian teens who went to Fundamentalist churches in our state.  I was amazed and excited to see teens who took their relationship with God seriously and who were "radical" in their pursuit of following God.  Here I saw people who believed that there was a way to tangibly live a holy life before God, something profoundly at odds with what I was observing in church.  My family and I embraced this "new," "more committed" mode of Christianity.

However, I gradually began to see tarnish on the halos.  During the course of a couple of moves we changed churches, always finding another church within the denomination.   But from one church to another, and sometimes from one leader to another within the same church, there were variances in "standards" and "convictions."  There was no way to ever be good enough.  There was always somebody with a list with something on it I didn't know about and didn't measure up to. 

But I forged onward, striving for holiness in my desire to please and serve God.  As the time came to head for college, my parents and I looked for a Bible college that held both the highest academic standards AND the highest standards of personal holiness.  The college we chose was part of a well-known, worldwide Christian ministry.  The president of the company and college was also the pastor of the church on campus.  While being an extremely small private Bible college, the president of the college was well connected with the leaders of Fundamentalist churches throughout the country.  As a result, we had a lot of close, behind-the-scenes exposure to Fundamentalist leadership around the States.

During my second year of college, I began to realize there were some serious problems behind the shiny façade. While we were told we were the "cream of the crop" among Christian young people, we were constantly criticized.  We were told we were ungodly, unjustly accused of wrongdoing, told we were too immature to hear from God for ourselves and therefore we must bow to the will of our leadership in all things.  There was also a good deal of immorality going on behind the scenes among the leadership and being covered up "for the sake of the ministry."   At the same time, to give credit where credit is due, there were and are a lot of people working there who are truly attempting to serve God with a pure heart.  Most have no idea the extent of the corruption in the leadership.

But good came out of all this.  God used this extreme situation to make me realize that this philosophy of godliness was an illusion.  Scripture plainly states in Col 2:20 - 23, "Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?  Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in WILL worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh."

All the "thou-shalts" and "thou-shalt-nots" didn't result in godliness, but rather had the opposite effect.     There was more deeds of the flesh (Gal. 5:19-21) in evidence among this group than in any group of lost people with whom I have ever had contact. 

By the time I finished college I faced a crisis.  I was completely disillusioned by the Christianity I saw all around me.  I threw away all my college notes and textbooks and refused to read anything written about God, the Bible or Christian living written by other people.  I didn't feel that I could trust any human to tell me the truth.  Their interpretation of truth could be subjective, based upon intellectual study of the Bible and on what they had been taught.  And I had observed that "godly" men could interpret the same Scripture to mean profoundly different, even opposite, things. 

So I went on a quest, standing on the Word which says, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him." (James 1:5)  One of the things my parents had taught me was that the Word means exactly what it says and that God can be trusted.  So I believed that if I asked for wisdom, He would give it.   I began my search for the truth, believing I had no place to go but up from the bottom.  Boy, was I in for a surprise!  God was just beginning to jettison my entire perception of reality and truth.

My new husband and I took the first ministry job that came along, not realizing we were substituting one abusive environment for another.  To make our lives complete, we got pregnant six months after we married.  Almost immediately after that we began to realize things were not going to be what we expected or had been promised at the ministry where we were working.  When I was seven months pregnant we came to an abrupt parting of the ways with our boss and moved across country.

Our first son, JD, was born and my husband quickly got a job with another Christian ministry.  But one year later that ministry was forced to lay off a large percentage of their staff.  At this point Brent had to take a secular job in order to keep working.  Three months later, that job also disappeared and real life hit in earnest.  We ended up living with friends for six months and both of us working a collection of part-time odd jobs for a couple years.   In the midst of this we found that our second son was on the way.

After Andrew's birth he was chronically ill with one ear infection after another.  While I was up with the baby almost all night, every night, the two-year-old was up early every morning, needing a mom too.  When Andrew was ten months old I discovered I was pregnant again.  One week after Andrew's first birthday, I had a miscarriage in my twelfth week of pregnancy.  I also had subsequent complications as a result of dangerous long-term blood loss and extreme hormonal imbalance, lasting about five months.  After that I was infertile, though no concrete medical reason has ever been found.

The combined stress of all this had some very unexpected results. Strange things started happening, which I was eventually able to identify as symptoms of PTSD -- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  A period of unusual stress can trigger the resurfacing of buried/prior trauma.  PTSD is characterized by a variety of symptoms including extreme nightmares, day-mares (like nightmares but you're awake), insomnia, eating disorders, depression, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts and impulses, short-term memory difficulty, resurfacing of buried memories and others. 

It was during this time that I realized there was a label for some of my childhood memories that I had always shoved into a distant corner of my mind whenever they surfaced -- it was called sexual molestation.  Because I had been molested twice by a female baby-sitter (not by a man, which is stereotypical of sexual abuse) when I was five, I never realized the significance of it.  I also began to realize that the spiritual environment we had been in during my growing up years also qualified for the label of "abusive" and that it mattered.  I hadn't left it behind me; the effects were still having a significant impact on my life.  Even though I was on a quest for the truth regarding doctrine and the Word, the environment had also affected me emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.

Another thing I learned during this time was that people who have been abused tend to be drawn to abusive environments.  Christians who have experienced abuse tend to be drawn to abusive churches.  It feels familiar and somehow "right" to be told or treated like you are bad, unworthy, ungodly and unable to hear from God yourself.  It also provides some measure of comfort (though false) to be in an environment that offers you the hope that if you can just live up to this list of "standards" of holiness, you will be good enough to be acceptable.

Our marriage had an odd beginning.  It was basically an arranged marriage on my side.  Brent was interested in me, but I was not interested in him.  However, I had been taught that parents know better than children whom they should marry.  I had also been taught that love is not an emotion.  If you do what is right, the feelings will follow.  To a degree this is true. But this combination of beliefs assumes that marrying who your parents pick is automatically the right thing to do. My father met Brent briefly once and decided that he was the one for me.  He told my mother and sister about it.  Later my sister told me.  I was shocked and dismayed because I didn't even like Brent at that point.  But I did what I had been taught was right. Brent and I were married while practically strangers since the environment we were in did not allow any means of getting to know one.  I certainly couldn't have let Brent know who I was because I didn't know myself.   My family never met his family until the wedding, though I did meet his family a couple times.  And at first glance, our families appeared quite compatible since we were both from pastors' families in the same denomination. This strained beginning brought some fundamental weaknesses into our marriage.  Brent and I are about as humanly incompatible as it is possible for two people to be.  (The good news is that God is bigger than that!)  Though completely unintentional, I also defrauded Brent in marrying him without loving him.  The erroneous teaching I received defrauded me as well.  The feelings of love didn't follow the obedience because it was an obedience God never asked for.   This difficult start also created strain on the physical aspects of our marriage.  It is virtually impossible to go from being practical strangers to having a wedding night of intimacy all in one day's time without creating some feelings of degradation or hurt of some kind.  This, on top of the fact, that I had some problems in that area anyway due to the molestation.  Sexual violation always results in some type of consequences because it is the deepest possible violation. Any sexual violation, whether it technically results is loss of virginity, violates the one-flesh relationship God intends between a husband and wife.  The fact that it is involuntary does not lessen the impact.  For me, rather than becoming promiscuous, I froze. I always wondered why I was constantly being accused of immorality as a teenager when there was no way I could have ever gotten close to it. Even kissing just about sent me into a full-blown panic attack with intense feelings of claustrophobia.

I was married at age 21, our second child was born when I was 25, and the crisis and healing process took until I was 27.  By the time I had reached what I thought was the end of this process, I was able to look back at my entire life and begin to see the threads of God's broad plan for my life.  I could see how God had a plan for my life and I could see His hand at work in that plan from the moment of my conception.  I could also see how Satan had a destructive plan for my life and how he had been at work on that plan from the moment of my conception.  I could see how all the parts and pieces fit together and I was amazed and delighted to know that God cared so much for me that He went to such painstaking detail in the creation of my life.

Truthfully, by the time I reached the end of my 27^th year, I believed that the healing work was completed in my life and from that day onward my life was going to be a beautiful upward move.   At this point, I had been married for six or seven years.   And I really thought that the healing I experienced was going to be the key to healing the widening cracks in our marriage.  I genuinely believed that my past was surely the cause of the problems we had.

In the months right before our marriage my future mother-in-law asked me once whether I thought I would be able to handle Brent's temper. I grew up in a home where I had literally never seen my parents fight - period.   Also, my siblings and I had largely been compliant children -- no significant rebellion from any of us, especially after we reached our teens.  I had no idea what Brent's mother could possibly mean.  I thought that since we were both Christians, there couldn't be anything that bad in either of our lives.

The first time violence entered our home was after we had been married for two years.  And it seemed like such a minor thing that I could not understand why it hurt my feelings so deeply.  But that incident was only the first in a gradually escalating pattern.  At first, Brent attempted to laugh off his outbursts. When Brent became enraged, there was always some reason why it was my fault or the children's fault.  For seven years I believed him.  Eventually I realized that I would never be perfect and neither was any other woman.  Yet other marriages didn't experience violence as a result of imperfection.   My failures were no excuse for Brent's choices, period. 

Brent didn't remember his outbursts after the fact, so he believed I was lying when I tried to talk to him about his increasingly dangerous violence and extreme profanity. God was merciful in that neither of the children or myself was ever hurt physically with more than minor bruises, like kids get every day during play.  And it really was God's mercy because there were many times that protection was nothing less than miraculous.

After about five years I began to think that since he couldn't seem to control it, maybe this behavior was related to a physical problem.  For as long as we had been married, Brent had always been weak physically.  He had experienced a complete physical breakdown several months before we were married as a result of an abusive situation and never fully recovered.   When I asked Brent about seeking medical help for his outbursts he finally acknowledged that there was a problem.

Brent was diagnosed as manic-depressive.  Manic depression is a broad diagnosis encompassing everything from chronic depression, resulting from a variety of sources, to bi-polar disorder, which is a definite medical condition requiring lifelong medical treatment.   Brent was put on popular anti-depressant drugs.  At first the drugs appeared to help.  But within about a year the violence began to escalate again, more than before.  After the fact, we realized that the drugs were responsible for making a bad situation worse.

During this process, I learned a precious "secret" that changed my life once again.  I learned that, as much as I want to talk to God, He wants to talk to me even more!  I learned that I could go to the Word and ask Him to speak to me and He would speak to me from His word with direct answers to my questions, guidance for my life, encouragement right where I need it.   It really is such an obvious thing, and yet we don't hear it taught and we don't see it modeled.  God makes it clear in Scripture that the purpose of salvation is to reconcile man to God (II Cor. 5:17-21) -- implying restoration of a prior relationship.  The prior relationship God had with man before the fall included a face-to-face walking and talking daily communication (Gen. 3:8).  Jesus calls us His friends (John 15:13-15).  Friends spend time together and a fundamental part of their relationship is two-way communication.  The Word characterizes our new relationship with God as one so close we can call Him "Daddy" (Rom. 8:15, Gal. 4:6).  Our "Daddy" is not hard or distant; He is close and approachable (Mt. 7:7-11).  God promises wisdom when we ask (Js. 1:5).  He says He has given the Holy Spirit to teach us and to be our counselor (John 14-16).  God says He has not changed (Heb. 13:8 and many more) and He does not lie (Titus 1:2), so the Word must mean exactly what it says.

I had begun to keep a journal a couple years before and at this time keeping a journal became a truly invaluable tool as I recorded day-by-day what God showed me from the Word.  Of course, I took this situation in my marriage to Him for answers.  For about a year, He showed me one thing after another than He wanted to change in my life.   As I obeyed, there would be something more.

Meanwhile things continued to get worse at home.  Then God began to show me things in the Word about our family situation.  He showed me the consequences for specific courses of actions.  And we began to experience crisis after crisis, which gave Brent the opportunity to turn toward or away from God.  Time after time, his choice was to turn away.  Some close friends began hinting that they felt someone should report us to the authorities for conditions in our home, but they didn't want to do it. 

The climax came the day after Christmas that year.  During an argument about another of his dishonest financial decisions, Brent became enraged and punched his hand through a window.  There are not words to describe the horror of that event.  Brent was taken to the hospital where he underwent complex surgery to reconstruct his hand.   He missed an artery by only 2 mm, severing muscles and tendons in a way that would have left him crippled just a few years before when micro-surgical techniques had not yet been developed.   While Brent was in the hospital emergency room waiting for surgery he apologized for his violence.  At that point, I didn't know how to respond.   I had heard it so many times before and I just didn’t know what to do anymore.  And within 24 hours of his return home from the hospital, Brent returned to his former behavior, though it was limited to verbal abuse since he was unable to be physically violent at that point.

I was so traumatized by the events of that day I literally could not sleep or eat for days afterwards.  Day after day, I spent all night praying for guidance and being in the Word.   I also looked back in my journal and realized that God had been telling me to flee for four months.  I just couldn't accept that because I believed that the sanctity of the family was supreme.  I believed that if a wife were godly, God would change her husband.  But the truth is that God will never violate a person's free will.  He may allow and use circumstances to be so persuasive it would seem no one could resist.  But he will never force a person to change, no matter how much we may pray for it.  And God wasn't finished trying to get Brent's attention; He doesn't give up on His children!  If the boys and I didn't get out of the way of God's consequences for Brent's life we were going to experience the pain too.  And with the increasing nature of the issue, that pain could even include death.  I had a responsibility as a parent, in the eyes of God and the eyes of the law, to protect my children.  Until this point of extremity, I never realized there was a place in Scripture for separation.  I was amazed to see what the Word had to say about it once I abandoned my preconceived idea that it was totally out of the question.

My church was surprised by my sudden actions because I had never told anyone what was happening. Brent is a very quiet and mild-mannered man.  No one would think he could possibly have done what we knew he did.  I told my pastors that I would be reconciled to Brent at the first sign of genuine repentance. After three months Brent's attitude changed.  He began to voluntarily acknowledge what he had done and to apologize for it.  During this time, he was also taken off the drugs.  After another three months of rebuilding, our marriage was reunited.

However, within about six months of our reconciliation Brent began retracting what he had said before.  He began blaming me again and gradually the violence began to increase. Eventually, Brent told me that one of our pastors had told him I would reconcile with him if he expressed genuine repentance.  I know that the pastor was just trying to be helpful, but it only prolonged the eventual agony. 

Before we were separated the first time, the boys didn't understand why I would break up our family.  They were both very angry with me at the time.  What they experienced was "normal" to them.  After we got back together, our oldest son, JD, was old enough to begin understanding and realizing he didn't deserve to be treated that way, so he started fighting back.  This only made Brent angrier.  He justified his physical responses to our son as discipline.  JD was nine years old at the time this second slide began.  The older he grew, the more angry he became and the more quickly he erupted into violence in response.  More times that I can count I had to get between them in literal brawling fights.

I still went to God as had become my habit, daily asking for His revelation of truth for my life from His Word.  During the next four years God still worked on me and my responses and attitude.  He also put in my life two precious friends who became my accountability partners.  This was a very important thing for me.  God does not intend for any of us to walk alone through the Christian life.  Heb. 10:24-25 indicates we need the mutual encouragement of other believers. 

After three years there came a point when I had to tell Brent that if he didn't stop the violence I was going to have to take some type of action because I couldn't stand by while it continued.  But still I waited because I had to have God's direction.  Several months later the decision was taken out of my hands.  While I was gone to meet with my accountability partners Brent and JD got into an altercation again.  There were neighbor boys present who saw the violence, and JD ran away.  I knew that we had to have some kind of help.  I made an appointment for myself and JD to see a Christian counselor to find out how we needed to respond correctly, so as not to enflame Brent.  However, when we told her what had happened she said she was legally required to report Brent to the authorities.  I was not expecting that and it certainly wasn’t my intention.  But after she said it, I knew she was right.

This experience was a mixed blessing.  On one hand it helped JD to realize that what he experienced was not acceptable.  But I found that it was hard working with the social workers.  They see violence every day but most of them are not trained counselors.  The social worker could not see past Brent's mild-mannered exterior and tears -- he was so different from the men she usually worked with who were jobless addicts and convicts.  At the same time, she saw some things in me that I had never realized were there.  The biggest one was that the boys picked up on my lack of respect for my husband, even though I tried to act respectful.  The Word says we are to respect our husbands, period.  But I couldn't conceive of how to respect someone who acted the way Brent did.  I thought it would be enough to act respectful.  But the children "caught" my underlying disrespect.  I was devastated to discover something this ugly still lurking in my heart after so many years of walking closely with God and earnestly desiring Him to change me.  I learned that I can respect my husband because of his position of authority, regardless of his behavior.  That does not mean I am supposed to sit by and participate in wrongdoing by my own inaction, however.

Meanwhile, things at home got worse.  Finally, I had to make the difficult decision to separate again.   The authorities were threatening the imminent removal of our children.   God gave me specific direction from His Word again, and confirmed it several times.  This time my church was much more supportive. God led us to a precious Christian friend for counseling.  During this counseling God again revealed several things in my own heart that shocked and dismayed me.

God also revealed to this counselor that someone in spiritual authority over Brent had cursed him.  When the counselor asked me about it, seeking to verify what she thought God showed her, I was amazed because I immediately knew it was true.  When she asked Brent about it at our next counseling session, Brent immediately thought of a different man than I had remembered.  Within a few minutes we realized that three men in a row had cursed Brent during the few years before we were married and the year after we were married.  These men were in positions of spiritual authority over Brent.  While Brent was just learning to hear from and obey God's direction as a man himself, these men were telling him he was mistaken, that he was too immature to hear from God for himself and that he must obey them in order to be godly.  They each publicly ridiculed and humiliated Brent for the very things he was doing in obedience to God.  The Word says death and life are in the power of the tongue (Prov. 18:21), and again, the Word means what it says.  There is also a principle in God's Word about the power of a cord made with three strands (Ecc. 4:12).  Satan used a curse with the power of a three-fold cord to bind Brent.   The result of this was that Brent shut down spiritually, just as his body had shut down physically.  When Brent shut down spiritually he had no way to deal with life because the Holy Spirit had no access to him. 

Gal. 5:19 - 21 says, "Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like..."  These are directly opposite to the fruit of the Spirit found in the next two verses, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness..."  How can we be surprised at such behavior when the Holy Spirit is shut out of a person's life?  We lived with hatred, wrath, strife and a murderous heart -- all quite simply deeds of the flesh.

When this curse was broken through simply exposing it to the light and agreeing with God's truth in prayer, the root of Brent's violence was destroyed.   Secular counseling could never have revealed this root problem.  Even most Christian counseling wouldn't have exposed it because unfortunately most Christian counselors rely on their "learning" and techniques rather than truly relying on the Holy Spirit for revelation of spiritual roots.  The Word says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood (Eph. 6:12) and it is literally true.

After we had been separated for a little over six months, we were reconciled again.  But God had more to teach me.   By the time we were reconciled -- a decision I made because I believed it was right, not because I felt like it -- I was emotionally shattered.  But I made a heroic effort to hold it all together.  At the same time, I began asking God to show me what His love really looked like.  The Word says that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves and I could see within myself that I had a hard time expressing love tangibly, even to my family.  Within another six months I couldn’t keep up the walls around my emotions any longer.  I've always been a terrific "stuffer" -- stuffing my emotions because I could see no benefit in them.  I always wanted to do what was right, and doing right often runs opposite of feelings.  So I learned to "control" my emotions and not "give in" to them.  What I was really doing was relying on my own strength to keep the doors to my emotions firmly shut and locked.  

But Jesus came to set captives free -- including emotional captives!  God let the pressure build until I could not keep the doors closed any longer.  I went into about a six-month period of being overwhelmed by a lifetime of stuffed emotions -- finally feeling the hurt of all the things that had happened.  I felt abandoned and betrayed by God, though my head knew this was not true.  I have always believed God loves me because the Word says so.  But I didn't know what that love was really like.  At the end of six months God showed me that when Jesus died on the cross, as a completely human man, He literally experienced every bit of the pain that has come into my life as well as the hurt I've caused others.  And He did it deliberately, because, being completely God, He loved me and wanted to provide a way of freedom from the curse of that pain.   When I realized how literal and real Jesus' love for me was in His death and resurrection, I was finally able to KNOW Him as the God of comfort.

God is good. God has taught me so much in hard places, and it is my heart's desire to share the truth of God's hope to other women walking in similarly dark paths.  I know there is hope because He's shown it to me again and again in seemingly hopeless situations.  God has real answers for life's real questions.  And, while I know I'll never be finished with the growth process, I'm delighted to be able to share with others the light I've been given. 

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