Married to the Enemy

1

The Demise of Supergirl

A girl is born!

A gift from God! The sweetest blessing.

She was made to be super. She was made to bring glory to her Creator.

Love was divided, and rare in her home. Her father was distant both physically and emotionally. Her mother had two boys, and another girl with down syndrome. She was busy and emotionally bankrupt.

Still, the girl knew she was super.

They left their home once, in a real hurry. Her father had been in his tent on one of the properties where he worked as a horse-hand only to wake up with the farmer’s naked daughter on top of him. There was no way the farmer would understand so they had packed and left immediately. She remembered her mother looking at her father strangely, perhaps wondering about the farmer’s daughter who must have been very cold to be in her husband’s tent. Her father seemed so disappointed to be leaving.

One day she came home from school early as the bushfires were closing in. Her mother was still at work but her father was home. He was in the bedroom kneeling behind a woman she did not know. They didn’t have any clothes on and he was pushing against her very hard. At first she thought the woman was in pain but she didn’t seem to want it to stop.

It wasn’t long before her father showed her just how super she was with one of the most wonderful gifts in the whole world. He was going to take her to Canada where his family came from long ago – just the two of them! Even Mummy seemed jealous and looked at them both from across the room, out of the corner of her eye.

He would take only her. She was so excited and packed her bag weeks before they had to leave. But when they arrived, they did not go to the cities or the mountains or the lakes she had seen in the brochures, but instead he turned onto dirt roads until they arrived at a remote farm, hours later. Her father was hugged for a long time at the door by the same woman she had seen him kneeling behind, back at her house many months before. The woman looked at her curiously then took her father inside and closed the door. She spent most of their two weeks in Canada roaming the property talking to the animals. The doors to the house were often shut muffling the painful cries of the woman inside.

In time her father would spend more hours at home to take a deeper interest in her. It was because she was... Super?

Special. It would be their little secret. Secrets were very special. Several years later she would have an abortion to keep a secret with her boyfriend.

All this helped her greatly when she married her husband. Super girls know exactly how to stop being special to the men in their lives. A firm message is needed! Remind them that you are in control – you will no longer be manipulated. No more agreeing to their devious schemes. No more falling for their special gifts, trips away, special embraces, even welcoming them into church families. They are all ways to control, put down and humiliate.

Super girls need only take that which is super from those around them to stop that happening. Super girls don’t need anyone else anymore.

2

Female, Pulse, what more

could you want?

I wonder how many people miss out on the one that God has set aside for them (or indeed ‘ones’ if we consider God affords Himself some ‘wiggle room’)? I wonder how many people get tired of waiting for the right person, find the wrong person to get them ‘through it’, and then the right person passes them by because they are already taken? I do sympathise with the fairer sex however. For those looking for a strong spiritual leader in their future husband the mathematics is simply not in their favour. There have always been far more Christian women than men and, of those who do worship regularly, the women seem far more committed. No wonder, after a time, some woman assertively take the first Christian option that comes along, or marry a non-Christian whom they will stoically maintain publicly is ‘a good man’, to anyone who will listen.

Ideally, it would be wonderful for people to just meet in their church, or another church, and fall in love. I think churches should do more to get their single people together. Churches are so geared towards the family unit that single people can often feel left out. In some congregations if you are older than thirty, and single, you might be looked upon as a strange curiosity. I have single male friends who are regularly overlooked at get-togethers as if something is wrong with them. People conclude that they have somehow bypassed their natural impulses and testosterone surges, so, perhaps ultimately their urges are not normal. They conclude that perhaps we should smile at them, while gently pushing their children behind them. I know of at least one female over forty who experiences this, not with children, but with women forcefully encouraging their husbands behind them as soon as they discover she is over forty and still single. Women became suddenly very cold to her and would take every opportunity (while looking her up and down) to remind her that the overweight guy with the glasses and flannelette shirt is off the market! No doubt this protective attitude was kindled in a growing awareness of the aforementioned mathematical, male meat-market, and whatever they had to go through to win their trophy man in the first place.

And then there is the group of married but childless couples who, under the barrage of church activities like mothers’ groups, Dad’s camps, Mother’s Day services; amidst calls for children to go to their Sunday School classes, toddlers banging into their shins, and the regular observation Isn’t it time you thought about having a family?, have pulled back from church....‘for a season’.

Now I am no oil painting, but I have a job, a full head of hair and despite being 45 was still close to my ideal weight when I was single (or alone in church). So when it came time during the church service to ‘welcome someone you didn’t come with’ I started ducking off to the toilet to avoid those middle-aged single women who seemingly just happen to be close enough to say hello, again. And perhaps hoping to not hug me one day because I was the person they had come with! Churches can be so family oriented they can sometimes be exclusionary. But that is a matter for another book.

As I said, the ratio of eligible women in churches has always exceeded that of men. Joyce Meyer used to warn the women in her church, If God tells you who He wants you to marry, don’t rush over and tell the guy, you will freak him out! Back in the 90’s, I attended a charismatic, Pentecostal church on the Central Coast of New South Wales where a highly enigmatic divorcee with a gift for preaching had joined our church. Also there, a woman with two girls to a previous relationship (and who was considered one of our foremost intercessors, moving powerfully in prophetic ministries). She approached my wife with a matter one Sunday and Lois then discreetly brought me in on the conversation. Tell Fraser exactly what you told me, she coaxed, her eyes rolling ever so slightly. Apparently God had told her that she would marry this new ‘Holy Honey’. The trouble is God must have forgotten to tell him, because he was taking a long time to ask her out. To cut a long story short and in true high school style, I was recruited to call him, share with him her thoughts and discover if he had indeed received the same love email from God in his prayer inbox. With gentlemanly grace he asked her for an immediate face to face meeting. Her knees went weak as she readily agreed. However, her return to our home was not so joyful. Apparently he had no romantic leanings towards her and God had not encouraged him with the other side of her romantic designs. It seems that in matters of love and romance, our heart can sometimes move ahead of the Spirit (or in a different direction), contaminating ‘Words of Knowledge’, even for a recognised intercessor. Perhaps the head hears what the heart wants, and we leave the Spirit out of it completely.

My advice? If you can avoid it, don’t marry a non-Christian. That is not necessarily Biblical (unless you are marrying for a second time – more to come on that), but the difference it made in my life was extraordinary and life-changing. How heart-breaking when you receive one of those revelatory ‘WOW’ moments from God and you turn to the person with whom you have been made one flesh and your unfettered verbal eruption is met with a deadpan look. You may want to share a revelation from scripture or something that God has dropped into your spirit and the response you get (if any) is brief, polite, or a complete lack of comprehension as they then leave the room to make a coffee. Inside you are screaming with excitement and the only one whose attention you can hold is the dog. (Oh well, at least he wagged his tail).

Don’t start marriage unevenly yoked. Don’t put your current children through it, don’t put your future kids through it and don’t put yourself through it. You deserve better! What’s more – insure yourself! I like the idea that if I have injured myself at home, my wife can do more than offer me a Band-Aid or a call to 000! Now, I have virtually no interest at all in cars but even I know that if your Holden breaks down then you need to take it back to the Holden manufacturer who made it in the first place. In other words, if you want your car to run the way it was meant to, when it first left the showroom floor, then you need to take it back to the people who designed and built it. Similarly, if your spouse is not a Christian then don’t expect them to understand you, appreciate you, look after you properly or communicate adequately with you. You are a triune being: body, soul and spirit (just like your Father in Heaven –we are made in his image). At best, an agnostic spouse will comprehend two-thirds of you, and even then in a limited way as the three aspects must necessarily inform the other