Healing ual and Relational Brokenness

Andy was a homosexual. Annette was ually abused as a . Now they are married and leading a ministry dedicated to bringing healing in ual and relational brokenness. It is called Desert Stream.

If one area exists where probably just about everyone is broken, it is uality, my seminary professor once said. The brokenness is manifested not only in conspicuous things like homosexuality or ography, but also in subtle things like power struggle between a husband and a wife in marriage, or fear in dating scenes among singles. The confusion and distortion run the whole depth of humanity, from shallowest to deepest. What God in His goodness has created for beauty and joy has become a source of perversion and pain. How we wish we could restore it! We must restore it, and we can, by the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

I am reading Andrew Comiskey’s Strength in Weakness: Healing ual and Relational Brokenness. I hope you will read it also. To whet your appetite, I typed about 1.5 pages of his book below. A caution in reading it though: do not read it to accuse the other (male or female), but to acknowledge our own wrong in this relationship, confess and seek healing.

"The fallen pair set in motion a struggle for power that has raged since time's beginning. Whereas in Eden they complemented one another in wholeness, outside the garden the genders tend to merge in brokenness.

In the case of a woman, we see her greater relational capacity becoming a potential for sin. She now years for a man's love inordinately--a tendency that places her at risk of making a god out of a mere mortal. This occurs when she allows herself to be subject to the broken creation in a manner that eclipses the primacy of the Creator in her life. From this flow the sins of a woman compromising her dignity to satisfy a man's cruel demands. Her idolatry is paired with the sin of self-hatred.

Many men reinforce this idolatry through requiring much of a woman and yet giving little. They want leadership without the cost of serving a woman in love. They may even justify the imbalance on the grounds that men are superior… and thus entitled to receive more than she does. This can lead to all manner of boorish, demeaning behaviors toward women. At the root such sin involves misogyny, or the hatred and dishonor of woman.

Modern women often tend toward a counterreaction to this traditional idolatry. A woman may ignore her ned for men altogether. This is a posture of worldly justice; the woman now exists in reaction to the man's historic cruelty. She becomes larger than the man--more confident, more capable and free to need him no longer. In reaction to his abuses, she now refuses him. Her sin involves the suppression of her good and appropriate need for the man. She complements his misogyny with misandry, the hatred and dishonor of man.

Many men today grow up in a culture rife with misandry and misogyny. The battle for justice has resulted in evolving gender roles. This confusion, combined with a lack of adequate fathering, can leave men boyish and underdeveloped in their masculinity. They are thus prone to bonding with women in their immaturity.

Unsure of himself, this type of male does not lord himself over the woman in his life, but neither does he love her with the clarity and commitment that healthy relationships require. His presence may be underwhelming; hers, larger than life. She retains control through her greater function in the relationship and yet resents him for his littleness. Her disrepect reinforces his disempowerment. He remains at odds with himself and subject to self-contempt. She struggles for security in her oversized, maternal posture. Both need to confess the sins of not standing in their true status: man and woman before the Creator. Their mother-child dynamic undermines God's intent for his image bearers.

Related to this boyish immaturity is a pervasive theme I see in men today--the tendency toward narcissism. Here the man, unaffirmed and self-absorbed, engages the woman with a limited capacity to give himself to her. The relationship revolves around him. Even then he is nearly unable to love her, to extend himself beyond the awareness of his own desires. He sees her only to the degree that she satisfies him.

Such chronic selfishness can be cured only if it is acknowledged. Confessing the idolatry of self is the beginning of healing here. This requires more than the other party's long. It must involve the clear witness that such a self-serving posture is wrong. Otherwise the one partner can contribute to the idolatry of the narcissistic other." (Strength through Weakness, Andrew Comiskey, 103-5)