If one of your friends is currently going through a difficult divorce, you have the opportunity to step up and support her through this challenging time.
However, there are certain rules to helping a friend through her divorce and so I’ve put together these tips on what NOT to say to help you, help her:
6. “You just didn’t pray hard enough!” “You are too carnal, walking in the flesh!”, “Surely you could have believed God and stayed in your marriage!”. “What did you do? There are always two sides to every story!” “If you say he cheated, I bet it was because you were not meeting his needs? Otherwise, why would a Christian husband cheat?” “There is nothing God can’t do, pray to God for his deliverance and he will stop beating you.”
- If you are a Christian and happen to be divorced, one of the most devastating things of all (and one that often saddens me the most as a Divorce Recovery Coach who is also a Woman of God) is that on several occasions, I have found that many of my clients and friends too, while in the middle of their worst nightmares, some finding themselves either as victims of abuse and/or being abandoned by their husbands, were also abandoned by the church and by many of their "Christian" friends.
Some divorced or separated Christians, have, as a result taken a downwards spiral and experienced a crisis of faith and even where they may have healed from the grief and shame of the divorce (and the traumatic years of physical and emotional abuse leading up to it), the betrayal and abandonment experienced at the hands of the Church and of church friends is something many are still hugely struggling today, many years later. The reactions above are quite representative of what many Christian women have had to experience.
#TuesdayQAndA #WhatNotToSay #DivorceAndFriends