How Not to Display Accurate Empathy II

It Takes a Miracle
1 Samuel 1: 12-19a

A little while ago a woman came to see me to talk about the way her husband was abusing her. It involved some physical abuse; he had hit her once or twice, but the background was not that he was an inherently violent person or a drunkard. The problem was more one of his negative, critical, dismissive attitude to her. The love he had once showed her seemed to have totally disappeared. So she came to ask what she should do. The trouble about the pastoral encounter was that I had in my head some of the things the New Testament says about wives submitting to their husbands and being willing to suffer as Jesus did, and I made two mistakes in my pastoral dealings with her. I failed to take into account the differences between the situation likely presupposed by those New Testament exhortations; and I failed actually to appreciate the dynamics and the pain of the woman’s situation. (Fortunately, she was extraordinarily patient with me rather than dismissing me as another abusive man, so that even if the pastoral encounter did her no good, I learned a lot from it.)...