The Treasure in the Wreckage

There is a woman who sat down one day and wrote some of the most honest words a Christian wife has ever committed to public record. She tells us that before she agreed to marry her husband, she prayed, had a dream, and woke up with a strong sense that she should say yes. She is not unusual in this. Many people have had powerful dreams at significant crossroads in their lives. The experience feels real. It often feels certain. It can feel, in the moment of waking, as though something or someone outside of yourself has spoken directly into your situation.

But this is exactly where a blog post with any claim to biblical fidelity must stop and be honest, because what feels like divine guidance and what is divine guidance are not always the same thing, and the stakes of confusing them are too high to pass over in silence. Jeremiah 23:25-28 records God’s own words on this subject, and they are more direct than most churches will teach. He says He has heard the prophets who prophesy lies in His name, crying “I had a dream! I had a dream!” And He says, “Let the prophet who has a dream recount the dream, but let the one who has my word speak it faithfully. For what has straw to do with grain?” He is not saying that God never speaks through dreams in Scripture. He is warning with a blunt force that the claim of a dream is one of the oldest and most emotionally powerful vehicles for spiritual confusion, and that the heart of a person under enormous pressure, grief, longing, or desire is fully capable of generating a dream that feels like heaven and originates entirely from within. Ecclesiastes 5:3 adds simply: “A dream comes when there are many cares.” The weight of a decision, the pressure of a situation, the desires we carry into sleep — these produce vivid and emotionally charged dreams regularly, with no divine authorship required.

None of this allows us to look at this woman and pronounce that her dream was or was not from God. We were not there. We cannot evaluate it. What we can say, clearly and without apology, is that her dream is not the foundation on which her story should stand, and it must not become the foundation on which any reader builds their own decisions. The foundation that matters — the one that held her through twenty-one years of real suffering — is not the dream she had the night before she said yes. The Word of God was what she kept returning to long after the dream faded. It is the covenant she made at an altar. It was the Scripture she stood on when everything in her wanted to walk away. That deserves our attention. That is what the Bible can actually speak to. And that is where this post will spend its time.

That kind of transparency deserves a response that is equally honest, equally unperformed, and rooted not in church culture or trending spiritual opinion, but in the actual text of Scripture read in its original languages, in context, and with the intellectual and spiritual sobriety the subject demands. Because what this woman is navigating touches some of the most profound and most frequently distorted truths in the whole of the Bible: what a believing spouse is actually called to do in a broken marriage, what submission and endurance really mean at the level of their original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek roots, how to distinguish the voice of God from the voice of one’s own desperate longing, from spiritual manipulation, and from a church culture that has increasingly confused emotional performance with genuine encounter, and how to test claims of “God told me” against the only standard that Scripture authorizes.

Now we must look carefully at what this woman says God said to her in her deepest moment of crisis, and we must do so without either dismissing her or adding superstitious reverence to her words that Scripture itself does not sanction. She quotes what she heard as a direct divine address, a series of personal statements she received as God’s voice speaking to her in her pain. This is the realm that the church has most spectacularly failed to teach with both precision and compassion, and so the result is that people either reject all personal experience of God as presumption, or they accept every internal impression as divine and then cannot explain why so many of those impressions lead to wreckage.

Translators use two distinct words in the Greek New Testament, and they render both as “word.” One aspect is λόγος (logos), representing God’s eternal, structural, and revealed Word. This Word, as described in John 1:1, was with God in the beginning and was God, subsequently becoming flesh and dwelling among humanity. As per Isaiah 55:11 (and the Hebrew root ריק, rêq, meaning empty, hollow, vain), this Word does not return without effect. Logos is Scripture, the revealed canon, and an objective standard that measures all other words. The second is ῥῆμα (rhēma), which in Greek corresponds to the Hebrew and Aramaic אמר (amar), the utterance, the specific spoken word addressed to a specific hearer in a specific moment. The Aramaic form אֵימַר (eymar) appears throughout Daniel and carries the sense of a personal declaration from a throne to a subject. Jesus uses rhēma when He says that man shall not live by bread alone but by every rhēma that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3). The distinction matters, and the logos does not change. The rhēma is situationally specific. Every rhēma must be consistent with the logos. If a rhēma contradicts the logos, it is not God.

This is the test this woman’s received words pass clearly. She says God told her that her husband is not her enemy, that the devil is her enemy. This is not a new word. This is the logos of Ephesians 6:12, ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἡμῖν ἡ πάλη πρὸς αἷμα καὶ σάρκα, “for our struggle is not against flesh and blood.” The Greek word for struggle here is πάλη (palē), a wrestling term, the word for a full-contact grappling match, and Paul says our match is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers in the heavenly realms. What she received as personal conviction was consistent with what Paul wrote as logos. That is a green light in biblical discernment. She says God told her that love paralyzes the enemy. This is the logos of Romans 12:21, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” where the Greek ἀγαθός (agathos) means not merely that which feels pleasant but that which is morally excellent, genuinely beneficial. She says God told her to love her husband as He has loved her. This is the logos of John 13:34, “as I have loved you, so you must love one another.” What she received as personal conviction echoed and applied the logos. That is the biblical pattern.

This is also the test that must apply to every claim of “God told me” in the modern church, and many such claims fail it at some point. The biblical framework for handling prophetic or personal claims is not emotional resonance. It is multi-layered. Deuteronomy 18:22 provides the first test: does the word come to pass? Deuteronomy 13:1-3 provides the second and more urgent test: does the word, even if it comes with signs and wonders, lead you toward or away from God and His established character? Isaiah 8:20 provides the third: does it align with the law and the testimony, the written Word? And 1 Corinthians 14:29 provides the fourth: is it submitted to the discernment of the assembled body of mature believers? A personal impression or conviction does not automatically self-validate. And in the modern church, where “God told me” has become both the most powerful and most dangerous phrase in common use, the body of Christ has largely abandoned the responsibility to apply these tests. The result is a culture where the person who claims the most confident divine communication holds the most power, regardless of whether their claim is true. That is not biblical discernment. That is a spiritual performance dressed in biblical vocabulary.

She says God called her a Teacher, and this also deserves honest engagement. The Greek word for teacher is διδάσκαλος (didaskalos), from the root δείκνυμι (deiknymi), meaning to show, to point out, to make visible. A teacher in the biblical sense is not someone who exercises authority or issues corrections. A teacher is someone who makes something invisible visible, who takes what hides in the text or in the experience of God and brings it into the light of comprehension for others. Paul describes the calling to teach in 1 Corinthians 12:28 and Ephesians 4:11 as a gift given to the body, not a title claimed for oneself. Other believers do not rank below the New Testament teacher. The teacher serves other believers by illuminating the Word. The church is full of people who have claimed the title of teacher as a position of spiritual superiority, who use it to establish hierarchies of correction rather than communities of illumination. But the woman in this article is not doing that. She aligns with biblical teachers by taking her own hidden, raw, and unprocessed life experiences and making them visible. This visibility allows others who suffer invisibly to see their experiences reflected in God’s truth, offering them help. That is didaskalos in its purest expression.

Let us turn now to the word that the modern church has perhaps most catastrophically distorted: submission. The Greek word, ὑποτάσσω (hupotassō), combines the Greek words ὑπό (hupo), meaning under, and τάσσω (tassō), meaning to arrange or to place in order. In its military context, it described the voluntary alignment of troops under a shared command. The critical word there is voluntary. The middle voice of hupotassō in Greek carries a reflexive meaning: to place oneself willingly under a structure. It is categorically different from ὑπακούω (hupakouō), the word Paul uses for the obedience of children to parents and slaves to masters (Ephesians 6:1, 6:5). For wives in marriage, Paul deliberately chose hupotassō, not hupakouō. The difference lies in a partner choosing to serve versus a subordinate who receives commands to comply. And this is the part the church has almost universally excised from the conversation: Ephesians 5:22 in the original Greek does not even contain its own verb. There is no verb in the Greek text of verse 22. The verse borrows its verb from verse 21, which reads ὑποτασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις ἐν φόβῳ Χριστοῦ, “submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.” The submission of the wife in verse 22 is a specific application of the mutual submission that Paul has already commanded of all believers in verse 21. Any theology of marriage that quotes verse 22 without standing it on the foundation of verse 21 has surgically removed the passage from its own grammatical context and replaced it with something the text does not teach.

What this means for the woman writing this article is significant. She has not submitted to her husband in the distorted sense that a portion of the church teaches, a sense that would require her to absorb abuse silently and call it holiness, or to comply with sexual sin and call it wifely obedience. She has submitted to God. The Hebrew equivalent concept, שׁוּב (shuv), means to return or to turn back toward. It is the word used for repentance throughout the Hebrew Bible; the act of re-orienting one’s direction back toward God. When she says she submitted to God in all things, she is using the language of hupotassō correctly: voluntary, reflexive, directed toward God as the ultimate commander, and then flowing outward from that center into her marriage as a partnership of two people both oriented under the same authority. This is what Paul meant. This is what the original Greek requires.

Now, the word endurance, because this woman has lived it for over two decades and deserves to have that living held up against its full biblical weight rather than reduced to a platitude. The Greek word ὑπομονή (hupomonē) derives from ὑπό (hupo) and μένω (menō). Meno means to remain, to abide, or to stay. Literally: remaining under. The theological force of hupomonē is not passive suffering. It is not grit- your -teeth religious survival. James 1:3-4 says that faith testing produces hupomonē, and believers must allow hupomonē to complete its work so they may be complete, lacking nothing. Here, the Greek word for complete is τέλειος (teleios). This word means brought to its intended end and functioning as it was designed to function. Endurance is not the opposite of joy. The writer of Hebrews commands believers to run with hupomonē the race set before them while looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross (Hebrews 12:1-2). Jesus endured the cross through joy, not despite it. The joy was the vision of what the endurance was producing. When this woman says she decided not to leave, not because the marriage was not painful but because she saw something on the other side of that endurance, she is functioning in hupomonē in exactly this sense. She is remaining under the weight of the marriage, not because God is indifferent to her pain, but because the weight is producing something that only hupomonē can produce.

The Hebrew equivalent in the Old Testament is קָוָה (qāvāh), a word whose root connects to the image of a rope being twisted and twisted until it is strong. When Isaiah says those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength and mount up with wings as eagles (Isaiah 40:31), the word for hope is qāvāh. It is the endurance that twists under tension until it becomes the thing that can bear weight and carry others. Over two decades of consistent pain have twisted this woman, and the question that her article implicitly poses is not whether that pain was real but whether qāvāh can be the result. The biblical answer is yes. Not automatically or without cost. But genuine, yes.

The article has a point that needs direct addressing: her description of the convictions she received in her darkest season, which she presents as if God’s own words were being reproduced. This deserves theological care rather than either uncritical validation or dismissive skepticism. The question the Bible asks about such personal convictions is not “is this possible?” but: what fruit does the word produce? Jesus said in Matthew 7:16 that you will know them by their fruit, using the Greek καρπός (karpos), the natural, organic outcome of an organism living according to its nature. He applied this principle to prophets and to prophecy. What did these convictions produce in this woman? They produced a turning away from bitterness toward love. They produced a shift from self-preservation toward sacrifice. For another person’s freedom, they produced a willingness to remain in a painful covenant. By the karpos test, the convictions are not leading her toward sin, toward self-exaltation, toward a break from the community of faith, or toward any of the red flags the prophetic tradition of Scripture consistently attaches to false spiritual language. They are leading her toward agapē.

The word ἀγάπη (agapē) appears nowhere in pre-Christian Greek literature as a significant or common term. The New Testament writers chose it intentionally. It is not the love of passion (eros), nor the love of friendship and affinity (philos), nor the familial love of natural bond (storgē). Agapē is the love that wills the highest good of another, regardless of cost to oneself, regardless of the other’s merit, and regardless of emotional response. It is the love John describes when he writes in 1 John 4:8 that God is agapē. Not that God has agapē, or that agapē is one of God’s characteristics. That God is it. That it defines His essential nature so completely that the word is interchangeable with His identity. And the command to love one another as He has loved us is a command to let agapē flow from its source in God through us as conduits toward one another, including, and especially, toward those who have wounded us. The woman in this article received that conviction and began trying to do it. That is the biblical definition of discipleship.

But here we must speak plainly about what the modern church has done with these teachings, because this woman’s article sits inside a church culture that has deeply corrupted many of the truths she is trying to live, and those corruptions themselves are a danger to her and to the many people reading her words.

The modern church, particularly in its American evangelical and charismatic expressions, has developed what can accurately be called a spiritual performance culture. This culture has taken the genuine, scripture-rooted concept of God’s voice and turned it into social currency. “God told me” has become in many communities not a claim submitted to testing and discernment but a trump card that ends conversations, establishes hierarchies, and silences questions. When someone in a community of believers claims “God said,” and that community never subjects the claim to the dokimazō process that 1 John 4:1 requires. δοκιμάζετε τὰ πνεύματα (dokimazete ta pneumata), “test the spirits,” where δοκιμάζω (dokimazō) is a metallurgical term meaning to assay, to run through the fire to determine what is genuine and what is dross — the result is a community organized around the spiritual authority of whoever makes the most confident claims about divine communication. This is not biblical Christianity. It is a spiritual performance dressed in biblical vocabulary.

The same culture has weaponized the concept of hierarchy in marriage. By taking the passages about headship in Ephesians 5 out of their mutual-submission context and out of their “as Christ loved the church” framework, portions of the church have constructed a theology of male authority in marriage that resembles the ancient Roman concept of patria potestas, the absolute authority of the male head of household, far more than it resembles Paul’s radical reinterpretation of household relationships through the lens of Christ’s self-sacrifice. Paul’s instruction to husbands is not “lead your wife.” It is “die for her, wash her with the Word, nourish and cherish her as you do your own body” (Ephesians 5:25-29). The Greek word for nourish, ἐκτρέφω (ektrephō), is the same word used for raising children tenderly. Ancient texts used the Greek word for cherish, θάλπω (thalpō), to describe the warmth a bird provides by sitting on her eggs. A husband exercising biblical headship is one who covers his wife with warmth, who draws out her growth, who lays his preferences down so that her flourishing can happen. Any version of headship that uses hupotassō to demand rather than to serve is a theological inversion of the passage it claims to apply.

The correction culture that flows from this distorted hierarchy is equally damaging. In many churches, the concept of “speaking truth in love” from Ephesians 4:15 — λαλοῦντες δὲ τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐν ἀγάπῃ (lalountes de tēn alētheian en agapē) — has become a license for relentless public correction, shaming, and spiritual gatekeeping. The person being corrected is told that their resistance is itself evidence of their sin. This is a closed loop of control. It resembles what Paul actually describes as a mark of false spiritual authority far more than it resembles genuine prophetic ministry. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 11:20 that the Corinthians have allowed those who enslave them, who exploit them, who take advantage of them, who exalt themselves, and who strike them in the face. He is describing spiritual abuse. The Greek ὑμᾶς καταδουλοῖ (humas katadouloi), “enslaves you,” uses the intensified form of doulos, the slave word, meaning someone who reduces you from a dignified person to property. Paul does not affirm this. He exposes it. Any community that maintains leadership’s claim to spiritual authority by shaming, weaponizing submission language, demanding believers silence their own discernment, and using “God told me to tell you” as a control mechanism exhibits the exact patterns Paul describes in that passage.

The woman in this article has navigated this terrain carefully. Without qualification, she has not told other women to endure abuse as a spiritual discipline. According to her, God placed a special conviction in her heart, a conviction to remain and to love. She has not created and imposed a doctrinal system on others. She has not said, “God told me you must stay. Her words were, “I believed this was my calling, and those facing similar situations might also feel a similar calling.” There is a world of difference between testifying to a personal conviction and legislating it as universal doctrine. The church frequently confuses these, and this confusion causes real harm in both directions: either the church dismisses personal convictions as irrelevant private experience, or it inflates them into binding doctrinal positions that others must follow.

She herself raises the danger of wounding humans for advice in the middle of a crisis. God Himself possesses the Hebrew concept of עֵצָה (etsah), counsel, as described in Isaiah 28:29. In this verse, His counsel is called פְּלִאיִ (peli), wonderful, beyond ordinary comprehension. The best human counsel in a time of marital crisis is not the counsel that simply affirms what you want to hear. Proverbs 15:22 speaks about the counsel of many advisors leading to wisdom, but it consistently distinguishes between counsel rooted in the fear of the Lord and counsel rooted in the flesh. The church’s failure here is not that it offers counsel. It is that it offers counsel without the fear of the Lord, shaped by cultural preference rather than scriptural fidelity, counsel that is too quick to say “leave” in the name of self-care or too quick to say “stay no matter what” in the name of submission, without the discernment to hear what the Word actually says to this specific person in this specific situation.

The woman writes that the enemy concerning the subject of marriage has polluted the church, holding a worldly and selfish view instead of a God view, and that Christians change spouses the way they change their outfits. She is right, and the language she uses here is sharper than she may realize. The Hebrew word for the covenant bond in marriage, בְּרִית (berit), is the same word used for the covenant between God and Israel. It is the word used at Sinai; the word used in the Abrahamic covenant; the word used in the new covenant promises of Jeremiah 31. Berit is not a contract with exit clauses. It is a covenant sealed with blood, death, and the invocation of God as witness. When Malachi 2:14-16 says God hates divorce, the Hebrew word used is שָׂנֵא (sānē), and the context is not God hating the divorced person. God hates the breaking of the covenant because He knows what it does to the human beings inside it, and because the covenant of marriage reflects the covenant between Himself and His people. Paul makes this explicit in Ephesians 5:32 when he calls marriage a μυστήριον (mystērion), a mystery that points to Christ and the church. To treat marriage as disposable is to treat the picture of the gospel as disposable.

None of this means that Scripture demands every person remain in every marriage under every condition. Jesus permits divorce on the grounds of πορνεία (porneia), sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9), and Paul permits a believing spouse to let an unbelieving spouse leave if the unbelieving partner goes (1 Corinthians 7:15), using the word δεδούλωται (dedoulōtai), “is bound,” to describe the covenant relationship, meaning the believer is not enslaved to hold together what the unbelieving partner refuses to honor. Biblical passages on marriage do not aim to chain people to abuse or demand that people consider suffering spiritually noble in every circumstance, regardless of its nature or severity. They protect the covenant, to honor the picture it represents, and to call both partners to the agapē that alone makes a covenant marriage possible.

What this woman is living is the frontier of that call. She is in a marriage where her husband has sinned repeatedly and seriously against her. She has reached the end of her rope. In her continued love, she perfectly illustrated John’s concept from 1 John 4:19, which describes the response to prior love: “we love, because He first loved us” (ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν). The structure of the Greek is revealing. The verb ἀγαπῶμεν is a present active indicative. It is not “we loved once” or “we will love someday.” It is “we are loving, right now, continuously, as an ongoing action.” The source of that action is always prior: He first loved. She is not sustaining her love for her husband on the power of her own goodwill. She is receiving love from God and allowing it to flow through her. This is not weakness. This is the most radical act of strength available to a human being.

I must say one more thing about this article, and it concerns how she does what she does: transparently, publicly, without the spiritual performance’s airbrushing, in real time while the story remains unresolved. The Greek word for encouragement in Scripture is παράκλησις (paraklēsis), from the same root as παράκλητος (paraklētos), the Comforter, the Helper, the name Jesus gives the Holy Spirit in John 14:26. The paraklete is literally “one called alongside.” Paraklēsis is what the paraklete does: it is the act of coming alongside someone in their difficulty, not above them in spiritual superiority, not behind them with correction, not in front of them with a prescription, but alongside them, in the same dirt, speaking truth to them in a way that gives them the courage to stand. What this woman is doing by writing honestly about her marriage while the marriage is still in process is an act of paraklēsis. She is coming alongside the people who are reading her and saying: I am here too. You are not alone. God is with you in this. That is one of the most biblically precise things a believer can do for another believer.

The way we seek people must match the way God seeks us. He doesn’t look for us via a correction memo. Nor does He say I am sorry for you or pursue us via a hierarchy of spiritual gatekeepers who determine our worthiness. He seeks us through love, through truth, through the constant, faithful showing up of His presence, even when we have wandered into bondage. He sent His Son while we were still sinners, ἔτι ἁμαρτωλῶν ὄντων ἡμῶν (eti hamartōlōn ontōn hēmōn), Romans 5:8, because the present active participle shows He gave His love while we were still sinning, not after we had changed our minds. He seeks us as Ruach HaKodesh, רוּחַ הַקֹּדֶשׁ, the Holy Spirit, the breath of the Holy, who does not bludgeon or expose or correct from a throne of spiritual authority but who hovers, as in Genesis 1:2, מְרַחֶפֶת (merachephet), the same word used of a bird hovering over its nest, over the chaos and the void, breathing the possibility of order into what has not yet become what it was meant to be. Just as Jesus called up to Zacchaeus in the tree without demanding repentance first, he also seeks us, inviting us into relationship and allowing love to foster transformation. He seeks us the way the father ran in Luke 15, not waiting for the prodigal to deliver a complete theological accounting of his failures but running while the son was still a great distance away, ἔτι δὲ αὐτοῦ μακρὰν ἀπέχοντος (eti de autou makran apechontos), covering the distance between them with his own legs, not the son’s.

This is the model for seeking people. It’s not through a spiritual hierarchy, nor by means of public shaming or humiliation. Not through performing authority. By running to help them in their mess. By accompanying them through their suffering. Instead of using truth as a weapon to prove our rightness and their wrongness, we can use it as a light that helps them see the path. Through being willing to remain under the weight of a relationship, submitted to God and enduring in the struggle, not because the struggle is good but because what is on the other side of faithful love is the thing the whole gospel is about: transformation, freedom, and the eruption of someone’s truest self from under the chains of what has held them captive.

The woman who wrote this article understood that. She stayed. She lives the Word in real time, regardless of her husband’s ultimate full delivery, her marriage’s fulfillment of her hopes, or its continuation as a war zone. That is what faithfulness looks like when it is not performing, not on a stage, not protected behind a carefully curated testimony, but bleeding and trusting and remaining under and running toward at the same time. That is the key, she said, God gave her. And it is the one the whole Bible has been pointing to from the beginning: that love, the costly, voluntary, God-sourced, agapē kind, is the only thing that can unlock the treasure buried in another human being who does not yet know they carry it.

Even what frays under pressure can be rewoven by the hands we cannot see.