This is Being a Pastor's Wife

How many women watch their man get beaten into the dirt? Welcome him home battered and bruised? Unable to help him, forced to stay soft and calm, our anger unhelpful. He must go this alone. You are left to pick up the pieces, morning, noon, and night. 

This is being a pastor's wife.

She must keep loving the very ones who rip her husband to shreds. That she must smile and hug and not defend. That she must urge him yet again over the wall of the trench and into friendly fire without losing her love of the shooters.

She sheds tears, pacing her home, as hour after hour after hour he is gone. Who notices her tears? Tears cried in the darkness of the night, in the shower, in times alone, for she won't risk further harm to her man, not at her hand. What human hears her prayers? Prayers for her man to be brave enough to face the guns again and again and again. Prayers that he'll endure even if it kills him and she has to watch. Prayers for friends she's desperatly trying to treat like friends when they hold the smoking gun.

How? How does she love the church as much or more than her man when it's the church that is tearing him apart, walking him up to the scaffold with no trial, themselves judge-jury-executioner. How? How does she brace up a man who thinks he's the problem? Who thinks the whole world will be better if he's gone? How does she remind him yet again that he's needed?

This is being a pastor's wife.

(Psalm 56:8)