MarriageAnonymous

20 Sept 3 min read

The Gospel He Never Practiced; He Knew Ephesians, Not Love

I met him at a vigil, in a neighborhood church I was invited to by my then roomate. He prayed like a man who had God's direct line on speed dial, and I mistook his loud "amens" for depth. Seven months later, we were married. I didn't yet know that a man can memorize the entire book of Ephesians and still not obey a single line of it. It started small. Any time I disagreed with him — where we lived, how we spent money, even what name to give our first child — he already had a verse loaded and ready. "Wives, submit to your husbands." He said it slowly, deliberately, like a judge reading a death sentence. I learned to nod. Nodding was cheaper than arguing with a man who had turned scripture into a weapon. But somehow the chapter always stopped at verse 22. He never once continued to where it says a husband must love his wife the way Christ loved the church — sacrificially, gently, willing to die for her. He never remembered that verse the night he staggered home at 11pm, reeking of alcohol, unable to hold his own head straight. He never remembered it the day he spent our children's school fees on Baba Ijebu, chasing a lucky number that never came, then told me to "trust God" when I asked how we were supposed to pay the school. The night I finally exploded, I asked him, "You want me to submit — to what? To your lies? To your ugly temper? To the money you keep pouring into bottles and betting slips while your children go hungry?" He looked at me as if I had blasphemed. "Does the Bible not say a wife must respect her husband?" — as though respect and truth were enemies of each other. I stopped arguing scripture with him after that. Not because I lost the argument, but because I realized he was never actually quoting the Bible. He was quoting his own edited version — one with every accountable part surgically removed, leaving only the parts that kept me silent. For years I carried that confusion on my back like an extra child — the agony of being told I was failing God because I questioned a man who wasn't even trying to obey God himself. I prayed. I fasted. I begged God to change my heart, to help me "submit better." I never once asked Him to open my eyes. I was blinding myself and calling it faith. The eyes opened anyway. Slowly, painfully. It was a sermon I almost didn't attend that finally cracked me open — the preacher, a woman, said something that went straight through me: "Submission was never a leash. It's a dance. And dancing needs two people moving together in love — not one person dragging while the other bleeds and smiles for the camera." That day I walked out of church and looked at my husband with new eyes. Not with hatred — with clarity, sharp and unforgiving. I stopped shrinking every time he raised a verse like a blade. I started asking him, calmly, coldly, "Show me where it's written that I should be lied to. Show me where it says I should carry this entire marriage alone and still call it partnership, while you pour our future into a bottle and a betting slip." He had no answer. Men who use scripture as a shield rarely do — because it was never about God to begin with. It was about control, dressed up in a choir robe to look like holiness. I am still in that house. I still wear the ring. I still pray — but not the same prayer anymore. I no longer beg God to make me smaller. I beg Him to heal my husband, and I beg Him for the strength to stop mistaking my own silence for holiness. Some of us didn't leave the church when we left the lie. We just finally learned to read the whole page — every verse, every side, not just the ones that were convenient for them.