Saved, sanctified, water baptised…
THIRTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Avadeen D has found herself in a tough situation.
She is forced to make the decision between giving her life totally to God, or continue living in a common-law union after being convicted by the Holy Spirit to become a Christian.
She has been saved and water baptised, but says she is using common sense when determining what happens in her relationship.
“I can’t convince my partner of five years to marry me and we have a young child. He’s the main breadwinner. We’re still living as ‘man and wife’ even though I’m baptised and I know the church frowns heavily on this,” she said.
It’s a problem that crosses denominations and beliefs, as after being saved one is required to cut all ties to the world, including living in sin, before they can be truly accepted as a child of God by the church.
And for some it’s simple to leave the unsaved partner they have few ties with, but for others who share joint finances and children, the decision to leave an unholy union is harder.
Thirty-seven-year-old Vandine McCurdy was in a similar situation.
“When I got saved people told me to leave the man and come into church and I said no because who was going to take care of me and my kids?” McCurdy told All Woman. “And in everything you have to use wisdom. I couldn’t leave him.”
So despite her conviction, and despite going to church on a regular basis, McCurdy did not take her water baptism because she could not afford to leave the man she had been with for 22 years and had three children with.
“I think if I was forced to leave him then I would not get saved,” she said. “But to me it was a situation where when God is calling you, you can run, but for how long?”
And so months after been torn between the two situations, McCurdy and her partner were wed, leaving her free to serve God, despite her husband not going into the faith.
“I got saved but I never got baptised until I was married,” she explained. “I can tell you that my pastor said he would not have told me to leave the man because he didn’t have anywhere to take me and my kids and put me. So his advice was not to leave the man. But I knew that if I was going to be living with the man he was going to want sex so I wanted to be on the safe side by getting married first and baptising after.”
Dr Barry Davidson, marriage officer, counselling psychologist and director of Family Life Ministries said priority has to be placed on keeping the family unit together even if one person gets saved.
“My perspective is that one has to put the priority on the family, but once persons get saved the relationship now becomes unequally yoked from a Christian perspective,” Dr Davidson explained.
“However, there is a responsibility to your family and we all know from experience that children are the ones who suffer the most in any form of separation, divorce or breaking up. So we can’t afford that because a person has become a Christian that the family suffers and children end up suffering because the parents are splitting up,” he said.
“So what we encourage, from my perspective, is for the family to stay together and we are prepared to entertain working with them to try and see how we can concretise the relationship if it’s possible.”
Dr Davidson said the other thing that persons need to realise is that even though people are living together, it does not necessarily mean they are going to make a marriage work.
“Counselling is required for every situation like that regardless of how long they have been living together,” the marriage counsellor said pointing towards the Bible passage in 1st Peter 3 which speaks about persons who are already married but which he said could also apply to common-law unions.
“It speaks to the fact that the woman, virtually by the way she lives, can impact the man in such a way that he can come into the faith,” Dr Davidson explained.
“So there is a challenge from scripture as to how to win the unsaved spouse in the faith. So the scripture does suggest that it is possible and that there is a way in which that [winning over the partner] can happen. So my first priority is not to break up the family, my second priority is to see how I can encourage the unbelieving spouse to come into the faith, and then the third priority is having committed to it, to then now seriously do what they know God would want them to do and that is to get married,” he said.
Though the decision was hard for 39-year-old Tracy-Lee Pearson-Drummond to give up her life with her partner of 23 years, she decided to get baptised but did not leave her common-law-husband and father of her three children aged seven, 11 and 16, who had no such conviction.
“I got baptised before I got married because I was saved before and just decided that I was going to step out of the box and get baptised,” Pearson-Drummond told All Woman. “When I got baptised, I slept in the same bed with him, but we never had sex or anything like that. I talked to him before and told him what was what. So he said he understood that I wanted to serve God and he would wait until we got enough money to get married then we would do whatever. But I didn’t live in a big house where I could go sleep in another room. And I wasn’t going to send him to sleep with the children. So I slept on the same bed with him and I wasn’t at east had he was at west, we slept close but we just never had sex or anything like that,” she recalled the incident leading up to her baptism two years ago.
This went on for four months before they finally gathered enough money to have a small wedding.
Today her husband is still unsaved as he said he is still not ready for a commitment to God.
“And it’s not good when you force a man to do anything because it will backfire on you,” Pearson-Drummond said. “And the thing is that if I don’t go church one day, he has a problem with it. He starts to ask why I don’t go to church and things like that. But he is not going,” she smiled.
“When you say ‘God’ you have to know for yourself what you want. If you decide that you want to serve God you have to know that you cannot have two masters. So once you decide to take that step, don’t worry ’bout nothing. If is your baby-father for donkey million years and if God say is him you going to marry, then he will be the one. Just trust God and he will come through as long as you have faith,” Pearson-Drummond encouraged.
Dr Davidson is adamant that he would not let religion or faith allow the family to break up as too much pain and hurt has been caused as a result. Instead, he noted that he would only encourage persons to leave their spouses if they are living in abusive situations since those could eventually lead to serious damage or death.
“There are other churches that encourage the saved partner to leave the union as a result of getting saved, irrespective of the damage it may cause to the family,” Dr Davidson said. “But which one of us, having been saved, stopped sinning immediately after? I believe the ministry of Christ is not about condemning people, it’s about convicting them towards change. But I’m committed to keeping the family together and try to work with them until they can get to a place where they do get married. But I do not believe in breaking up the family because somebody has committed to the Lord.”
