Marriage

Yesterday, Will led a discussion with the "Young Christian Fellowship" group from the Moru church. This group is aimed towards young married women. Most of the women's husbands are living in South Sudan and they stay here in Arua, Uganda with their children.

Will led the discussion from Ephesians 5 and focused on the call for men to love their wives and women to respect their husbands. We quickly learned that "discussion based" groups are not common in this culture. Typically, they would prefer to sit and listen. However, they responded well and gave us good insights into marriages in the Moru culture.

Hearing from these women reminded me of how much marriage is in crisis in this world. Satan loves to distort and pervert marriage away from the way God desired it to look. This happens everywhere, but it is more hidden in other places than it is in Africa.

We asked the women how their husbands love them well. This immediately turned into a discussion about how the men left them (all of them seemed to be shaking their heads in agreement, so we assumed this was the case with almost all of them) in Arua with the children and have taken other wives in South Sudan. They said they don't like calling their husbands anymore because when they call them, a woman will often pick up and start insulting them. It sounds like their husbands do not openly discuss other women, but it is just expected and known without it being something that can be mentioned. In this culture, if a man gets a woman pregnant, He is supposed to claim her as his wife. So, in a place with very little birth control, it is common for a man to get another woman pregnant while he is cheating on his wife. He then has multiple wives and multiple children to provide for. Due to everything happening in South Sudan, most of these men have very little money right now, so the money they do have goes to provide for their most current wives/ children, and the first wives are left in Arua without means of providing for their children and with a husband who stops coming around. You can imagine how this conversation quickly turned in a way we didn't expect when asking how their husbands love them well...

During the course of the discussion, one woman asked me how to keep respecting your husband even when he does not love you well. I responded from my own experience and explained that the Bible doesn't say to only respect your husband if he is loving you, but that we are called to respect no matter what. I explained this takes a lot of prayer and can only be done through God's strength. The translator told the woman everything I said and then added, "She (me) is only saying this because she has a good husband. She is a kawaja (white woman), so she doesn't understand". They went on to discuss how "white people" have an easier time in marriages and how they wish they could have married a white person so their marriage would be good. Thankfully, Justin calmly explained how the same sins exist in the West, but are just more hidden. He explained that it is not a culture that they should want to immolate, but Jesus Christ. He did an amazing job walking them through respecting even when the situation is saturated in sin and how Christ is the only one who can give them the strength to do so. He explained that God does not force us to stay in abusive, adulterous relationships, but that He can provide strength in the midst of these or provide a way out (when there are Biblical reasons for doing so). The women responded extremely well to this and said that this was the encouragement they needed to keep going. They said they knew Jesus was able to give them the strength to endure and that they needed us to continue to pray for them in this process.

Please join us in praying for marriages in South Sudan (and the world). Pray for the men to have changed heart and to love their wives well and commit to one woman. Pray for the women to chose to respect even when it is hard and to lean on Christ as their first love and their strength. Pray for the children who are caught up in all of this and often live without fathers present- and without good examples of loving fathers.