There are consequences for sin - especially horrible, heinous sins like sexual abuse. You may think your abuser has fooled other people, and your abuser may think he has too. But I can guarantee you they are absolutely not getting away with it. I want to show you a "picture" of my abuser as he is today. He has yet to reap the full consequences of his sin, but you can decide for yourself if he is getting away with his sin.
Consider this "picture" an outline only, like a pencil drawing--without the colors and details.
The abuser in my life, my brother, claims to be a Christian. He is teaching at a tiny church and substitute preaching. He helps serve meals to the homeless at his church. He has served as chairman of a committee. He has had different people (including two women) living with him over the years, supposedly to "help" them, yet none of them seem to want "his" God.
He has been married and divorced three times. The first marriage was to a barely turned 16 year old who, after a few years, got fed up with him and had an affair. The second marriage was to a woman about 10 years older than him. They hadn't known each other very long and just eloped. He has one daughter with this wife. She finally divorced him and moved to another town with their daughter and her two sons from another marriage. The sons never had anything to do with him again.
The third wife was 40 years old, never married, and didn't show up for her own wedding rehearsal. I could devote an entire blog to just her. She claims to have a spiritual gift that God reveals to her things (like truth) that the rest of us don't know. Let me just say that she has a significant amount of static on her special line and I don't think it is connected anywhere close to Heaven.
His daughter by the second wife goes to church regularly. She had her first baby at 15, her second baby at 16, and her third baby, just recently, by a man she is living with, who is still married to someone else. She has been married and divorced twice. My brother wonders why his daughter continues to make unwise choices.
He is a hoarder - a person who can't get rid of anything because he thinks everything is valuable or important to keep. He thinks everything is going to be valuable someday. He saves grocery store receipts for food that is already eaten.
A few years ago a pipe burst in his house and flooded his entire house. While the house was being redone, the boxes and furniture were in storage courtesy of the insurance company. During the remodel of his house, he nit-picked about everything. He made the contractor repaint walls and re-stain doors if he saw even one tiny little speck or flaw. I think it took a year for the work to be finished because of all the delays caused by my brother. Like I said, this happened a few years ago. The insurance company delivered his belongings back to his house. To this day, he has never unpacked anything except for his bedroom. His house is wall to wall, floor to ceiling boxes. There is a tunnel, literally, from his front door to his bedroom and bathroom. He has been issued violations of city ordinances for having a fire hazard. But that was only for the outside of his house.
He is verbally abusive to my mother. He hollers at her and calls her "woman" like a cave man. It is incredibly disrespectful. In the year his house was being remodeled, he lived with her, without asking her first. He yelled at her if she touched anything of his. His mail would stack up in enormous, gravity-defying piles because he had to go through everything, every piece of junk mail, every ad. But he wouldn't go through it for weeks and weeks so the ads would all be expired by then. I remember visiting my mom and seeing a 3 foot stack of mail in his room, like the leaning Tower of Pisa.
When I was young, I saw him hit my mom in the face. He started a fist fight with my dad in the doorway of my bedroom.
He is greedy and stingy. He has been known for being that way for a very long time. He never picks up the check at a restaurant and he thinks less than a 10% tip is enough. He gorges himself knowing someone else is paying for the food. He will take home everyone's left overs.
He would buy my mom something then show her the receipt and tell her how much he owes her. These were for things she didn't want and didn't ask for. It is unfortunate but my parents are partly at fault for giving in to this kind of nonsense.
He would do things for my parents, like mow the lawn, drive them to the doctor, etc. But he always expected to be paid to do anything for them and always at his convenience, not theirs.
In contrast, my brother would repair cars for friends and do all kinds of things totally free. I never could understand this until a very wise friend of mine explained it. She said when people do this it is because they are trying to appear like a really great person, so willing to help people. But the reality is that they aren't doing things to actually help people, they are doing it so the others watching will think how wonderful they are. This explains why he charges his parents and family to do things that normally other family members wouldn't. He has nothing to gain personally from helping family, so instead of wasting his time, he expects to be paid.
He hasn't held a steady job for years. In his last job, he bragged about how he told his boss that HER job was to make sure he could do HIS job. It is very sad to see a man in his 50's that has never learned how to be a good employee. Yes, he was eventually let go from that job.
I remember a few years ago taking him to a very well respected Christian psychologist to try to help my mom and him resolve some issues. My brother boldly told the psychologist that he would take my mom to the doctor and she'd only give him 20 bucks. My brother doesn't have a clue how that sounded, or that there was something wrong with his thinking.
The psychologist offered him free counseling through a church's professional counseling/psychology ministry. He first wanted my brother to go to a psychiatrist to be evaluated. He refused everything that psychologist recommended.
In October 2011, I found out he is lying, once again, about his abuse of me. He already acknowledged it many years ago when confronted with it. But now he is lying about it in order to deceive our mother. I again confronted him with this and he lied, over and over, in front of a pastor. It was interesting, actually, because some of the lies were things that he didn't need to lie about. He made up things completely out of nowhere. He seemed to delight in telling his lies as he would get a smirk (sort of a half smile) on his face while lying to the pastor. It seemed, from some of his comments, that he thought he could fool this pastor by putting on a holy man facade.
I have been giving my brother the benefit of the doubt for years, that he was truly sorry for what he did to me and was repentant. I did know he back-tracked many years ago when our parents confronted him. But I never truly knew HOW much was wrong with him until this meeting with the pastor. I believe that God used this confrontation to show me the extent of my abuser's sin and the consequences upon his life.
I never truly thought of my abuser as a deliberate liar and a deceiver. I know now that is exactly what he is. And it has taken a toll on his life both mentally and spiritually.
An abuser looks like the continuing consequences of their unrepentant sin. As the sin continues, so do the consequences. In our small one-dimensional perspective, it may seem like an abuser is getting away with their abuse and sin. But, not from God's perspective. Only God sees the entire picture. We only see the outline.
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