(photo: via Facebook)
Australian media was dominated last week by an event in my home city of Brisbane of a most horrendous act which occurred on one of its quiet suburban streets - a street I have passed the end of many, many times. A man (Rowan Baxter) murdered his recently estranged wife and three young children by pouring petrol over them and the car they were in and setting fire to it as the mother was setting off to drive the kids to school, and then it appears he stabbed himself and died at the scene. Nothing excuses sin, but this issue causes us to ask what precipitated or fueled or provoked or contributed to this horrible situation, as a mum simply set out to take her kids to school, and many others like it as numbers of Domestic Violence incidents in Australia continue to rise.
Firstly, I want to say that in thinking about what is 'behind' this evil act, I am not wanting in any way to lay blame, but am reflecting on a statement by Quentin Bryce when she says there is a 'need for early intervention'. While there is a call to recognise mental, sexual, emotional and financial abuse as well as physical, I think we need to go even earlier and deeper than just 'noticing' the relationship signs early on and speaking out or going to the police or calling a helpline or encouraging others to get help. Those things are important, but surely we don't even want it to get to that stage?
There is a call to create a 'safer Australia built on respect and equality' - in other words 'honour and equality'.
People who were interviewed on the street after the event were shocked and horrified and were almost speechless as they asked what is happening to our society that this could occur? Others are calling for something to be done to prevent such incidences occurring. Sadly this is no longer unusual.
25% of all murders in Queensland are from Domestic Violence (DV).
About one woman is murdered every week in Australia!
One ABC article stated…
In looking for an answer, Tom Meagher's words from over six years ago following the murder of his wife Jill Meagher, still ring true."The monster myth perpetuates a comforting lack of self-awareness … we can only move past violence when we recognise how it is enabled; by attributing it to the mental illness of a singular human being, we ignore its prevalence, its root causes, and the self-examination required to end the cycle."
We can't turn a blind eye or hope the problem will go away.
This is a road that every human heart has the propensity to walk down, sometimes in imperceptible steps.
As someone once said 'anyone can commit murder'. If Cain as only the second-generation of human beings on this earth could get to the point of killing his own brother out of jealousy and revenge, then no-one is exempt from the warning of the commandment 'do not murder'. Jesus pointed out that anger and hate in our heart is no different in his eyes to an actual act of murder.
So we need to take a good hard look at ourselves and understand our own hearts better if we are going to personally change or be change-agents for our communities, and allow the light of Christ to shine and not be deceived by our own sinful selfish hearts.
I certainly don't know all the details of this situation but I would like to contribute a few thoughts. As we consider this event and the mood of the Aussie outpouring of shock and grief, I believe as Christians we have opportunity to deeply consider both our own lives and the situation, and bring hope and truth into community conversations.
So what is going on in our society?
Lots!…and there is so much I could raise here on many issues that feed into such situations, but I want to focus on the area of honour, in three particular problematic facets in our Aussie society that have stirred my thoughts once again as I ponder this very sad story in the context of our honour research and its challenge to the church:
1. Image of honour equalling pride and power over others, rather than humility and love for others
In rejecting our Judeo Christian roots in the West, we have rejected the reality that we are not inately good. We are at the root, selfish and prideful and we seek to win or have power over others. We have also detached ourselves from the source of true honour that frees us to humbly love. And without direction and guidance and teaching our kids to have self-discipline over their emotions (not hiding them but directing them and dealing with them appropriately), and recognising that 'sin is crouching' at the door of all our choices….we open ourselves up to both unrestrained emotions as well as misplaced desires.
So if kids, and then adults, have modelled for them on the TV in cartoons, in shows, in video games, on the sporting fields and even in the schools and homes that honour and praise and value comes from the power to achieve in whatever ways possible - thus inevitably that meaning power over others, that is what they will seek. How much of life around them models humble self-sacrifice and love for others rather than themselves and how much do we intentionally teach and train them to live in that way?
And if there is very little moral direction or self-discipline learnt within strong moral boundaries as they grow from infancy, and they are told be whatever they want and no-one can tell them what to do and autonomy is praised and promoted, then they will become what 'we' have trained them to become.
The problem is that the world doesn't function along the lines of everyone doing whatever they want.
We are not individuals in a bubble doing whatever we want.
Life isn't always easy and doesn't always go your way.
We live in community and we have to learn how to live in community. We need to learn to love others and not just ourselves, and that means learning to say no to ourselves and our own desires and emotions at times…for the good of others.
But a child that doesn't learn that in their young years doesn't even know they are disadvantaged for life. They think that to have a good successful happy life is to keep doing what provided them supposed happiness and success while growing up - doing whatever they wanted and making sure they got what they wanted. And if anger is what gets a child their own way when they are young, they will continue to try to use it. If it gives them a sense of power and control, it will become a learned behaviour.
Rowan Baxter didn't become angry and controlling manipulator overnight. Hannah's parents saw problems from the beginning of the relationship. He had been known as an angry football player years before, and his defence of that was just that it was who he was! This was a problem that went way back! But it was a problem that didn't actually bring him the happiness he desired and instead propelled him beyond any love for his kids and wife, to thoroughly selfish ends.
The world is starting to wake up to some of this as this ABC article on dealing with children's temper tantrums notes:
"The ability to manage a reaction to things is learned. And we start learning it, basically, from the moment we're born."So they're picking up what we, as parents, are putting down.And as the adult in all of this, we need to get across it early, or we run the risk of raising teens who can't control their feelings.Beyond that, we could be looking at a generation of adults who can't handle big emotions like rage, jealousy or insecurity.
Sadly as I look at the West (and see Africa heading in the same direction), children are not learning the self-control of humility of heart and love for others, but pride of heart and love for self.
2. Men having lost their honour position in society, while women pushed ahead with promoting theirs.
Even in Jesus' day, there were issues of mis-uses of power in a patriarchal society. Men should lovingly lead their homes alongside an understanding that both men and women are equal in value. But in any society or heart where God doesn't reign as He should, it is inevitable that (due to physical strength if nothing else), men will oppress or dominate women one way or another. They will seek the honour that our hearts inherently seek.
If men seek their sole or supreme honour status from what they can get out of their position in our world - within society or in the family or position in the marriage, or demonstrate by sheer dominant strength, they are predestined for difficulty. It is an honour that deceptively masquerades as self-benefiting and boosting self-worth but in the end is destructive and unfulfilling.
When the honour position of men is challenged in society and that's the only honour avenue available (since honour before God is rejected), men have increasingly felt helpless and hopeless. And as they continue to seek honour in a misplaced way, one way they still try to find it is to claw back at honour with power, however they can. When we combine that power seeking and manipulation with uncontrolled anger - whether verbal or physical, there are bound to be significant consequences that are not good. It has also been said that Australia has a culture where anger is more acceptable for a guy than tears, a culture that further fuels rather than helps the problem.
However, not only is there an 'unbalancing' on the male side of honour as we were meant to experience it, I also observe in our world that most women misunderstand their identity honour in terms of equality defined by capacity, and thus we get busy trying to 'do' everything men 'do' to prove our worth. We may not see it in the same way, but just like the guys, it is still seeking power, success and worth through mis-placed honour.
We may even make that sound 'ok' and acceptable by saying we want to be in control of our own lives. It was interesting that these concepts of honour through power of control, emerged together when Hannah (Baxter) said just days before she died, after leaving her husband: 'I am in control of my life and there's nothing I can't achieve. My girls will grow up being strong women who understand their worth'.
But true worth, peace and security in our life doesn't come when we are 'in control' (of ourselves or of others), but only when we enjoin ourselves to the All-powerful God who is in control.
The reality is that none of us are in ultimate control over our world and it is a lie of the devil to think we are.
And its another lie to think we have to prove our worth by having power above or over men or without men.
We also cannot ignore both the fact that not only are we not the determiners of our own destiny, but that women are not men and men are not women. We are created different in role and capacity, but equal in honour and identity. We are both created and loved by God, and as Christians redeemed by Christ. Men are meant to show honour for women as fellow human beings of equal value, and women are meant to show honour to men as fellow human beings of equal value.
But if a man has no honour except what is achieved in his social context, and for whatever reason that is taken away from him though loss of job, loss of position, loss of reputation, loss of home and life he has built, loss of his loved ones, his family,... and his world crumbles, his identity and honour overwhelmingly vanishes, ...he is going to do whatever it takes to fight for that loss…. either to restore them if at all possible (that takes humility and hard work), or he'll hang onto pride and run from the problem even further to distance his achievement-honour loss from his person, or take revenge to prove his power believing that will restore his honour, or remove himself altogether from what he feels as shame and hopelessness (suicide). In the case at hand, there was a combination of revenge and remove.
As Rosie Batty, a spokewoman against DV said:
"Murder is a decision that is deliberate and driven by the need to exact revenge and achieve the ultimate act of power and control."
However, when we seek our honour from society and not God,
we entrap and limit ourselves into the confines of the social constructs of the era.
So, we as the West not only cease using God and his word as the guide for society, we stop having a framework and criteria that supercedes and rises above the ethnic constructs that oppress and persecute. We embed ourselves in the sin-ridden and false construct that there is limited honour to go round and it becomes a competition…as we try to 'win' and 'outdo each other' and 'attain our goals' all by earthly achieved honour.
The underlying cause of both of the honour problems of both men and women, are that we have lost the ascribed honour we knew we had in God's eyes.
And we have lost the goal that we live not for ourselves but for God and others.
We have lost the understanding that our honour is not about our individual outward appearance of role, skill, capacity, strength, power. It is about the fact that in God's eyes as individuals we already have honour in our identity firstly as part of the human family created by God. And though estranged from God, he still seeks relationship with us and provides full honour restoration for us, if we will come to him through his honour gift of his Son Jesus Christ.
When we get God's design for life messed up, life messes up!
3. The problem that as Christians we have also lost a right understanding of honour.
Not only have Christians also fallen prey to the above points in various ways, and been pulled off-course (which we need to repent of and correct and change), but our understanding of honour has been lacking.
We have lived through multiple recent decades where the West and the Western church has had a strong guilt-innocence-law emphasis - how to obey God. But we haven't done a good job at linking it with the deeper call of God on our lives…to honour Him (Romans 1:21).
As I have said many times before, just because we stop talking about honour, doesn't mean humans stop seeking it.
If we as Christians, who are meant to be the light in a dark world, don't shine the light of the truth of true honour in a world that is seeking it, the world will be prime targets for Satan's efforts to allure blind sinners (and unaware saints) to false and mis-placed honour.
We have the good news for a screaming world - a world screaming 'what has gone wrong'?
The good news is that true honour, true worth, true value is found in God through Christ and in honouring him with our whole lives for all eternity as we were created to do. We don't live for now, for this earth, for finite thinking, and we don't find fulfilment through sinful unrestrained desires that destroy us and destroy the communities around us.
To know peace and fulfillment,
we need an honour that is not dependant on own ability to create or on others to give it.
God's supreme holy honour in Christ is the answer to our deepest longings.
The message of God's holy and true honour is not one that is just for Africa or other 'honour-shame cultures' - its a message for everyone.
It's a message every human heart is crying for.
It's a message we are called to share with the world around us - across the street or around the globe.
Let's share it!
NOTE:
I want to highlight that I am not inferring by the above, that Domestic Violence issues only occur in non-Christian homes. Any time when we don't live as we should according to the Spirit following God's design, we open the way to create and build difficulties in our relationships. As Christians we constantly battle the desires of the flesh against the desires of the new nature and we all bring our own patterns of behaviour into our relationships, which are not all godly. As is noted above, we all need to continue to allow God examine our own hearts by his Spirit through His Word if our relationships are going to grow in glorifying God. We don't come to our neighbours as ones who are perfect in this area but as ones who recognise our weaknesses and have come to know the One who is perfect and offers Himself to us.
I recommend reading the short booklet 'Domestic Abuse' by Heather Nelson and published by New Growth Press
and other books by New Growth Press on dealing with various life issues and struggles.
and if you are interested in becoming more equipped and aware of how to share God's love and counsel with other Christians in difficult family contexts, I recommend contacting
or
In Australia, general Family violence support services include:
• 1800 Respect national helpline 1800 737 732
• Women's Crisis Line 1800 811 811
• Men's Referral Service 1300 766 491
• Lifeline (24 hour crisis line) 131 114
• Relationships Australia 1300 364 277
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