Part of the Marriage: For God’s Sake & the Children’s Sake series
Watch Savann’s Story (CBN, The 700 Club)
If the video does not load, you can watch it here: Savann’s story on CBN’s The 700 Club
A Little Girl Who Needed a Father
When Savann Walker was nine years old, her father was shot and killed. In the CBN story she shares the prayer she prayed as a little girl: that if her daddy was gone, God would never leave her alone. She ran to the church because she wanted to be surrounded by God’s love, and she carried a deep desire to please God and do what was right.
At 15 she was baptized by her pastor, a man 17 years older than she was. Over time he earned her trust, and she says she felt she had found the father figure she had been missing. That trust became the open door for everything that followed.
“A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.” (Psalm 68:5, NIV)
When Scripture Is Twisted
When Savann was about 20, her pastor began teaching that God was fine with a man having more than one wife, pointing to the patriarchs. Because she wanted so badly to obey God, the teaching landed on her sincerity. After his wife left him, he pursued Savann. They married and moved to a remote 40-acre property they called the Village, with a camper, no running water, no electricity and outhouses. She describes how her appearance and her life were stripped down, because she had been taught the most simple life was closest to God.
A few months after her first child was born, he took another wife, and later a third. Savann says she felt devastated, disrespected and devalued. When she began to speak up for herself, she was met with physical abuse, and she describes a home where people experienced abuse mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually and sexually.
The patriarchs’ stories are in the Bible, but they are recorded honestly, not held up as the pattern. Every one of those households carried pain. Jesus took us back to the beginning, to God’s original design:
“That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24, NIV)
“and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (Mark 10:8-9, NIV)
Scripture also gives a clear standard for those who lead God’s people:
“Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach,” (1 Timothy 3:2, NIV)
“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.” (Matthew 7:15, NIV)
This is exactly why we are walking through the Marriage: For God’s Sake & the Children’s Sake series. God’s design for marriage is one man and one woman, joined in covenant love, and that design protects women and children. When a leader bends it, the ones who pay the highest price are usually the wife and the little ones.
Love That Lays Down Its Life
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25, NIV)
A godly husband protects, he does not strip away. He gives himself up, he does not take. Savann says she no longer saw her husband as a protector. That is the opposite of the picture Paul paints. Brothers, please hear this: our wives and children should feel safer because we are in the home, never less safe.
For the Children’s Sake: A Mother’s Courage
Savann says motherhood carried her through the trauma. A turning point came while visiting her oldest daughter at college, when a professor welcomed her into her home and treated her with dignity and grace. Savann describes that kindness as empowering. She returned home determined to see her children have a better life, made a plan, and one day while her husband was away she gathered her children and drove away. She calls it one of the hardest and most empowering things she had ever done. She reported the abuse, and her husband was arrested.
Starting over was hard. She describes pain, trauma, grief and time in a homeless shelter, and re-entering the workforce after more than 20 years at home. Yet she began to see the doors of God’s provision opening, and realized that God does hear her and is providing.
“The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18, NIV)
Notice how a simple act of hospitality from one believer helped change the course of a family. You never know whose story God is writing through your open door and your kind word.
God Is a Redeemer
Today Savann says her life is beautiful in a way she never could have imagined, and that her Heavenly Father is the only Father she ever really needed. She shares that her children have gone on to do great things, some with multiple degrees.
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (Genesis 50:20, NIV)
If This Is Your Story
If you are in a marriage or a ministry where you are being controlled, devalued or harmed, please hear me with love: abuse is not God’s plan for you or your children. Please reach out to someone safe. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
And if you want to build a marriage that honors God and blesses your children, I warmly invite you to start the Marriage: For God’s Sake & the Children’s Sake series today. Thank you for reading, and please share this with someone who needs hope.
Related Reading
- Marriage: For God’s Sake & the Children’s Sake, Metanoia (Part 20)
- Marriage (Part 19): For God’s Sake & the Children’s Sake | What It Is Like to Be Married to an Unbeliever (Part 4)
- The Power and Fruit of Forgiveness versus the Cost of Withholding It
- The Loneliness Epidemic and the Church Jesus Designed: From Isolation Back to Family
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
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