Dear Bret,

Today I received a long email from Ljubica. In it she again availed herself of an opportunity to pour poison into my soul. The email itself was enough to put an end to a promising start to the week. I won’t disclose the details to you—maybe later I will write another blog post about it.

Anyway, part of her email discloses her knowledge of another email that I sent to you and the other elders. How exactly did she come to know about this email and its content? The only possible route leading to the disclosure of this information goes through you and the other elders. Which one of you did it? I don’t know. I don’t care. One of you did.

I wrote you an email expressing my outrage that one of you did this. You denied that any of you had done any such thing. And then you lied to me. You are a liar. But I’m sure you don’t care that I think that you are a liar. Because you have such a low opinion of me, I can’t image any reason why you would care what I think.

So overall it’s been a shitty day.

To put an end to it, I’ve decided to post a letter that I wrote to you but never sent you. I wrote it last May. Its composition was provoked by a reflection you published in the church’s bulletin. In your reflection, you write about a know-it-all kid you knew as a child. Here it is:

Dear Bret,

I would like to respond to your comment: “I have many times expressed to you my sorrow for Ljubica’s words, going back to I guess this time last year when you first confided these things to me. I have no doubt that such words cause great pain and severely undermine the foundation of a marriage, perhaps irreparably. I do believe you’ve been treated badly in your marriage.”

I acknowledge that you have “expressed sorrow” and I appreciate that you recognize that Ljubica’s words “cause great pain.” Your empathy is appreciated.

But empathy is not sufficient, at least not from you. You are not simply another member of the congregation, you are its minister and one of its elders. One member of your congregation mistreated her spouse to such a degree that in January 2015 he contemplated committing suicide. I do not believe that you have ever adequately appreciated the severity of the abuse to which Ljubica has subjected and continues to subject me.

You who speak about the “plain meaning” of the biblical texts to condemn me, do you forget James? He writes, “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:14–17).

I suppose a literalist interpretation of the text gets you off the hook, just as you deem your literalist interpretation of Jesus’s words to have put me on it. I was not ill-clad or in lack of daily food. Instead, I was abused and mistreated. My spirit was beaten down. I was hated. I was called worse than a rapist, indeed, worse than a child molester. The ministry you provided to me was nothing more than the equivalent of “Go in peace, be warmed and filled.” I cannot recall any time when you took action to intervene and stop the abuse. Once the abuse was made known to you, you had an opportunity and, I believe, an obligation to act. Yet you did not.

You did not act. A host of other people also failed to act. As the object of Ljubica’s abuse, I could not act. No one came to my aid with real assistance. Maybe no one could have. Regardless, why does it seem so incredible to you that in a situation like mine, God did act—directly—and freed me from my abuser?

I read your latest reflection in the church bulletin. It seems obvious that at some level you had me in mind as you wrote it. Perhaps I am the “know-it-all” you are really concerned about. You wrote, “[Jesus] healed lepers and gave sight to the blind just to mess with what everyone thought they knew about cleanliness and uncleanness.” Surely you don’t believe this? Surely your understanding of the gospel is not so shallow that you are unable to see that Jesus healed, in the first place, because of his love, compassion, mercy, and empathy for blind people and lepers.

I spent twelve years trying to love Ljubica. I spent twelve years trying to convince her that I cared about her. I took care of her needs. I made sure we had sufficient resources to meet—to exceed—what is required for life. I went into debt to pay for her trips to visit her family. I was faithful to her. I was not a perfect husband. I was once much younger and much more immature. Nevertheless, there is no correlation between the treatment I received from her and my own imperfection. There is absolutely no justification for her mistreatment. None.

But still I tried, and tried, and tried. I imagined how Jesus would love her if he was married to her, and then I tried to live that way. I expended myself loving her to the point of becoming suicidal because she made me believe that only by being dead could I succeed in making her happy.

And no one stepped in to stop the abuse. One of the other elders said in that marathon meeting you called me to that “God can do the impossible.” He was thinking of Jesus’s words, “What is impossible with men is possible with God” (Luke 18:27). The impossible thing he wanted me to believe in was that God would heal my wife and heal our marriage. But God had already done the impossible thing: He set me free from Ljubica.

I was the leper. I was the blind man. I was the woman with a hemorrhage. I was the deaf-mute. Jesus came and healed me. He set me free from my oppression. And he did not do it to make a point to you or to anyone else. He did it because he loves me and he wants me to live. God is about life, not death. You might yet learn something about him from this, but I am sure that his purpose was never primarily to teach you something about himself.

I will say no more.