#3 I HATE DIVORCE !!

IOPNA shares this 3rd article in our 9-part ‘Exclusive Brethren’ series:

 

Okay, you say that you failed to honour your dad but what actually happened to your family?...were you kids safe, provided for and happy?

Happy days.......once.

Sure! All that I noticed was we didn’t seem to be going to Brethren meetings anymore and Dad was getting frustrated with some of them turning up at our home in Stonyfell; we're talking: early 1962. 

Why weren’t you going to the Brethren meetings?

I learnt years later that it was because Dad had been ex-communicated for having a television or car-radio.

Really??  Is that all?  So then what happened?

My mother told me years later that her father had been publicly told to take action, by a Brethren leader. The first thing I knew was being walked out of Burnside School at lunchtime by Mum - my sister had been kept home that day and my brother was a 3 year old – then I was told to get in the car of an Adelaide elder who drove us straight out of the city to Murray Bridge where we met Mum’s parents who took us to Melbourne the long way via Ouyen. We went into hiding in a holiday house on the Mornington Peninsula until it seemed safe to move into my grandparents’ home, attend Brethren meetings again and enrol at the Box Hill school.

So that was the end of family life with Dad?...just like that?...over a TV or a car-radio? 
You’re kidding me aren’t you??  Tell me you just had a bad dream!

I wish.  No, that’s the truth and this was common knowledge among the Brethren in Adelaide and Melbourne….probably Geelong too, our old home town.

I can’t believe that so called Christians who seem to think they’re better than anyone else would do this to a family! Did they ever apologise for it?

No, never. No acknowledgement in public or private, in 23 years. The world leader of the Brethren, Jim Taylor of New York, actually criticised dealing with young families this way, so one of Dad’s brothers was coerced into spying on Dad to get evidence against him for a divorce.

This gets worse!  I can see she was forced into it but had your dad been unfaithful or violent with your mum to give her grounds for desertion?

Not that I know of.  She sent him a letter of apology but then divorced him after he was caught one night with a new companion.

Can you blame him??  So Dad was given access rights to you kids?

No, none. He walked into my classroom later that year but I never saw him again after a tug-of-war over me in the streets of Box Hill.

…and he died 12 years later, never setting eyes on his own kids again?

That's right. He’d remarried and fathered two little girls but had contracted throat cancer which he battled during 1973. Finally he made the effort to sell one last house in Hove over Christmas so that his widow would receive the commission but died of a heart attack at the sale property, on the day after his mother died.

I can’t believe my ears! …and they stopped you from saying good bye to Dad??

Yes and years later I was even warned against checking on his widow and her two young daughters. 

So these people are lying when they say they don’t break up families, aren’t they? This was common knowledge…and aren’t they now trying to show the world how deserving they are of ‘charitable status’?

Well, I‘m just telling you our story…….and it didn’t end there……..

I’m gob-smacked - really I am!     
Remind us please what God thinks about the busting up of marriages…

“Take heed then to your spirit, and let none deal unfaithfully against the wife of his youth, (for I hate putting away, saith Jehovah the God of Israel)…”    Malachi 2:15

…and here’s what Jesus had to say:

“…What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate ….Moses, in view of your hard-heartedness, allowed you to put away your wives; but from the beginning it was not thus. ”         Matthew 19, Mark 10

Did you get that? 

I sure did - GOD HATES DIVORCE!

NEXT: ‘Church speak’
Click on: http://hotspuds.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/church-speak.html

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