January 19 - Hosea's Wife by Brooke Fraser

I Am Gomer

A while ago I heard a friend give a worship on Hosea, about how our lives do not always turn out the way we expect but that God always has a plan. I enjoyed the worship and gleaned some new ideas but it didn’t really grab me.

A few weeks later I was reading the book of Hosea and I suddenly realised why; in the story of Hosea and Gomer ‘I Am Gomer.’

I just don’t identify with Hosea. Gomer on the other hand, I understand, I know what it’s like to be driven to do things that you know are destroying you because of the pressures that build up in your mind. Because you can’t see any other way to survive.

We all develop ways of coping with the pain and stresses in our lives. These coping mechanisms are generally enjoyable, give us pleasure, and suppress and stifle pain. Then they develop into the things we habitually turn to for comfort and hope, they become our idols; the things we just can’t live without. But, invariably these coping mechanisms turn out to be destructive. If left to ourselves, our idols, these coping mechanisms, will destroy us. God even warned us about this phenomenon Hosea 8:4 ... With their silver and gold they make idols for themselves to their own destruction.

Gomer was a prostitute, (Vs 2 “Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms.”) Gomers mother was very possible a prostitute too. It’s likely that Gomer didn’t know who her father was and she probably grew up in a very dysfunctional family (Vs 2 “whoredoms.”)

I picture Gomer as young, beautiful, full of life, a party girl trying to suppress her past hurts, trying to grasp a future, trying to have fun. She didn’t understand the demons who drove her – or perhaps she did, all too well. Either way she had found some techniques for quieting them. When she was drunk, with a man, dancing, she didn’t feel the pain, the urgency. She didn’t understand that these protective defences were destroying her, or perhaps she did. Either way she couldn’t stop.

We don’t really know how she ended up as a prostitute, all we know for sure is that by the time Hosea comes along she was a ‘working girl.’

In my imagination I see Gomer taking the chance Hosea offers her, thinking she can make a clean start and be a fine upstanding wife for this prophet of God. But she takes the demons that drive her into her marriage, in her mind. She tries really hard to be a good wife but the pressure builds and she doesn’t know how to handle it so she slips back into her old patterns of coping, I imagine she felt guilty and hated herself but she didn’t know how else to deal with the pain inside and she couldn’t tell Hosea because he couldn’t possibly love her if he knew what she really was like inside. But he finds out anyway because she gets pregnant. And he keeps the child and cares for it, and loves it, and her guilt grows, and that happens three times. Eventually the pain and the guilt get too great and she leaves him for good and goes back to the old way of life.

Maybe she convinces herself that she’s having a good time and that she doesn’t want Hosea, maybe she doesn’t. But at some point she hits rock bottom, no one wants to purchase her favours, in fact she can’t even give them away. So she sells herself as a slave, and she has to live with the knowledge that she created her own destruction.

But the thing is Hosea knew she was going to be unfaithful before he ever married her. God had told him to take unto himself “children of whoredoms” (vs 2) The Bible tells us Gomer’s children were conceived after her marriage, she came to him without children. Hosea married her knowing she was going to ‘stray’.

Hosea searches for her, finds her; sick and dying, a slave, chained to a wall perhaps, he sees the worst that she is and he pays her ransom, the price for her freedom. He gathers her up in his arms and he brings her home.

My story is not as lurid as Gomer, it’s not laced with obvious sins or vices. My idols, my destructions are/were socially acceptable. But I recognise the relationship between Hosea and Gomer, it’s the same one I have with Jesus.

I did not find Jesus, I had no interest in finding Him. He pursued me. I can’t say there was a particular instant when I was converted, there was a day when I gave my heart and life into His keeping, but it was the result of a long and gentle process.

I was raised in an Adventist home, both sides of my family have been in the church for generations.

My parents, both biological and step, did the best they could given the limitations of their own woundedness, they certainly never intended to hurt me and for the most part I had a happy childhood.

When I was 5 my Mum took my siblings and I on a week long holiday and did not bring us home to our Father for 9 months. 18 months after we came home my parents separated forever. After the separation my father dropped all contact with us, we had to ring him on our birthdays and Christmas if we wanted to talk to him. As an adult I can look back and understand that his actions was the only way he knew to deal with his own pain, that he didn't mean to hurt me, but as a child it still hurt. 

Every school holidays we would wait and wait for Dad to ring and invite us to come and visit him, but he never did so about two days before the holidays we would ring our grandparents and ask them if we could come and visit them for a week, they always said yes. Then we would know that we would see Dad at least once in the holidays. Dad remarried when I was 9 – he did not invite us kids to the wedding – didn’t even tell us that he was getting married, we found out the day before from our grandparents.

About this time I started to close down emotionally. I remember our cat was run over and killed, my brother and sister were balling their eyes out, so I pretended to cry because I knew I should feel sad but really I didn’t feel anything. I think the last time I truly cried was when my Mum’s mum died when I was 12, after that I don’t remember crying about anything until I was well into my adulthood and God was beginning to heal me. But of course you can’t block out the bad feelings without blocking out the good ones too. So for a long time the only time I felt anything at all was when I was immersed in a book.

I was baptised when I was 11 or 12, partly because I loved Jesus, partly because I wanted to go to heaven and escape hell, partly because I wanted to make my Mum and Jesus happy and partly because everybody else was getting baptised around the same age.

Just after I turned 13 my Mum remarried and we moved again. My Step-father was newly divorced and harboring a lot of hurt and anger. There was lots of fighting in our house. I dealt with this in three ways,

1.       I simply ignored my stepfather unless he spoke directly to me because then I didn’t have to deal with his anger etc. (For the record he never laid a finger on me, it was all verbal – just loud.) This lead to me pretty much treating all men the same way. If I ignored them then I won’t be frightened. Didn’t really work, I was frightened anyway.

2.       I used food to suppress the fear and sadness. The enjoyment of pleasurable taste would stifle incipient emotions that were trying to escape. This eventually lead to health problems that nearly killed me.

3.       I escaped further into the world of books – lots of stories. Stories are less scary than people and always have a happy ending. 

Mum has her own personal relationship with God, and growing up we always had morning and evening worship. I would participate as required, I knew all the correct answers and to all intents and purposes I looked like a good Adventist girl. But in my heart I had no connection to God. I knew and believed that Jesus died for me but it made absolutely no impact on me. I knew that in my heart, in my safe private fantasy world, I was breaking all of the 10 commandments a hundred different ways and I didn’t care, I certainly didn’t feel sinful.

Mum was desperate for us to have the same kind of relationship with Jesus as she did. And I remember her trying to bribe me to read certain books that she felt would encourage me to go along those lines. Or she would take the books I was reading and throw them away because she did not approve of them. She also recognized early that I have a body that gains weight very easily so she would try to ‘subtly’ control what I ate. This together with the fact that I blamed her for spoiling what was essentially a happy (if fatherless) home by marrying my stepfather, bred anger, resistance and rebellion in me. To all appearances I was a good daughter, but quietly I went and did what I wanted as a way of exerting my independence, releasing my anger in little rebellions. I would eat all manner of things she did not know about, I got my ears pierced while she was away for a weekend, and read things I knew she would not like, hiding them under my homework or in my lesson pamphlet, etc.

At the end of high school I decided to go to Avondale College because it meant I could leave home – Now there was no-one to police whether I went to church or not so I didn’t. And, there was no-one to police my eating so I went into full binge mode and started putting on weight very quickly. 

I saw my friends get married and have their first children and I would watch their husbands with those babies. I was the oldest of my siblings and there seemed to be a special bond between these fathers and their oldest child – regardless of if it was a boy or a girl. One father once explained to me that his oldest was the child he knew best – he knew he would come to know the others just as well as they developed and grew but, and he shrugged...

I met people who knew me when I was an infant, they told me that Dad used to take me everywhere – he was an electrician in a farming community and apparently he was always taking me out to the farms he worked at. I don’t remember any of that.

As I said earlier, I did not find Jesus, he pursued, he stalked me. Thank God for praying Mothers!!

Before I ever accepted Christ as my Saviour He was working in my Life:

1.       He got me a job teaching at LAC when I graduated from my teaching degree, in answer to the first prayer I had prayed in something like 10 years, a job I didn’t want. I got there and it was as if the students were trying to behave well and be good because they liked me, not because I had any control over them – and I didn’t to start with. I learned about unconditional love, that people could love me just for who I was not for what I did.

2.       He sold my TV in a miraculous way, removing a major obstacle to Him being in my life, proving He was interested in me, and then He cleared up misconceptions I had developed about God and salvation as a child.

3.       He gave me a new metaphor to see Him as; not as a Father, because that meant amiably distant and disinterested, not as a mother because that meant anger and rebellion, but as a husband and a lover, the thing I wanted most but was also most afraid of.

4.       He taught me to trust Him to only ever do things for my good, I learned to see that even in the hard things I am blessed beyond measure.

5.       He used my struggle with addictions to teach me the process of overcoming sin and ultimately He freed me from that temptation.

6.       He was patient when I refused to give up things I loved more than Him. He listened when I shouted and swore at Him and told Him to get lost and He wasn’t offended. Instead He orchestrated circumstances to show that my only safety was in Him, not in those things I loved more than Him, He showed me that those things were my destructions, and then He began freeing me from them.

7.       He taught me to feel again; the good, the bad and the ugly, the pain and the joy. Then He began healing the hurts, removing the ugly and showing me how living with Him made everything beautiful.

Now in actuality Jesus work on me wasn’t a nice tidy process like the list above, things overlapped, and some of them He’s still working with me on.

Somewhere after number 2 in the list above I gave my life and heart back to God. Yielding was the hardest and the easiest thing I have ever done, to give up on trying to protect oneself and allow someone else to provide that protection as they see fit is very scary, but the relief from always having to be strong and carry your own burdens is immense. When it was done I wondered why I had not done so years ago.

When I finally yielded to God He began to heal my broken bits. Over the last few years God has removed the anger and rebellion I had towards my mother, removed the bitterness I had towards my step-father, and healed the wounds my father unwittingly inflicted. I get on quite well now with my step-father and in the last few years my Father has begun to contact me on my birthday voluntarily, and to invite me around to visit when I'm in Auckland.

Now I have a heart that is not empty, it feels, both the good and the bad, but since I learned to surrender what I mainly feel is joy and peace. He taught me that I do not need to fear anyone when He is with me.

When I compare the woman I am now with the girl I was when I began teaching there is no comparison. I do not ever want to be that person again. I can’t go back, so the only way for me is forward, regardless of the cost. And, looking back I see that as Jesus leads me into deeper and deeper surrender the cost is minimal for what I’ve received, the only things He has ever asked me to give up are the things that harm me and come between us.

That doesn’t mean I always get it right, in fact it seems I get it wrong much more often than I get it right, but He is patient and gentle and I am learning.

Gomer means ‘to complete’ or ‘to finish’. We don’t know what happened to Gomer and Hosea after Hosea purchased her and brought her home, I like to think she learned to trust Hosea and found the love, understanding, healing and forgiveness she was searching for, that they were happy together and blessed by God in their old age. That she was ‘completed’, ‘finished’. (The Bible doesn’t say that happened, but it doesn’t say it didn’t either.)

For me, I’m afraid God still has a long way to go with me, I still argue and fight, sometimes I still run from Him, but I don’t go far because I’ve also learned that I can’t live without Him, that I can trust Him and that, like Hosea with Gomer, He seen me chained to a wall as a slave, he knows the worst of me and He still loves, desires and pursues me.

I live by the promise found in Philippians 1:6(NIV) Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

A few years ago, I came across a Name book that actually had my name in it – with the Gallic spelling, until then I had gone with the meaning of Catherine. I discovered that my name means ‘perfect.’ My second name is Anne which means ‘grace’. This is an exact description for my relationship with God, he gives me ‘perfect grace.’ Just like Hosea ransomed Gomer, Jesus ransomed me, knowing I was going to sin, to stray, but in the space created by his perfect grace I have room to grow, to learn, to heal. And one day I will be completed, healed, sinless, finished.