Idolatry

During a time of prayer very early on, (meaning a few days after KatieLyn, the runaway bride, bolted into the night,) I received the insight that KatieLyn had made an idol of her mother. Now, months later when I go back over the notes of my prayer journal, I see that I couched this thought with the phrase "is likely." The truth is, in the first few days after she ran, I wasn't fully ready to accept that truth! I was still trying to think the best of everyone, and I certainly did not want to accuse KatieLyn of idolatry.

Within a fortnight, (I don't have opportunity to use that word often, so I will seize the chance here!) and through a different route, God had revealed the same idolatry to Joe. Joe brought up the subject of her idolatry first in our conversations, and by the time that he did, I had seen more of the pieces fit together.

Here is the nutshell version:

Anything that places 'other gods' before the Living Creator is idolatry—Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.  Yet by her actions, KatieLyn had honored her mother's desires before she honored God's desires.

That is one of the reasons that both Joe and I were incredulous when KatieLyn would later try to explain the break-up by saying that she had "put my relationship with Joe ahead of my relationship with God, and that was my biggest mistake." Another reason that Joe was unconvinced that her account of her "biggest mistake" was valid was that they had covered this very point of putting God first during times of Bible study and had also touched on it during premarital counseling. (The August 10 post, "Faith works by love," discusses this more fully and asks, "(a) What is so wrong with placing a high value on a relationship God gave you as an answer to years of prayer, and (b) why is that a problem that cannot be fixed by anything short of dissolving the God-given relationship and running away?")

More than mere Humble Opinion, and supportable by observing her actions, KatieLyn put a third relationship before both her relationship with her God and her relationship with her fiancé. The relationship that she made into an idol was her relationship with her mother.

At the surface, that sounds like a horrible, mean, spiteful thing to say, right? And KatieLyn's explanation about mistakenly putting Joe ahead of God sounds so principled, upright, and noble. But the underlying facts are so ugly that my progression to acceptance of that idea was an evolution of substantial reluctance.

From even before the engagement period, KatieLyn's mother had "jokingly" commented that Joe was "taking Katie away" from her. At first, I wrote-off her joke as an unfortunately blunt comment, easily forgivable because she was probably experiencing normal empty-nest syndrome. I now believe it goes much deeper. I considered the possibility that KatieLyn's mother was both afraid and jealous that KatieLyn might love someone else more than she loves her own mother. That might explain the mom's actions, but it does not explain KatieLyn's. After all, KatieLyn did not flee to a friend's house to get away from Joe; she fled back home to be with her mother.

About three weeks after what should have been their wedding day, I finally accepted a reason for KatieLyn's calling off the wedding that made sense—she is so submitted to her parents, her mother in particular, that she is unable to be wholly submitted to the Lord. She looked to her mother for instruction and guidance more than she looked to the leading of the Spirit of God. Her heart is divided and incapable of committing to marriage. She could not accept the Lord's plan for her life because she has unhealthy soul ties to her mother. This is idolatry.

♦ ○ ♦ ○ ♦

Ideally, parents would be in tune with the Lord's plan for their child.  That did not happen for KatieLyn. Her mom was all over the place, giving mixed signals, projecting her own fears, and  attempting to rationalize her feelings in a way that would make the mom look like "a good person." (I may cover some examples in future posts, but they are a bit like plots for a sit-com episode, and I don't want to treat idolatry as a joking matter in this post.)

The Lesson
Today's lesson from a runaway bride is that an idol is the thing you run to in place of God. Framing the running "away" as escaping a bad thing is disingenuous. The bride was running back "toward" her idols for a promise of safety from the unknown. She preferred what her idol was offering over what God had for her.