Sanctuary or Living Hell

I woke up this morning with the word "threshold" in my mind. Threshold, threshold, threshold. Why?

A quick scan down the listing in my concordance landed me on Judges 19, and I remembered the story there. Rancid stuff. Horror. But I read it again, and this time, one line I don't remember noticing before stood out to me. Verse 3: "Then her husband arose and went after her, to speak kindly to her and bring her back."

To speak kindly to her.

This is the story of the slave-wife, the concubine of a Levite, who after some circumstance that left her labelled unfaithful (we are not told what she did, nor what the conditions of her life preceding her action may have been like), fled from her master-husband to take refuge "in her father's house at Bethlehem in Judah." After four months, her master-husband comes after her, finally, and the text notes that he intend to "speak kindly to her and bring her back."

Just a few verses later, this silver-tongued bastard is handing his slave-wife into the most treacherous scene ever. In order to defend himself, he gives the woman he has taken from the safety of her father's house into the hands of men who will rape and assault her until nearly dawn. When the master opens the door the next day, he finds his concubine outside the door with her fingers on the threshold. She has crawled back from her horror to the one who sent her into it, and found the door closed to her.

This is not her father's house.

Is she already dead? Or comatose from trauma? We don't know, but the master-husband has no regard for her. When his order to her to get up and get on their way gets no response, he picks her up and lays her on his beast. In the next scene, he hacks her body into a dozen pieces and sends it out throughout all the land. The depth of evil in his heart is exposed, and nothing like it had ever before been seen or heard of.

How many of us have reached safety or almost reached it, only to lose our footing when kind words convince us to return once more, to put ourselves back into precariousness or outright danger? How many have been told it is our obligation to do so, because Christ suffered at the hands of the enemies he would make his friends at his own death? I know I have.

I have been the concubine with my fingers on the threshold, frozen, traumatized, all but dead.

Today, I am in my father's house. And I am not leaving it. I can't go back there. Kind words are not enough.