Chronicle Editor
Stephen Mpofu
The coronavirus pandemic has registered heart-rending boomerang effects in families, especially in rural areas, with gender-based violence (GBV) reportedly prevalent as the lockdown becomes a litmus test of just how solid marriages are.
Officials in Manicaland Province have openly decried GBV acts in many families but, it obviously follows that though not reported, domestic violence must also be prevalent in other provinces not to mention urban areas as husbands feeling tethered, as it were by Government regulations ordering everyone to stay put at home, vent their frustrations on family members especially wives for nagging them etcetera, etecetera. Many women have made reports to authorities to that effect.
During lockdowns some husbands spend long hours away from home and family with gallivanters among them venting their lust on women of easy virtues, spending cash which they ought to use feeding their families and risking harvesting diseases and in the process endangering the lives of their spouses back home.
God created Eve from Adam’s rib in the Garden of Eden to serve as her husband’s “helper”.
Men and women are respectively today’s Adams and Eves, descendant from the Garden of Eden.
The Bible says in Ephesians 5:22; “Wives submit to your husbands, as to the Lord . . . ”, and to men: Ephesians 5:25 “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for her.”
Tragically, however, some men give a convoluted interpretation to the Bible’s exhortations above to mean that wives must say “yes boss” to whatever they say including frittering family finances to satiate their desires for pleasure while families back home starve or risk being bundled out of rented accommodation for failure to pay monies due.
As such the husbands in question are supposed to intertwine their hearts with those of their spouses in the conjugal oneness of their flesh, for only death to do them part. But the foolish and abusive husbands complained of apparently feeling that they are tethered to their homes by the Government regulations to control the spread of the coronavirus when they ought to be on the loose cavorting with women of easy virtues on whom they fritter family finances while their children and wives starve or risk eviction from rented accommodation with some school-going children risking expulsion for non-payment of fees or the men being arrested for defaulting on rent payment.
And, come to think of it, the men expect their wives and other people to clap their hands along with other men in applauding the womanisers’ extra-marital exploits as if these were a statement about the supremacy of the womanisers’ virility.
If that is not an absurdity of absurdities, one wonders what it is.
In the circumstances, this communicologist-cum-sociologist submits that there is an urgent need by the Church of Jesus Christ, to trailblaze an evangelism driven by both a religious and a sociological ethos in aid of the connoisseurs of Christianity who more often than not do not believe that their vocation and religion are fellow-travellers on a journey to a destination with mutual benefits to adherence of the two different values.
But, of course, it should be realised by all that the ultimate purposes of the things that human beings do must accord with the desires of God — who so loved this world that He sent his only begotten Son to die for humanity so that whoever believes in Him should not die but have everlasting life — and not with the desires of devil, the dragon who comes to steal, kill and destroy in whatever he lures humanity to do.
Online Reporter