Counseling Abandoned Women on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson, and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

And today I am delighted to be joined by Julie Ganschow, who is the founder of Reigning Grace

Counseling Ministry in Kansas City, Missouri. It's a certified training center there of ACBC, and she is one of our ACBC members.

She is also an author of several different biblical counseling resources, many pertaining to

issues that women face. And so we're so glad that she's here with us today. Julie, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. What an appropriate topic, especially in the cultural time

that we live in in the present. And so it's great that we're here to talk about this issue of

the church's responsibility in ministering to women who have been abandoned. So what I

want you to do first is just explain some of the symptoms, some of the things that we would see

in a woman who has been abandoned, some of the ways that the church would recognize some of the

issues that she may deal with

if she's been abandoned. Well, because abandonment that we typically deal with in a marriage

situation is in three forms, either physical abandonment where the husband physically leaves

the home, emotional abandonment where he stays in the home, but he completely

withdraws from her. He's not engaged with her in any way other than he's physically present,

and then sexual abandonment where he refuses to be intimate with his wife. And we find that

these three types of abandonment can overlap depending on the circumstances

and all the underlying issues in the marriage. When we get a woman that has been physically abandoned,

we really rely on the church to step up and minister to her. The church as the ambassador for Christ is

charged primarily with meeting the physical needs on the larger scale. This could be meeting

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