I grew up in a family consisting of my father, mother and one older sister and one older brother. My mother was a Christian beliver, but my was father not, though he was a nominal member of the state Church.
I belived in Yah'shua (Jesus) and His Father from when I was very young thanks to my mother who taught me to pray and took me to her church. But in the enviroment in which I lived, there were also always many ungodly things such as quite heavy rock music which I was exposed to from when I was about 6 years old. I also partied with a lot of alcohol. I attended these functions with my kind and well-meaning brother Tadeusz and his friends from when I was about 8 years old. They were very kind, nice boys but they trapped me in all of these bad, ungodly activities which make them (and me) deaf to Yahweh's voice.
As a teenager and in my twenties I became more and more confused. I went to parties on Fridays and Saturdays, and played a lot of sports. My studies and work took up most of my time, and on Sundays I attended the state Church. When I was sad or troubled I prayed and randomly read scriptures in my bible.
Well, the devil pushed me on more and more - the music was on all day, from soft and hard rock to New Age music with strange rhythms. I put a lot of effort into 'looking nice', went to more and different kinds of parties, and as I did I progressively drifted away from Elohim (God) and got confused, very sad and, and eventually ill.
Though I never denied Elohim (God) and never stopped reading my Bible (when I was often afraid I read the Psalms to calm me down), and considered myself to be a Christian, and proclaimed openly that I was one, and prayed, the lifestyle I led told the opposite story. I was dumb and blind, and lived like a person who didn't know Elohim (God) at all. Even so, my family regarded me as a Christian.
My elder sister was involved in a cult called the Mariavites which accepted polygamy for the priesthood at that time and she was the first to introduce me to the principle of plural marriage. She has always been full of original ideas, so I looked upon it as a new funny idea and treated it that way. She said she thought it would be good for the women to share the work in a big family.
When I was around 25 my mother sent me in her place to Israel for 14 days (she doesn`t like to travel), and I was sorrounded by Christians (about 5,000) and I came to a point in my life where I had to choose whether to follow Elohim (God) or not. I got a blessing/revelation from a Dutch lady in Israel with the message to "go home, for God (Elohim) had important work for me to do there".
When I got home, I attended a new big charismatic Protestant church. I was there for a year. Lots and lots of people got 'saved' there each year and they did much social work. But I yearned for more spiritual depth, and eventually found my spiritual home in a little evangelical group called the Chavurat Bekorot which believed in modern revelation. Here I learned more about proper disipline in Yahweh's word, to stop living my own life and to yield to Elohim (God) the Father more properly. (I haven't regretted that discipling for one minute). And I learned that Yahweh speaks to us today as He did before and that the Bible is 100% reliable and is not divided into Old or New Testaments, but that both the 'parts' compliment each other.
Here I got to learn about many deep and holy mysteries, and one of them was polygamy. Although my spirit was open to receive new gifts from heaven, I was nevertheless shocked when I was proposed to by a married couple (Stanisław and Isabel) whom I came to know well. This principle was so different from everything I had learned while I grew up. So all sides of me exept the spiritual one were at war against it. I knew that the proposal was made on purely spiritual grounds. I ignored and forgot about the proposal for several months, and pretended not to think about it. Then for some more months I was taught more about the spiritual and practical living of polygamy, and kept in close contact with the couple all the time. In the end I dared to trust the guiding from the Holy Spirit, and fell deeply in love with my husband-to-be as well.
I was now very, very happy, and very much in love. But I still had a long way to go, because the family I grew up in had an upside down spiritual mindframe, the society I grew up in had an upside down spiritual mindframe, as does the society we still live in today. Wherever I had moved in the past I had been in this upside down world which taught me: Cinderella, we (one man and one woman) are enough for each other, feminism (he, the man, wants to step on you, woman - get involved in a struggle for power - or let us be friends and equals in all things), Elohim (God) wants us to be 'happy' so don`t take away the music I like, the amount of talking I like to do, TV, my sports, holidays (like Christmas), my free time, etc.
Yahweh and my husband are still patient with me, and there is nothing else but happiness to be found when these false paths to happiness, and others like them, are progressively released, and when I am in harmony with Elohim's (God's) will with myself.
So I started happily and in love with very good knowledge of how a good polygamy family should work (mainly by revelation and also others' experiences), but with, I would say, a 100% monogamy-only set of feelings. And I belived this change would happen fast like a miracle.
We did not know about anyone else living this (polygamy) principal in the total way which we were aiming for at that time, so we were very much alone, and had to learn as we went along.
Feelings are very tricky (my husband's comforting words!) So I was in love and wanted to be loved as the one-and-only, instead of giving love to my husband, and through him love the whole family. I was fixed on him for a very long time instead of taking interest in the whole family also with my feelings. I did everything with the family but wanted rather to be with Stanisław (the Cinderella Syndrome). I did not easily trust him to lead if I felt I was about to lose something from it (the Feminism Syndrome)
I had trouble with jealousy, and felt I was locked out, or not important (self-insecurity), that Stanisław...... and Isabel had had longer time together, or was more interesting or prettier (complete). Isabel also had her troubles, from the same background reasons as myself, I believe. Stanisław poured love and understanding over us and explained the differiecies between feelings and the truth.
A few years later Kasia came into the family. I still had problems with my feelings, mainly jealousy, was still in love and quite sure I had made the right choice for a husband, and had grown into loving the whole family. I faced a new round of fear and jealousy.
Kasia was young and came from a huge family in Russia with more of a polygamy-friendly mindframe than most people. As we knew each other well from before, I was able to love her as a good friend, almost like family. She did not seem to have much trouble with her feelings at all. I felt the fear and jealousy as an acute and real heart pain, with breathing problems. They came and went. We could talk things through. That helped, but feelings are tricky, they come and go for no logical reason, I had to go through the same problems again and again. I got my first child, Tytus, but it did not relieve the problem, rather the hormones mixed my feelings up even more, and gave me less time with Stanisław on a daily basis. I also reacted by withdrawing when I was sad. The jealousy grew riper and uglier until I once, in a fraction of a second, dreamt I wanted to hurt Kasia by pushing her down the stairs (do you recognize this from stories of jealousy you hear about children who have got a baby sister or brother?). I shocked myself deeply, and had to turn and face the problem (a very, very important choice had to be made) - I was experiencing nothing less than the spirit of murder, because jealousy is the spirit of murder.
My jealosy did not 'kill' my sisterwife, but it was 'killing' me, my spirit. I saw how everything I had been taught was wrong. Some of it I had seen and learned gradually. I went to Stanisław or to Kasia or both and told them about my feelings and I got to see that in reality I was already a part of everything I wanted to be a part of. I went again and again for counselling to my husband. It relieved the pain and transformed our marriage into shere happiness. But this flash of hatred taught me that every feeling of jealosy I had had was only created by myself, and the evil spirit(s) I had let into me. I was in a spiritual prison, and now I wanted to get out, and by Yahweh's power and honest prayer, I feel great peace and love for all of us in the family. Now is is so easy, because I did nothing more than the ususal thing expected of believers, which is to accept God's gift of forgiveness and His Spirit. I was now master over that feeling, so when it sometimes sneaked itself in on me, I mastered it by drawing close to Elohim (God) in prayer and being honest with myself, and the ugly face of 'wanting something or someone for myself' could not hide away or prevent me from going to Yahweh to be healed. Love, I learned, is giving, not taking/having.
I will tell you how Yahweh kept me true for this first 7 years of struggle (I have been married for 10 - the last 3 have been bliss). Even if there were problems, as I just have told you about, we had much happiness, and I loved Stanisław very much and felt loved and appreciated, and in spite of the jealousy, the relationship beween Kasia and I was pretty good. But my thought patterns and my feelings were not yet in harmony with one another. And when I became pregnant my family got to know that we lived polygamously and did everything they could think of to get me and Kasia away from our Stanisław. So for a year or so I was on a full war footing with my beloved relatives. For the first time in my life I felt very lonely. At the same time Isabel left us for a while for various reasons. This made life hard for all of us. My sister was a great support for me many times, even though we have different opinions as well. Stanisław was, and is, a rock of faith (not to be mixed up with the Rock!), because he has walked longer with Yahweh in terms of 'quality time', and so he supported me/us always and at all times. But at one point I was so confused from discussions with relatives and sad happenings that I went to the forest and prayed and said I would of course leave at once if Elohim (God) wanted me to, and after this silent confession, I felt the Spirit telling me to stay where I was, and that I was in His will where I was. Every time I lost sight I would be helped in this way, Yahweh always confirmed that the way of polygamy was right and true to my spirit. This is a good thing to carry with me now when I have a lot more knowlegde about polygamy that confirms this.
Yahweh has always so much more to give, and therefore we are, as Christians/Messianics, always young, and independent no matter what age we are. We can never be fully grown up!
Some years after He took away the curse of jealousy from my heart, Yahweh led the whole of our congregation go through a cleansing (deliverance) from evil spirits. We followed a proceedure from a Christian book whose author knows a lot about such things. And for me this clean out gave me a new inner life. At the same time the last remnants of jealousy disappeared out of my life. I am now completely at peace and I am able to love in a new way, after previously being at one level of peace, and I am sure new deeper levels of peace and love are to come in due course.
We knew of nobody living polygyny for about 8 years, Stanisław having started to live this way many years before I came into the family. So there was great happiness when we got to know many other polygamous families on internet. Elohim (God) never takes away good things without replacing them a thousandfold over.
It took us some years to get me sorted out to where I am now, but I am so happy to be exactly here where I know Elohim (God) wants me to be. He has made me and remade me and must continue to do so. I can choose and say:
"Yes thank you, Father, I will let You have my miserable ego, my efforts to be seen, my fear to lose something , etc. Then you can fill the empty space with Your love for You and for every lovely soul that You have created around me. THANK YOU!
"Thank You, Father, for letting me be one of many wives so we can share our most beloved husband. (At one time I did not even want to share Yah'shua the Messiah/Jesus Christ with anyone because I wanted to be special).
"Thank You for letting me be one of many wives so I can experiece that I am special. (At one time I never did know I was special).
"Thank You that it is a little bit easier to remember that I am not the center of the universe. (At one time I had few other places to look).
"Thank You that You have given me lovely friends in my sister-wives. (At one time I had no-one to share the 'real me' with).
"Thank You that You have given me a husband through whom Your Spirit truly flows. (At one time I chose dry places and died).
"Thank You that I can be fully a woman. (At one time I wanted to be male to get a position of power, but lost my spiritual harmony).
"Thank You that You reveal Yourself through polygamy as a true principle. (At one time I didn't even know that this wonderful love existed).
"Thank You that You have preserved this truth of your polygamous nature through all centuries and have revealed it to Your disciples. (At one time I belived the lies of Catholicism).
"Thank You that You can use all who are willing to recive Your never ending gifts. Yahweh be praised and glorfied for ever and ever, Amen."
Letters from Readers About This Essay
Dear Kryztina,
You have done a very good thing by writing this essay. I know that it will help many women, especially those new to christian polygyny. Thank you so much for sharing yourself and your inner thoughts and feelings in such an honest way. A man named Daniel Webster once said, "There is nothing so powerful as the Truth". By revealing the trials and tribulations you went through in your own plural marriage, you help others realize that it is normal to experience certain negative feelings, but that they can be overcome with God's help and the help of a godly husband, of course!
Once again, thank you and God bless you. Say hello to Stanisław and the family for me. I am going to make sure both my wives read your essay.
A.S, USA (19 October 2001)
Author: KCK
