Early last Spring, I began to be able to tell that something was terribly wrong. As was my nature, I mostly ignored it. Truth is, I’d been ignoring it for so long that it was only when it forced me to acknowledge it that I began to deal with the reality that my marriage was in trouble.
The way I saw it, one day everything was fine and the next day, out of the blue, my wife turned cold toward me. Asking her what was wrong didn’t get me any real answers, so I took a “wait and see and everything will be fine” attitude. I didn’t know what else to do and I assumed that whatever was bothering her would pass.
As days turned into weeks, I began to ask her more pointed questions. What was going on? What had I done? Why was she no longer close to me? These still didn’t get me any satisfactory answers, but whatever the problem was, it had my attention now.
Never mind the fact that a year or so before that, I had allowed myself to fall for another woman and had lied to her about it. Never mind that since then, I had verbally expressed my dissatisfaction with the marriage and the thought that I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue on with it.
If I had loved my wife then like I love her now, I would have understood that she needed security above all else. I would have known that my words, my actions, my lack of commitment, and my failure to be the man she thought she had married were destroying her as surely as termites, mold, and cracks in the foundation destroy a house, no matter how beautiful it started out to be.
As a man of faith, I had no excuse. I knew that God had placed me in the role of being the spiritual head of the household, and that He expected me to love, honor, and protect my wife. The real problem wasn’t that I had become selfish and negligent toward my marriage. The real problem was that I had been faking my spiritual life for years, looking right on the outside and saying all the right things, but phony as a three dollar bill on the inside where it counts.
In the book of Isaiah 29:13, The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” My problem wasn’t with my marriage, my wife, or my situation. The problem was with my heart. Until I was willing to stop praying phony prayers that I didn’t mean and get serious about getting my heart right, there was going to be a whole lot more wrong in my life than a failing marriage.
The Restoration Tour 