Archive for May, 2011

A Broken Ring and a Broken Heart

Posted: May 11, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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The first step toward the restoration of our marriage after the vision brings me deep shame to admit here.  In the Christmas season of 2007, my wife took on a part time, seasonal job at Target.  Christmas help for some extra spending money.  While working there, she caught her ring on a shopping cart and severely damaged it.

The ring was, like her, very unique and special, just like the marriage it represented.  It was flashy, elegant, and it stood out.  Picking it out and buying it for her was one of the truly remarkable moments of my life.  There was a part that overlapped and extended beyond the rest of the ring.  This was the part that snagged and it was bent almost to breaking, losing some of the baguettes in the process.

Soon afterward, I took it to a local jeweler for repairs.  He didn’t seem real interested in fixing it, making a lot of excuses and asking for an exorbitant amount of money.  I returned home with the ring in a tiny zip lock bag.  I put it in a drawer and after a while, it was “out of sight, out of mind.”

You might ask yourself how a husband could possibly be as much a fool as I have been.  You would be right to ask that question.

Coming out of the vision, the first thing that was clear to me was that my wife’s wedding ring needed to be repaired, no matter what the cost, and returned to her finger.  To say that I loathed myself that day would not really capture the spirit of the moment.  I was overcome with guilt, shame, and an overwhelming sense of wondering how I could be so blind and stupid.  How could I not have known that this was unacceptable? There was no defense for my lack of caring and concern.  This was the Spring of 2010 and the ring had been damaged in December of 2007.

I didn’t say anything to my wife, but I put the bag into my pocket when I left for the gym.  I worked out, then planned to find a place to take the ring.  As I was leaving the fitness center, I was thinking to myself, “I don’t know any jewelers.  I don’t even know where to go.”

As I was thinking this, I was making a left turn out of the parking lot and found myself looking at a storefront window that said, “Jeweler” and “repairs” in large letters.  Right across the street from where I worked out nearly every day was a small shop and I turned in.  I spoke with the man and showed him the ring.

He had a great plan for how to not only fix the ring, but to make it stronger than before.  The price he quoted me was a fraction of the estimate I had gotten at the other store.  He explained that the finished product wouldn’t be as fancy as the original ring, but that it would still be very beautiful and, more importantly, it would be strong enough to withstand the type of accident that had gotten us here.

Stronger than before, and no less beautiful
That’s the picture of love.  It gets hurt.  It suffers damage and loss.  But it withstands the hardships and becomes stronger than ever.  Sometimes in trials and difficulties, it loses some of the outward luster, but it loses none of it’s beauty and even increases in quality.
I wrote a long love letter in which I expressed these thoughts and placed it with the ring on her pillow when I brought the ring home.  I hoped that she would read the words and they would reach her heart and we would reconcile that night.  Unfortunately, I badly underestimated the depth of her pain and the brokenness of her heart.  Returning the restored ring was a start and a step in the right direction, but the truth was, while she still shared the apartment with me, my wife was already gone.
Things would have to get much worse before they got better, but I now had hope and a plan.  Continue to fix what needed fixed.  Keep repairing, replacing, and restoring everything that I could find that needed my attention.  Let God show me what to do and then do it with all of my heart, regardless of whether I could see any results.

Seeing the Big Picture

Posted: May 10, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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For anyone who says that people can’t change, I say, “You just don’t know.”  It’s true that many people don’t change, but there is too much evidence of changed hearts and lives all around us to take such a narrow view. 

Living with and loving a person who needs to change, but won’t, is a very difficult spot that many people find themselves in.  The message of this blog is simple.  Don’t give up.  With God, all things are possible. 

As my stony heart was being cut out, my eyes began to be opened to things that I should have seen, but didn’t.  It was during this time that the vision for the restoration tour was birthed. 

One day, about a year ago, as I was praying and meditating, I saw a vision that would become a driving force in my life and marriage.  I saw our marriage as a house going through stages.  At first, it was newly built and ready for the first occupants to move in.  The curb appeal was very strong and it was the kind of property that people would drive by and think, “What a great place!” 

That was us in the newlywed stage.  We were the ones always chosen as the cutest or most romantic couple.  We had that special something in our marriage in a big way and others recognized it.

Then the house began to experience normal wear and tear.  Some of the paint began to peel.  Hinges got rusty.  Windows began to stick.  All these were small things that happen naturally.  The key is that they are easy to fix. 

Some homeowners take pride in their house and quickly take care of this type of maintenance.  Others procrastinate.  I was one of the latter.  I let things go.  I’m not sure why.  I just didn’t see the big picture.

Eventually these little depreciations became bigger and bigger problems.  Boards began to sag.  The lawn and landscaping became an unruly mess.  There were plumbing and electrical problems.  Windows broke.  Not nearly so easy to fix now.

My response? I sat in my chair and ignored it.  It’s not that I didn’t care.  I just didn’t want to deal with it.  In the vision, I clearly saw how lazy and negligent I had been.  I saw my beautiful home turn into a dilapidated, run down eyesore. 

My wife and I used to buy old, run down properties and restore them.  We would find houses that were built to be something special and work on returning them to their former glory.  It’s very hard, dirty work and you have to deal with a lot of mess along the way.  You also have to undo a lot of things that shouldn’t have ever happened, but did.  You can’t ignore them and they won’t just go away.  They have to be dealt with before you can complete the restoration.

As this vision passed before me, I immediately recognized its meaning and what I had to do.  I had to get to work and it wasn’t going to be on little things.  This wasn’t routine maintenance.  If my wife was ever going to want to live in this house again, it was going to take a full scale gutting of all the mess and a committment to renewing all of it. 

Fortunately, I had the Master Builder, a carpenter from Bethlehem to lead me through the process.  The same one who said in the book of Revelation 21:5 “Look, I am making everything new.”  Time and circumstances were not in my favor, because this was going to be a long and daunting task, but for everyone who has ever heard or said the words, “It’s too late,” I would counter with the idea that as long as we have breath of life in our nostrils, it’s never too late.  Real change is possible, but it has to start with ourselves, on the inside.  Only then can meaningful change spill over into our circumstances.

Removing the Heart of Stone

Posted: May 9, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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It’s a sad thing to pray a prayer that God can’t answer because the heart of the one praying isn’t sincere.  Over the years, I wouldn’t want to know how many of those I prayed.

For whatever reason, I always had a heart problem.  I wanted to follow the Lord and do what was right at some level, but only on my terms.  Bottom line – If I was the one calling the shots, He wasn’t really my Lord.

The prayers of the hypocrite go like this:  “Lord, I’m sorry that I haven’t been living right and following you like I should be.  Please forgive me and help me to do better.”  The words themselves are a prayer that God wants to answer.  It’s hypocritical because I knew, even as I would say the words, that I wasn’t really willing to change.  I didn’t want to do better.  I just didn’t want to feel guilty.

We all have our currency.  We all have something that is worth enough to us to want it, work for it, and be willing to change if necessary.  My currency turned out to be my wife.  As we approached two months of still living under the same roof and sleeping in the same bed, but having next to no level of intimacy, the urgency to somehow fix what was broken began to skyrocket.

I finally did the only thing I could.  I got real with God and with myself and I began to pray in earnest.  I began to pray prayers that I not only meant, but that emanated from a heart and soul in desperate anguish.

Nothing changed overnight.  You’ve got to realize, even though God knows our hearts, He’d been listening to these kinds of prayers off and on for two or three decades.  If I was serious this time, I was going to have give more than lip service.  It was almost like He was giving me the chance to reconsider.  “Do you really want what you are asking for?  Do you really even understand what you are asking?” were the implied questions in the days that followed.

I was praying about my marriage, but instead of answering in terms of that, God began to show me what I had done to my relationship with Him.  He began to let me look into His heart and see how pure and true His love had always been for me, and how horribly unfaithful I had been to Him over and over again.  I had pledged myself to Him so many times, but just like a wayward lover, I had gone after whatever caught my fancy and left Him with the choice of forgiving me and taking me back one more time or rejecting me for good.

In Ezekiel 36:26, God says, “I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.”  That’s what I needed.  Heart surgery under God’s masterful hand.  I let go of all the things that had held me back for so many years and went under His knife.  I allowed Him to reach inside and show me all the horror of my inner self.  I allowed Him to hold the mirror in front of my face and compel me to look.  And I allowed Him to cut away that stony, stubborn heart and remove it once and for all.

I can never decribe or explain the pain of that experience (which lasted for days, not minutes or hours).  I never knew my eyes could hold that many tears.  I only knew that, through the agony, healing would come.  I knew that death was what I deserved, but life came instead.

Facing the Hard Truth

Posted: May 8, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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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.

Latest Tour Stop: Republic, MO for the May Day 5K

Posted: May 7, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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In November of 2009, we down-sized from a large house in the country to a small apartment in Republic, Missouri, a suburb of Springfield.  We had been living on a farm and my wife was becoming increasingly unhappy.  For me, it was an attempt to stop the bleeding in our marriage.  For her, it was the beginning of the end. 

Shortly after moving, we endured a difficult Christmas, and, based on her experience with her parents’ divorce, she concluded that we weren’t going to make it.  These were our circumstances entering the Spring of 2010.

My wife is a runner.   She’s a gym rat in general, but especially, she is a runner. 

The first 5K in the local “season” is the May Day 5K, which is held in Republic on the first Saturday in May.  So today, we got up early and made the drive back to Republic for this year’s event. 

It was difficult to go back to a place where so many bad memories linger, but that’s part of the restoration tour.  More on that later, but this morning, it was about me supporting and cheering on my wife, my partner in love and life. 

Last year, I don’t want to imagine what she was thinking before, during, and after the race.  This year, it was us together; she the runner and I the cheerleader. 

She was disappointed in her time this morning, but I was as proud of her as I could be.  At last year’s race, I wanted her to know that I loved her and supported her.  Her mind and heart were elsewhere.  Today, on the ride back home, she told me how much it meant to have me there to cheer her in.

That’s the spirit of the restoration tour.  I’ll share much more details in the days to come, but in short, the restoration tour is the process of going back to all of the times and places where we hurt each other, let each other down, and failed to love each other the way we promised to.  It’s a healing of the hurts,  a repairing of the damage.  It’s a setting right of the wrongs.  Restoring what once was and was meant to be beautiful, so that it is, in fact, beautiful again.

Take the Tour

Posted: May 6, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Exactly 3 months from today, a ceremony will be held.  It will feature a man and a woman who want to share with their friends and family how much they love each other and how happy they are for the love they have found.  There will be close friends who will stand with them. People will share inspirational words.  Vows will be spoken, music played, and some tears will most likely be shed.

This ceremony will not be their wedding.  That happened in 1996.

This ceremony will be the culmination of a year of the restoration of that marriage; a celebration of what God has done and made possible for a couple who lost their way and found it again.

The purpose of this blog is to encourage others to hold on to the dreams and ideals of marriage with all of their hearts and all of their might.  You can live happily ever after and dreams do come true, but it takes a lot more than wishing on a star.  As James A Baldwin once said, “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does.  Love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up.”

I hope you’ll join me for the next 90 days as I share a bit of the hopes, dreams, fears, mistakes, and ultimate victory that is our marriage.

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