The Restoration Tour

Time can play tricks on us when we’re going through stressful events.  Hours can seem like days, and days like weeks or months.  When it’s your marriage, everything is amplified, because your whole future is tied to that person and whether or not you’re going to be together.  The days, weeks, and months I spent not knowing how things were going to turn out drove me to become a better person and deal with my issues, but it also wore on me.

In the book of Job, you see the effects of time on a person’s state of mind.  Job is a righteous man who has a great life, but suffers tremendous tragedy and difficulty all at once.  His initial reaction to it all is extraordinary.  He accepts the news and worships God in spite of his loss.  As time goes by, he is unable to maintain his peaceful acceptance.  Eventually he curses the day of his own birth and begins to demand an explanation from God as to how and why this could happen.

As time continued to pass with little or no visible change to my circumstances, it became even more critical for me to stay strong by leaning on my close friends and spending as much time as possible in prayer.  There were days when I could feel myself wanting to break, but I fought through them.  I also allowed myself to cry and grieve.  That’s not the manly thing to admit, but it’s the truth, and it was important that I have an outlet to get some release for my emotions when it all became too much.

In the song, “Start Again,” by Red, there’s a part that says, “What if I let you in? What if I make it right? What if I give it up? What if I want to try? What if you take a chance? What if I learn to love? What if, what if we start again?” As I mentioned in an earlier post, the song tore me up with grief, but also gave me hope.  The line that haunted me the most was, “What if I learned to love?”

Throughout this whole ordeal, I was learning what love really was.  The hope in the song was that, if I really did learn to love my wife, and if she took that chance, things could be right and work out between us.  There were times I would lay on my bed and I could see such a vivid picture of how things could be.  I could envision in great detail how much better our marriage could be than it ever was before and how we could be closer than we had ever been. 

As desperately as I wanted that (and I would have given up everything I had to get it), I was also learning that true love means giving, not getting.  Loving someone, really loving them, is not about having them, it’s about giving them what they need, no matter what that is.  Real love sacrifices.

The best known scripture in all the Bible, John 3:16, begins by saying, “For God so loved the world that He gave…”  The apostle Paul so loved his people, the jews, that he wrote, “I would be willing to be forever cursed…if that would save them.”  That’s how real love operates.  True love is sacrificial in nature.  God wasn’t going to force anyone to love Him, but He was willing to sacrifice His son to make it possible.  Paul couldn’t save all the jews, but he was willing to give up his own salvation, if that could accomplish it. 

As I prayed, I released my wife to God and to whatever was best for her.  I knew she wasn’t following God at the time, but neither had I been and He had brought me back.  I also knew that she could very easily find someone younger and more attractive, and who made more money than me, and that it was very possible that she already had.  It was the hardest prayer to ever pray and mean it, but I told God that if I wasn’t ever going to be able to make her happy and be right for her, that I would rather that she did find someone else who would. 

Without even realizing it, with that prayer, I had learned to love.  What I also didn’t realize was, with that prayer, something shifted in the spiritual realm.  Moving forward, God began to answer prayers and move in powerful ways on our behalf.