Posts Tagged ‘divorce’

Food, Fun, Fitness, and Following God

Posted: June 21, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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It’s the first day of summer and my wife and I have been on about a three-day eating fest.  This isn’t exactly productive, since we are both fitness buffs and summer is the busy time for competitions.  There are races and events nearly every weekend, and we should be in training mode.  In fact, we keep telling ourselves that we are, and then revising that to, “we will be starting tomorrow.”

The problem is two-fold.  One, we are both foodies, and two, we’re really enjoying our year of restoration.  There is so much wonderful food out there to eat (and to cook), and we’re having so much fun enjoying each other’s company and experiencing our second chance at love.

Last year was the first year that we were both full-time educators. It has been my dream for many years for us to have summers off together while still being paid from our school jobs.  Of course, last summer started off as a nightmare instead of a dream.  This year, we are living not only the dream of spending summer vacation together, but a summer of being in love again.

Father’s Day began with going out for breakfast at a local breakfast cafe that is really a throwback diner.  The atmosphere is great and the food is anything but healthy.  Then there was going out to lunch with my Dad and family, followed by my wife cooking dinner for our entire small group from church.  I told myself it was my “cheating day,” since I had been in a triathlon the day before.

Yesterday was spent in Kansas City catching up with my wife’s second daughter, who she put up for adoption as a baby, and who just made contact with us last year, right after we got back together.  Had we not worked our marriage out, things might not have gone so well with that relationship, but it has been a real blessing getting to know her and sharing a little bit of our lives.  We sat for more than three hours in La Bodega, a Spanish tapas bar last night, and it would be a major understatement to say that nobody left hungry.

This morning, after our workout, we stopped in for the lunch buffet at Old Chicago, another of our weaknesses, and then celebrated the release of the “Summer Crush” cupcake at our downtown cupcakery.  Tomorrow we will start eating right and being on a training diet, though.  After all, we have races coming up…(wink, wink)

I actually first met my wife when she handed me a job application at a retail store where she worked back in the early 90’s when we were both going to college.  Then, later, she showed up at the fitness center at that same college where I had since gotten a job as an instructor.  I remembered her (you don’t just forget the most beautiful eyes you’ve ever seen), and we got to know each other a little bit through the gym.

We were both education majors, so we had that in common as well.  Our friendship grew, but we were both in other relationships at the time.  When we finally found ourselves both single and available, we had been friends for so long that we almost didn’t date.  Eventually though, we did, and a third component, our spiritual lives, began to fall into place.

I had gotten away from church and anything spiritual when I had gone through my second divorce.   I knew what I believed, and I knew that eventually I would have to fix that part of my life, but I had spent too long drinking too much and doing my own thing to be much good for anyone else.  My wife didn’t know what she believed and was searching when we first got to know each other.  As I got my spiritual act together, I was able to help her sort hers out and find her way.

Those three areas of life: education, fitness, and spirituality, had formed the foundation for our friendship and dating relationship so many years ago and now have come full circle.  Now, as educators, we have the schedule that allows us to spend time together the way we do.  Working out, being active, and competing together keeps us fit and active, and greatly improves the quality of our lives.  Seeking God, and following Him gives meaning and purpose to who we are as individuals and as a couple.

Food?  Well, that just kind of evolved over the years.  We tend to agree with one of the hosts on Fox Sports Radio, who said, “I’d rather kill myself in the gym and eat whatever I want, than diet.”  Life is truly beautiful now, and we are seeing the fulfillment of so many of our dreams, as well as reaping the fruit of a lot of our hard work.  It’s mind-blowing to think of how close we came to throwing it all away, and what a horribly tragic mistake that would have been.

What is Love?

Posted: June 20, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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The question has been asked thousands of times for thousands of years.  Songwriters ask, “What is love?” and “How will I know when it’s love?”  Poets and painters, preachers and philosophers, psychologists and pundits all have their take.  “I want to know what love is,” sings one man who found that being a rock star, with all of its trappings, didn’t satisfy that inner longing for something deeper than money and fame could provide.

The need for love is basic to the human condition.  The lack of understanding of what this somehow elusive entity is, underscores how far from the path we humans have wandered.  The scriptures declare that, “God is love.”  For some, that is far too simple.  For others, such an idea is far too complicated.  I would humbly suggest that, if God is the creator, then apart from Him, love is irrelevant and cannot truly be found.

While my wife and I were apart, I searched both my heart and the scriptures for answers to the many questions I was struggling with.  I was led to two words.  One, of course, was love.  I wrote out pages of verses that contained the ideas of love and marriage.  I read them out loud and prayed them day after day until they took root deep in my soul.

The other word was fear.  Again and again, God led me to that word.  He revealed to me that there was a stronghold of long-standing fears that were holding my wife’s heart captive.   She didn’t know or understand this, and would have denied it if asked, but it wasn’t important for her to know it.  It was important that I be willing to fight for her, and to know what I was going up against.

I’m not really comfortable putting on the hero’s cape and going out to rescue the damsel in distress, but love drove me to do what I had to do.  Just as with the word love, I wrote out pages of scriptures about fear, and prayed and meditated on them.  Even after we got back together, there was an ongoing battle for both of us to conquer our fears and overcome those beliefs and tendencies that still remained from previous failed relationships and unhealthy interactions with people who didn’t show true love.

During the height of all of this, once again, a song spoke deeply to both of us.  I was in the car and a song came on the radio that literally stopped me.  I was so blown away by what I was hearing that I had to sit and take it in.  I found out later, by searching the web, that it was called “Please Don’t Let Me Go,” by a band called Group 1 Crew.

God’s love is a rescuing love.  His love is relentless and unstoppable.  He loves in the face of rejection and hurt, even to those who spit in His face, and most especially to those who are lost and confused.  Deep beneath the surface, where she appeared to be detached and independent, my wife’s heart was crying desperately for real love.  A part of her closed up her ears against those cries, because sometimes it’s easier to deny a need exists, than to face the idea that you might not be able to get it met.

My wife desperately wanted love to be real, and she wanted the love that she had believed she had from me when we married.  If she couldn’t have that love, she didn’t know where to go or how to live in this world.  It was up to me to break through her walls of fear and doubt and set her free to love and be loved the right way.  In order to do that, I needed to be filled with God’s love, because none of us have that kind of love on our own.  It simply doesn’t exist apart from Him.

Two verses were very powerful for me during that time.  The first is a prayer.  It says, “May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other.”  The second says, “There is no fear in love.  But perfect love casts out fear.”  Perfect love doesn’t come from us.  It only comes from God.

As I allowed Him to fill me with His love, it began to overflow to her.  The love that she was then receiving was coming from Him, through me.  Once she was filled to overflowing, she began to return that love back to me, and I, in turn, was returning it back to God.  He returned it back to me, and the cycle continues.  The cartoon is right, when the child asks, “Dear God, if I give all my love away, can I have a refill?”  Not only a refill, but a neverending supply.

For Future Generations

Posted: June 19, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Today is Father’s Day and truthfully…I don’t remember Father’s Day last year.  My wife doesn’t either.  So as far as the restoration tour and Father’s Day, we’re just going to assume that last year wasn’t good.

My wife and I both had kids from previous marriages, so when we got married, we did the whole blended family thing right from day one.  We never had any kids together because she was no longer able to.  All of the kids she already had were very young, so I was in their lives from early on.  I had a daughter who didn’t live with us, and my wife had two daughters and a son.

They don’t give you an instruction manual on raising your own children, and raising step-children is even more of a challenge.  I always tried to be there and provide stability, but I never tried to take the other parent’s place.  The kids had a “real” father, and replacing their blood relative was never a thought for me.

It took time for the relationship to develop between myself and the kids.  There were custody and visitation issues, as well as the problems left over from the previous failed relationships, and those are things that you just have to figure out as you go.  I thought that if her kids saw me treating their mother right, that was about the best thing I could do for them.

From the very beginning, we agreed that there would be no “your” kids and “my” kids.  We were married, so everyone was part of the family.  We always referred to all of them as “ours” and we still do.  That wasn’t to say that they no longer belonged to their other parent, it just meant that in our household, there would be no favoritism.

My wife’s oldest daughter, Angie, developed the earliest and strongest bond with me.  She had been a teenage pregnancy, and her biological father had chosen not to be a part of her life.  Even though she knew him, I was the only “Dad” she really had for most of her life.  She is one of my heroes, because she overcame the rejection and dysfunction of her early childhood, and has become a shining example of what can be, rather than what could have been.

When things went bad between my wife and I last year, Angie was as devastated as I was in her own way.  She cried and agonized for the same number of days and months that I did, so much so that her own marriage began to suffer for it.  What neither of us realized was that she had watched my wife and I through the years, and seeing the beautiful marriage that we had gave her the faith to believe that she could have that too, despite her less than ideal beginnings.

When people are going through troubles in their marriage, it’s very easy to forget that there are future generations who have a stake in the outcome.  While my wife and I had alternately cast our love for each other aside and wallowed in self-centeredness (i.e. focusing on what I want and MY needs and what makes ME happy), we lost sight of the fact that there were other people who were going to have to live with the consequences of our choices.

A friend of ours got a divorce after her husband cheated on her, confessed, and then went back to the same woman.  As much as it was a horribly painful experience for her to be betrayed like that, she discovered that the future pain that she had to watch her children go through was even worse.  She once told us, “If I had known what the divorce was going to do to my kids, I would have invited her (the other woman) to live in my house and sleep in my bed.”  While she wouldn’t have in actuality, the point hit home.

When a marriage fails, it’s not just a husband and wife who experience the pain of loss, and their pain is not necessarily even the deepest.  For my wife and I, our pain was very real, and our loss would have been great.  For Angie, there’s no telling what the final toll would have been if we hadn’t made it.  She said to us that she had based her whole marriage and choice of a husband off watching us, and if we couldn’t make it, then what chance did she have?”

When we reconciled, we not only saved our marriage and created a testimony of hope for others, we positively affected generations down the line.  The other kids have been affected, and have since shared things that we never realized they saw in us and thought about us.  Today, those kids are celebrating with us and wishing me a happy Father’s Day, even though I’m only their Step-Dad.  I would like to believe that they would still care about me if our marriage had failed, but there’s no guarantee that I wouldn’t have lost both a wife and a family.

Back To School

Posted: June 16, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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There are always two or three days before the school year starts that the teachers have to report to “get ready for the year.”  What this really involves is huge amounts of wasted time and frustration.  The teachers want to work in their classrooms, but almost all of the contract time is scheduled with meetings, presentations, etc.  The overwhelming majority of the content of these meetings are 1) things that the teachers either already know, 2) don’t pertain to the entire staff, or 3) could have been communicated via email.

To say that I don’t look forward to these days would be quite an understatement.  This past year was different, however.  Not different from any of what I just mentioned above.  That didn’t change.  What was different was the fact that my wife and I work at the same school, and, after facing the possible dissolution of our marriage as the previous school year had come to a close, we were attending these meetings together and feeling like newlyweds.  Acting like it, too, I suppose.

There were a number of people on staff who knew nothing about our troubles.  Then there were others who were aware, on various levels, of what had taken place.  It was a very emotional experience for me to share the story of our split and reconciliation several times with different groups of people, and I really wanted everyone to see a difference in me as a person, as well as the changes in us as a couple.

I also really wanted everyone to be happy for us, and to share our joy.  Many did, but there were some who didn’t respond well.  I was even called in to the principal’s office later in the school year because there had been complaints about us being affectionate toward each other while at school.  I can only assume that the people who didn’t or couldn’t feel happiness for us were jealous or unhappy in their own lives.

For my part, I was utterly thrilled to have my wife by my side and to have our future looking bright and beautiful.  I enjoyed those days that usually drive me crazy.  One teacher, who is a friend of my wife, told her privately that she could see how much better things were, because I, “look at her like a goddess now.”  Another teacher called us, “the lovebirds.”  It was a very special time, especially after my fears of never reaching this point.

It was, after all, during such days, at the beginning of an earlier school year that I had still been in the middle of my confusion about who I wanted to be with and where my life was going.  It was from my classroom, during a brief respite between meetings, that I had made a phone call effectively choosing my wife and ending my ambiguity about where my affections were to be given.  That all seems so absurd now, and redeeming those days as part of the restoration tour was a joy that I won’t soon forget.

Just yesterday, my wife was hired for brand new position at the school; one that she should excel and be very happy in.  It was great to be able to celebrate her success, and see the result of her hard work and perseverance paying off.  It also means spending more of those in service days prior to the new school year together.  It doesn’t mean I will look forward to the meetings any more than I ever have, but the blessing of sharing life with the one I love will certainly take the frustration out of them.

The Tour Begins

Posted: June 10, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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Waking up that first Saturday together was a miracle on so many fronts.  I have had more than one person tell me, both before and since, that they have never known a couple who has gone to the place we did and come out of it together.  There were times that my best friends made their doubts evident in things they said.  They stood by me and prayed for our marriage, but also said things like to be prepared, “just in case this thing goes badly.”

While the outward miracle of my wife and I moving back in together and re-committing to our marriage was in every sense spectacular, the things taking place on the inside of each of us were even more amazing.  I was literally living the final phrase of the famous “footprints” poem.  I was being carried by my Savior and I knew we were going to be all right.  There was going to be some work left to do, and more that we would need to heal from, but I knew that if He was carrying me, He would carry both of us. 

The most wonderful miracle for me, though, was what I saw in my wife’s eyes that next morning.  There was a transparent honesty, a release from some long-standing fears, and a vulnerability and openness that I hadn’t been sure that I would ever see.  It erased all my doubts about our reconciliation working out.  Her eyes have captivated me since the first time we met, but looking into them that morning, there was a depth and a newness that was more beautiful than I could have even imagined.

It was then that our “new” relationship truly began.  It reminds me of the very final stages in the restoration of a house.  The inside is never completely finished until after the outside is done.  There are always those details on the inside that put the finishing touches on the place and make it completely ready to be lived in. 

For the neighbors, and for people driving by, the outside being finished is the signal that it’s ready.  They see it looking done on the outside, and they want to see the inside, or they wonder why no one has moved in yet.  The people doing the restoration know that it isn’t finished, and they know what still needs to be done to make it just the way they want it. 

Some people live in the house during the restoration process.  Others move into temporary housing and then come back when it’s done and ready.  We always stayed in the houses while we worked on them, no matter how big the job was.  It was difficult and beyond inconvenient (think bathrooms and plumbing here) at times.  Often it was very tedious and seemed like little or no real progress was being made.  Other times, though, a lot came together at once and you could see the transformation happen. 

Once such moment is a favorite story of ours, when a friend, who generally didn’t knock, opened the front door and suddenly backed away.  She looked around in confusion, as though she’d gone to the wrong house and didn’t know where she was.  What had happened was she had stepped right into one of those moments where a lot had changed seemingly overnight.  It really didn’t happen that quickly, there was just a lot of work that had gone on unseen before the visible part appeared.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians contains the line, “I’m convinced that God, who began this good work in you, will carry it through to completion.”  The work in our marriage wasn’t finished, but the outcome was no longer in doubt.  My wife and I were both being transformed on the inside, and those changes were going to make our future so much different from our past. 

The plan for the restoration tour began to form in my mind almost immediately.  Nothing could be done about missing the bike ride, but I knew that it was an annual event and, much like I had set the Tiger Triathlon in my mind as the time that we would get back together, so I began to envision a year of restoration leading up to the next Tour De Cox.  We had a year to heal, to grow, and to repair our past mistakes.  Where I had been working on restoring our marriage alone, we would now spend a year of restoring together, ending with our renewal ceremony after the 2011 Tour De Cox.

After the Phone Call… Now What?

Posted: June 8, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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The day of “the phone call” was July 31st, so school was out, and it was a Saturday, but I did have to work at Macy’s later that day.  I didn’t expect to see my wife, but she showed up with our oldest daughter soon after my shift began.  Her face was flushed with excitement, and she had been sharing the good news with our daughter, who had stood strong for us throughout the entire ordeal.

There are two moments in my life that I will never forget.  They are forever etched in my memory like living photographs.  One is our wedding, when I first saw my wife at the back of the church.  At the risk of sounding cynical, I’ve never bought into people saying someone was the most beautiful bride ever, but that moment is permanently frozen in my mind, and I’ve never seen anyone or anything so beautiful. 

The second moment was that afternoon at Macy’s, when my wife got me away to where it was just the two of us, looked me in the eye, and told me that she loved me.  She repeated it, as if to make sure that I understood what she was trying to say, and she looked at me with eyes that melted me completely.  If you’ve ever seen the movie, Notting Hill, you know the scene near the end when Julia Roberts says she’s “just a girl, standing in front of just a boy, asking him to love her.”  In my wife’s eyes was both a statement and a question as she repeated an almost pleading, “I love you.”  The statement was clear. “I didn’t mean what I said before.  I do love you.”  The question was equally obvious.  “Will you love me back?  Will you please love me back?”

She told me that she had been wrong and had made some mistakes.  She said that she had done some things she wasn’t proud of.  I told her that it didn’t matter and that if I had been the man that she needed me to be, and the man that she believed she had married, she would never have been put in a position for any of this to happen.  I told her that I took full responsibility for the entire mess and that I would never again allow her to ever be in that type of situation.

She said she needed a little bit of time to clear her head and get things ready, and she asked if it would be all right if we waited until Monday evening, when I got off work, for me to move in.  I told her that was fine and to do whatever she needed to do.  We kissed right there in the store and I didn’t care if I got in trouble (I didn’t).  I don’t really remember much of anything about the rest of that day or the next two days.  Monday evening just couldn’t come fast enough. 

On Monday, August 2, 2010, my Facebook status was the famous quote from Al Michaels, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”  This was no hockey game, though.  This was a marriage pulled from the wreckage and rubble, being rebuilt, restored, and made new again.  This was the result of countless tears, unmeasured anguish, hours and days of prayer and faith, and work.  Work like there was no alternative but to do this, no matter how long, how hard, or how insurmountable it may have seemed at any given moment.

If you are reading this, and either you are struggling in your marriage, or you know someone who is, let me be very clear.  It is never too late.  It is never beyond hope.  If the two of you loved each other enough at one time to marry, that love can be rebuilt.  That’s what it takes.  Building love by your actions and not getting stuck in the past or the what-if’s.   Just like you’ll never get fit unless you start working out, the feelings of love won’t come back until you start building the love back up in your relationship.

The Phone Call

Posted: June 7, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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July 31, 2010 is a day that will be forever known to us as, “the phone call.”  It was also the day of the mock tri; a practice run with my training group for the upcoming triathlon in Republic.  Let me back up…

In March of 2010, my wife ran a half marathon (13.1 miles), her first ever.  There’s been a lot of debate about whether my derailment and/or hers was the result of the dreaded “mid-life crisis.”  She insisted that a year or two prior, I had been going through such a state and that explained some of my behavior.  She was now approaching 39 and her stated objective was to prove that she wasn’t getting old. 

Whatever the side stories may have been, I came to support her and was blown away and inspired by what I saw that day.  Remember, I was a former fitness instructor; that was how we had gotten to know each other while we were in college.  Call it laziness or life getting in the way, but I hadn’t done anything to keep fit for a long time.  There had been some half-hearted attempts from time to time, but I had just gone through the motions.

That day, at the half marathon, I saw people of every category.  Children, elderly, men, women, fat, thin, you name it, they were there.  And they were all doing it.  That was what struck me.  All these people were out there on a cold, miserable day to run/walk 13.1 miles and I was doing absolutely nothing.  When I saw my wife cross the finish line, I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of another person in my entire life. 

I vowed that day that I was going to change and get back in shape.  I never, in the farthest reaches of my imagination, could have fathomed that it would only be a little over 2 weeks before my marriage as I knew it would essentially be over (or at least suspended).  That was part of the irony of it all.  The very time that I was getting ready to get at least parts of my life back on track, she was turning me out of her heart.

I started a running program called “couch to 5K” or C25K for short.  It’s designed to get a person who has been doing nothing to be able to run a 5K race in about 2 months time. My wife had done it years before, and now it was available as an app on my phone.  I followed the program to the letter and got back to the gym in earnest.  When my wife unexpectedly went cold at the end of March, I desperately held on to the one part of relationship that was still intact; us running together and being workout partners.

Our fitness center was offering a class to train people who had never done a triathlon before.  It was to run from late spring until the “Tiger Tri,” the annual triathlon held in the town where we were living at the time.  My wife only went once, then dropped out as we separated.  Somehow, I fixed it in my mind that I was going to complete that triathlon, and that in so doing, I was going to get my wife back.  I had no reason to believe that one would lead to the other, but I did believe with all my heart that when I crossed that finish line, it would be the culminating event in bringing us back together. 

Two Saturdays before the actual triathlon, our coach had us do a mock tri.  We would swim, bike, and run the entire actual course so that we would know that we could do it, and be prepared for the rigor of the event.  Throughout the mock tri, and especially during the run, I prayed and spoke my wife’s name to keep me going.  I was determined that I was going to finish, and that I was going to run every step. 

When I got done, I felt a sense of accomplishment, but was still focused on the real event that was two weeks away.  I had literally only been home about 15 minutes when my phone rang and it was my wife.  She said, “I’m calling to ask you if you’re ready to give your landlord your notice and come live with me.”  I don’t know how or why the timing went that way, I only know that after I hung up I laid on my bed and cried for about 30 minutes straight.  Joe called about then and asked how I was doing.  I told him, “I’m crying this morning, but it’s tears of joy today.”

Something Beautiful – Something Whole

Posted: June 6, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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My wife’s favorite scene in the movie Joshua is where a character named Maggie tells Joshua, “My life is a mess,” and Joshua responds, “Your life’s not a mess; your life is beautiful.”  Maggie says, “My life was beautiful.  It was great.  It was whole.”  Then she smashes a glass vase on the ground and says, “That is my life, and it can’t be fixed.”

The next morning, the priest tells Maggie, “Wen Joshua left, he gave me something for you.  He said he made it.”  He holds up a glass angel and says, “Amazing.  The guy takes a million pieces of broken glass and makes something beautiful out of it”  Maggie takes it in her hands and stares at it in wonder and then finally says, “Something whole.”

There are times in a restoration project that you just have to tear down parts of the house.  They are too flawed, too damaged, too overcome by the years and everything they’ve withstood.  In another scene in Joshua, there’s a church that was hit by a tornado.  Joshua begins to dismantle it and sates, “Sometimes you have to tear it down to build it back up.”

My wife’s childhood and early adulthood is the stuff of daytime TV talk shows, made for TV movies, and soap operas.  An abuse victim from a very early age, growing up around mental illness and dysfunctional relatives, it is nothing short of a miracle that she has any kind of stable, successful life.  When I married her, I wanted to take her away from all that.  I wanted to be the rescuing knight who set her free and transformed her life.

Unfortunately, I am as flawed as the next guy, with a tendency toward some mental illness myself.  Even so, I always believed that, as the years went by, and I didn’t abuse her and was always there for her, she would heal.  They say that time is the healer and that time heals all wounds, but that’s another cliché that simply isn’t true.  A person with a severe laceration or a compound fracture doesn’t go to the doctor and be told that time will heal it.  It won’t.  It needs to be treated.

I’m not making excuses for why I did any of what I did, and there is no excuse for how I could have reached the point that I thought I wanted to end my marriage, but my frustration and feeling of helplessness continued to grow as certain things never changed no matter how many years we were together.  There were parts of my wife’s heart and mind that were inaccessible to me, and I had no way of fully understanding the things that she had been through and how they had shaped and affected her.  There were things she carried, and no matter how desperately I had wanted to set her free from them, my love wasn’t going to be enough. 

During our separation, my wife was keeping up appearances on the outside, but on the inside, she was growing more and more unhappy with the choices she was making and the direction her life was going.  She got to the point that she knew she wanted to try to come back to God and back to me, but she didn’t know how, or if she even could.  Christ is referred to by many names in the Bible.  Two of His titles are The Great Physician and The Master Builder. 

Some friends of ours used to have a poster in their house that said, “God can heal a broken heart, but He has to have all the pieces.”  As The Great Physician, He knew that time would never heal her wounds, and as The Master Builder, He knew that some things had to be torn down – shattered like the vase in the movie – so that my wife could be built back up, and made whole. 

I called Joe one night and told him that we had the upper hand now and urged him to join me in a final push in prayer to break through and finish this.  He spoke prophetically again without knowing it.  He said, “When this is over, you’re going to have a brand new wife.”  He didn’t mean a new person to be my wife, he meant my wife would be a brand new person.  Just like the yielding over of my hard, stubborn heart was terribly painful, so my wife needed to be broken to pieces in order to be healed, so her life could be made into something beautiful, and something whole.

Deciding I’m Worth More

Posted: June 5, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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As last July wore on, there was a strange dichotomy taking place in our relationship.  At the very same time, we were growing closer together and farther apart.  Looking back, it makes perfect sense.  I was winning her over.  She could see that I had changed.  She was seeing glimpses of the possibility of things working.  At the same time, she was scared.  She was afraid that it wouldn’t last.  She was afraid that things would go back to the way they were.  She was afraid that the choices she had made would keep us from being together.

The first sign that things were changing was the return of the laughter.  There were days and nights that we sat at a cafe or laid in bed and laughed and laughed together.  Comedian Yakov Smirnoff says, “Where there is love, there is laughter.”  When the laughter came back, the evidence of love being present, no matter how deeply buried, was unmistakable. 

Another sign was in our physical relationship.  We had gone through a stretch of time where my wife was mostly unresponsive to me.  Anything between us tended to be mechanical and without feeling. That all changed fairly suddenly, and even though we didn’t really talk about it much, she not only wanted my touch again, but we found ourselves acting like newlyweds despite the fact that we were still separated. 

What struck me as the strongest indicator that we had turned a corner came on the day we went to St. Louis with my daughter from Kansas.  We all had a blast that day, and anyone who saw us probably just assumed we were a very happy family.  We went to the zoo, took pictures, laughed a lot, and had a magical day.  While we were sitting at lunch, we were reminiscing about the past and I realized that my wife was telling stories of happy memories from our life together. 

For too long, when she talked about the past, she had only talked about the negative things that had happened.  Hearing her that day recalling the good times gave me a surge of hope that she was moving beyond the pain and toward a future with me still in it.  When we got back, she kissed me good-bye like it was the most natural thing in the world.  That day was, in fact, a turning point for her.  That was the day that she started to allow herself to believe that it was possible that our marriage could really be made beautiful again.

It was during this same time period that we experienced some of the bad times that I’ve mentioned in previous posts.  My wife called them fights.  To me, they were just painful conversations.  One evening, near the end of July, we were talking and I verbalized to her the idea that I had become a much healthier person and I saw myself differently than I used to.  I told her that I still wanted her back and that I would still continue to do the things that I had been, but that I would eventually need her to make a choice and a committment to me.  Things couldn’t go on like this forever. 

I wasn’t trying to give her a deadline or scare her into making a decision.  I was in no way being manipulative.  It was just that I realized I was worth more than being her errand boy and part-time lover.  I told her this, even though I was afraid to, in the gentlest way possible.  It had just become clear to me that I had value and that it wasn’t what was best to continue to let her call all the shots, while I simply went along with whatever she wanted at any given time.

I had learned to respect myself, and that led me to understand that if she was going to come back to me, I would have to be someone she could respect.  That meant being strong.  That meant being a leader that she could willingly follow.  It meant being whole and complete in my own self and not dependent on her or anyone else to make me happy.  I never imagined that instead of putting her on the defensive, it was exactly what she needed to hear. 

She asked me if I was still praying.  I told her that I was.  She said that I needed to pray like I never had before because she really wanted things to work between us.  She said she didn’t know how it was going to be possible, and that it would take a lot of prayer, but that she could see that I had really changed, and that the time we had been spending together made her want our marriage to work out.

Darkest Before The Dawn

Posted: June 4, 2011 in Love and Marriage
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I’ll never forget a story I heard from two older veterans of D-Day describing the invasion at Normandy.  One was a foot soldier who was landing and attempting to take the beach.  He was under intense fire and saw his comrades falling all around him.  He said that, from his perspective, there was no way the allies could win. 

The other was a pilot providing air support.  From above, he could see how many allied troops there were and how the Germans would soon be overwhelmed by their sheer force.  He said that from his vantage point, there was no way they could lose.

I wonder how often people give up right before their victory would have come.  I wonder how many times people fail to hold on, don’t make that necessary push, aren’t willing to pay the price to get to the other side, and never know that the thing they’ve been fighting for was within their grasp. 

I don’t know if it really is darkest just before dawn, but I do know that many times, the hardest resistance comes right at the very end.  It’s like a defense in football who is backed up against their own goal line.  They know that if they don’t hold the line here, they’ll give up a score.  How sad it would be if the offense didn’t know that they only needed to gain one or two more yards and they would have a touchdown.  Unfortunately, I think that’s exactly what happens to us sometimes, when we fail to break through.

I know that some of you reading this don’t believe in God, much less angels and demons, but I can assure you they are all real, and as much as I want to be able to give you good advice and inspire you in your own relationships, I have to tell you the truth.  The truth is that God saved our marriage, and there was a spiritual war that went on throughout this entire ordeal that had to be won in order for us to be where we are today. 

My wife had fallen under the power of darkness and couldn’t break free.  Because of the evil forces that had overtaken her (I’m talking about spirits here, for those of you unfamiliar with these things), she had allowed herself to begin to live in a way that was contrary to who she really was.  Her thoughts had become confused, her reasoning flawed, and her actions contradictory to what she really wanted.  What she wanted was for us to be in love again and things to be right.  What she was doing was trying to close the door on that and drive me away for good.  It’s a form of self-destruction that people often fall into when they don’t believe they can actually get the thing they truly want.

God began to speak to me very specifically in prayer around the time that my wife told me she had begged Him to make things work between us and that they weren’t.  He began to give me exact words to say to her.  It was literally that clear and specific.  He would dictate to me exactly what I was to go to her and say.  He also told me that she would respond badly, but to say it anyway – that she needed to hear the words, and that me saying them would have an effect on her that I would only see later. 

I was afraid of being hurt more than I already had been, but I was well beyond the point of no return by then.  I also knew that she was like a prisoner of war that had been taken captive by the enemy, and even though she was blind to it, she needed me to come and rescue her.  In the spirit realm, I led a mission to free her from her captors.  In the physical realm, I went to her apartment and delivered the message.  As God had told me she would, she rejected my words and told me she didn’t love me. 

I didn’t know what she would do from there, or how long it would be before the work was done.  I just knew that I wouldn’t give up while there was still hope, and that hope came from God, not from any signs from her that she was returning to me.  I resolved that whatever she did from that point, I would continue to fight the spiritual war on her behalf and show her love when I had the opportunity.  Even though I was the foot soldier in this story, God had the view from the air, and he knew it would soon be over.

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