Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (18 page)

Double-mindedness keeps us from the help we desire: full healing and reconciliation. Instead, double-mindedness sets our desires against God’s, proving futile for us since we’re asking for God’s help in the first place! Our coping mechanisms, our attempts to avoid pain in our own strength, are counter to the kind of healing God wants to provide and even cause the instability we try to avoid. Instead, we are to view the trials we face as “an opportunity for great joy” because these trials develop perseverance and maturity (James 1:2-4). God’s desire for us, as it was for the Israelites in the desert, is to refine us.

But the process of refinement is painful, and when we ask God for help, we are often looking for an easy solution rather than the help we truly need. James later adds to this point: “You don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure” (James 4:2-3). When we desire to avoid pain more than we desire intimacy, ordinary is the only result we can expect.

THE PATH OF RESENTMENT

The problem with our coping mechanisms is that by using them we are not dealing with our pain. This pain then festers and puts us on the path of resentment, and resentment inevitably leads us away from our goal of true healing through reconciliation. Resentment is a silent assassin in marriage. Resentment is the author of ordinary, and it infects every aspect of our marriages. We cannot harbor bitterness in our hearts and love our spouses in an extraordinary way. Resentment kills the seed of love. And unfortunately, we often don’t recognize resentment until it is too late.

Resentment has a way of disguising itself as self-protection. We put up walls of bitterness that we think will keep us from getting hurt again. But bitterness and resentment only produce unforgiveness. When we refuse to extend grace and forgiveness
to our spouses, we undermine the self-protection we seek. In harboring bitterness toward our spouses and refusing to forgive them, we are refusing to allow God to heal and transform us.

There is an irony in Christians’ struggle with forgiveness. As believers in Jesus, we have been saved by grace. We have been offered forgiveness. When we least deserved it, God forgave us. Yet many of us fail to forgive our friends, parents, siblings, coworkers, and yes, even our spouses.

Hurts, disappointments, wounds, resentment. You have accumulated them over the years. From your childhood, from college, now from your marriage. The person you love the most is the one who hurts you most often. Maybe not in big ways, but in consistent ways. These open wounds are eating away at you, robbing your marriage of the freedom that comes through forgiveness.

Resentment is easy; forgiveness is difficult. Our marriages put us in situations where we must decide over and over again whether to choose resentment or forgiveness. You will have opportunities to pursue and experience intimacy through forgiveness, but as we’ve mentioned, intimacy comes with a price. Grace is free but never ever cheap. There is always a price to redemption, and that cost is paid through gut-level honesty and refining. As with the principle of the Dip, it’s so easy to stop just short of our moment of redemption because the path seems too difficult or painful. But the path of brokenness is the way to redemption, and there are no shortcuts.

THE PATH OF BROKENNESS

You may feel like your relationship with your spouse is nearing death. Starting on the journey toward reconciliation may seem hopeless, especially when the path is rocky. We have witnessed many people give up and step off the path rather than staying on it and finding healing. The truth is that this path is painful, narrow,
and rugged. But it’s a path that, should you choose to take it, will lead you to freedom and a new life found in God.

In the book of Job, we find a man on a path he didn’t choose; it was chosen for him. In fact, the Bible says that Job “was blameless—a man of complete integrity” (Job 1:1). But God leads him to a narrow path that eventually costs him everything. His family, friends, and livelihood are taken from him in a painful turn of events. He questions. He argues. He pleads. But Job never stops dialoguing with God. He’s bound and determined, even in his pit of despair, to figure out why God has placed him on this path, and he later comes to this conclusion:

     
He knows where I am going.

          
And when he tests me, I will come out as pure as gold.

     
For I have stayed on God’s paths;

          
I have followed his ways and not turned aside.

     
I have not departed from his commands,

          
but have treasured his words more than daily food.

Although Job’s circumstances brought about gut-wrenching pain, they didn’t inherently bring brokenness. He had to choose it. Job was at a painful crossroads to daily choose brokenness over bitterness. Brokenness allowed Job to see past his circumstances and to treasure God’s words more than even his daily food.

Brokenness is an act of surrender. It’s giving up rather than just trying harder. Brokenness is a decision, laying everything on the line and then submitting it all to God. It is an awareness that God is your only hope. You can choose brokenness. The Bible says that God “will not reject a broken and repentant heart” (Psalm 51:17). He longs to see us desire brokenness, for it is in our brokenness and weakness that his strength is made perfect (2 Corinthians 12:9).

THE BENEFITS OF BROKENNESS

When we embrace brokenness, we can expect these benefits:

• We lose our need to control.
  When we have a faulty trust in God, we don’t think he can control our lives as well as we can, so we manipulate. When we choose brokenness and surrender, we trust that God is in control, and we submit to what he desires and chooses. There’s freedom in knowing he’s in control.
  
• We lose our need to impress.
  When we choose brokenness, we lose our need to impress others. We begin to live out of an identity that isn’t based on others’ opinions, validations, or acceptance. When we live
  only
  trying to impress God, we discover a confidence and freedom that we’ve often tried to provide for ourselves but never could.
  
• We lose our desire to pretend.
  When we embrace brokenness, we stop pretending. We stop pretending we’ve got it all together, we’ve got all the answers, we have the perfect marriages and have overcome all sins. We lose our desire to pretend to be better friends, husbands, or parents than we really are, and we desire to be more of who God calls us to be. We actually want to wake up and
  be
  the people we’ve been pretending to be, realizing that brokenness is the only way to get there.
  
• We lose our need to hide.
  As we find and embrace broken
  ness, our need to hide fades away, and all we are left with is
  freedom
  .
  

So how do you find this path? Do you have to sin to get there? Do you have to experience devastation to get there? The answer is no. Confession is necessary, but brokenness is available to anyone willing to pursue it. The truth, however, is that this path is most apparent in desperate situations because they come from a place of crisis. Most of us don’t choose this path, because there’s nothing appealing about it. It’s narrow, and most of those who walk this path do so because of crisis.

But that’s the beauty found on the narrow path of brokenness. It leads you to death so Jesus can bring you back to life as a
new
creation. Not a better version of the old you, but
ne
w
! Brokenness starts closer to home than we might find comfortable. Hebrews 3:12 says, “Make sure that
your own hearts
are not evil and unbelieving, turning you away from the living God” (emphasis mine). As much as we might want to change our spouses—as much as we disapprove of their behavior and wish that they’d come to a place of brokenness—the path of brokenness begins with ourselves. The truth is, while the following verse says, “You must warn each other every day” (Hebrews 3:13), we can’t control what other people will do. Yes, we can warn them, but ultimately, to take the narrow path of brokenness is first of all an individual decision. And when we are broken, there is a greater chance that God will use our brokenness as a witness to bring others to a place of brokenness in their own lives.

We must guard our hearts, because self-deception is the most dangerous type of deception. Self-deception will convince us that we are justified in our own behavior. Self-deception gives way to selfish choices rather than godly ones and often puts us back in the cycle of resentment. This passage in Hebrews goes on to say when we are deceived by sin, we become “hardened against God” (Hebrews 3:13). It doesn’t say we
might
become hardened, but that we
will
become hardened against God.

The path of brokenness is hard, and the road is narrow, but brokenness brings us to a place where we can receive and give grace. This is where extraordinary thrives.

QUESTIONS

1. Is there anything that you need to confess to your spouse? Take some time to pray, asking God to examine your heart.
   
2. What are your natural coping mechanisms? How did these mechanisms develop? How might your spouse view these coping mechanisms?
   
3. What role does resentment play in your marriage? If any, how did that resentment come about?
   
4. What are the costs of choosing brokenness in your marriage? What are the benefits? Have you chosen brokenness? Why or why not?
   

In our story, the affair gets all the attention, but what I (Trisha) have come to realize is that I had a forgiveness issue long before the affair. I had mastered the art of unforgiveness and felt clueless about what true forgiveness looked like.

Jesus knew we would struggle with this whole process of forgiveness. He knew forgiveness would have to be something we choose, not something we drift into. Look at this passage in Matthew:

“No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven!”

Jesus tells Peter to forgive seventy times seven times, not because the person we forgive will need it that many times, but because resentment can have such a grip on our hearts that we need to forgive that often for our
own
healing. That is exactly what we realized as we walked through the cycle of forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard.

Christians aren’t the first group of religious people to struggle with forgiveness. In the Gospel of John, a group of religious people catch a woman in the act of adultery. They have no intention of forgiving her. They have no compassion. They have no desire to dispense grace; they want condemnation. So they bring her out into the middle of the street and throw her at the feet of Jesus. With stones in their hands, they stand ready to bypass forgiveness and dispense justice. Here is how Jesus responds:

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.

That is a great passage, but when I read it, it’s easy for me to think,
What about her husband? He wasn’t in that circle. He didn’t do anything wrong. He had every right to throw stones
. What do you do with this idea of forgiveness when you have the right to dispense justice? What do you do when you have the right to throw stones?

The Christian thing to do is to follow Jesus’ lead and put down your stone, but the truth is that the hurt is real. You’ve got this stone in your hand, and you know you’re not supposed to throw it, but you can’t let yourself drop it either.

One of the questions we always get—and it may be one of the questions you had as you turned to this chapter—is, “How did Trisha ever forgive Justin? How in the world could she forgive him after what he did?” It is one of the most important questions you can ask, and one of the most amazing questions we have the honor of answering. After all, ordinary lives in resentment, but extraordinary lives in forgiveness.

JUSTIN:

I attended counseling alone every day. Two weeks after we separated, Trisha called me for the first time. When I saw her name on my cell phone, my stomach flip-flopped. It was the first time I had heard her voice in fifteen days. I had no idea what to expect; I was just thankful for her call.

She was gentle. She was soft spoken. She was open minded. If the Prodigal Son’s father had had a cell phone, this was the kind of call he would have made. She asked a few questions. She made
a few statements. We both cried. She didn’t make any promises—just an offer to go to counseling with me.

Two days later, we began counseling together. I hoped to be home by the end of October. Our counselor hoped to have me home by Christmas. It would be a long journey. For the next thirty days, Trisha and I went to counseling together every day but Friday. We followed up our counseling appointments with long conversations on the phone. Long e-mail exchanges. Long talks over coffee or at Red Lobster.

More important than those conversations were the time and conversations I had with God. Sadly, it had been years since I had read the Bible for any purpose other than preparing a message. It had been years since I had spent time praying for anything other than church growth, church people, and church problems. God’s presence had never been more tangible. God’s voice had never been clearer. God’s Word had never carried more power to illuminate the sin and darkness in my heart.

The things I was learning about myself were ugly. The affair wasn’t the problem in our marriage; it was a visible and destructive symptom of an illness that had lived in my heart undetected. Insecurity and fear had ruled my life for years. They had given me an ability to manipulate people and situations in such a way that I would appear more put together and spiritual than I ever was. Years of woundedness, running, and hiding had finally caught up to me. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be healed. But I also wasn’t sure I wanted to pay the price. It would take more courage and more faith than I’d ever had.

About a month after we began counseling, we came to a pivotal point in our recovery. Our counselor could see that trust was being rebuilt. Intimacy was being restored. What we did at this point would determine whether our marriage would experience health and recovery. This moment was huge. The counselor made it clear that if I had left anything out about the affair, any details at all, they
had to be revealed. He told us to fast and pray for twenty-four hours and then come back—and I would share anything I had withheld.

We showed up together the next day. I spent the first ten minutes of our session sharing details about the affair that I had somehow withheld for the previous month. That was Trisha’s breaking point. I had hurt her again. She left me there sitting in the counselor’s office.

I called Tony and told him what I had done and asked if he could come pick me up. I went back to my room at his house and sobbed. I knew that my habitual inability to tell the truth had just delivered the knockout blow to my marriage. The past month had been a smoke screen to hide the disease that I couldn’t break free from. About an hour after I arrived at the house, I received a phone call from a woman in our church. She told me that Trisha would file for divorce on Monday because I couldn’t be a person of truth.

I was at my lowest low. My marriage was over.

Later that night, our counselor called me. He wanted to make sure I was okay. He had talked to Trisha, and she had told him that she was done with me. I felt hopeless. He said, “Maybe this is about your relationship with God more than your marriage.”

He was right. For the past month, as much dependence as I’d felt on God, I’d really been focusing on what I needed to do to fix my marriage. What could I do to make up for the hurt? What could I say to take away the pain? How much could I change to finally be the husband Trisha deserved? What hoops did I need to jump through to have a better marriage?

The truth—though I didn’t know it then—is that jumping through hoops will never give anyone an extraordinary marriage. Hoop jumping always leads to ordinary.

That night something clicked in my heart and mind. For the first time in my entire life, I desired my relationship with God more than anything else. Even if it meant I would be divorced, I knew I couldn’t live the life I had been living for the past twelve years. I wanted to live in a right relationship with God, no matter my marital status.

I called a pastor friend of mine who had been my church-planting coach. He and I had met every Tuesday for the past three years for “accountability.” I was supposed to share struggles and temptations and problems with him. I had failed him, too. I asked if I could come over that night to talk to him.

I arrived at Keith’s house around eleven. I was terrified. I had never told anyone what I was going to share with him. I had convinced myself that if anyone knew about these things, I would lose everything. That fear had kept me silent with my board member by the creek, but that fear wasn’t going to keep me silent tonight. The reality was that the effort to keep these things hidden had already cost me everything.

I sat at his dining room table, hands shaking, voice quivering, tears streaming down my face. I confessed to a ten-year addiction to pornography that I had never told anyone about. I told him I had been sexually abused as a kid and that I had never received help or shared it with anyone. I told him that all I wanted was to have a pure and authentic relationship with God. I was confident that Trisha was done with me, but I couldn’t pretend with God anymore. I wanted a second chance with him now that everything else was gone.

Keith’s response made me laugh. He said, “I’m going to pray for you, and I’m going to ask God to give you an opportunity to share this with Trisha.” There was no way that would happen. Apart from the divorce courtroom, I would probably never again have the opportunity to speak to her. He prayed for me, hugged me, and tried to encourage me.

On Monday I came to the house to pick up the boys for school. Trisha appeared in the doorway and asked me to come in. I was content with getting the boys to school late, because being invited into the house trumped getting them to school on time. She sat down on the couch and said to me, “I have to know everything. Are you telling me everything?”

I said, “As far as that relationship goes, I’ve told you everything.
But I have a lot more to tell you; I’m just not sure you want to know.”

Trisha looked at me and said, “I want to know everything.”

I asked the boys to wait upstairs and watch television until I came up to get them for school. It was just Trisha and I on the couch. I didn’t want to hide anymore. I confessed to her what I had already confessed to Keith. I told her I was so ashamed that I had refused to admit to these things or get help. She was sobbing. I was heaving, I was crying so hard. “I haven’t just been lying to you; I’ve been lying to myself, and I want to be a person of truth, even if you don’t want to be married to me anymore.”

In an act of grace and mercy unlike anything I’d ever seen or experienced, Trisha wiped my tears away and said, “Now we can begin again. Now we can start over.”

We sat there in silence a few moments. I felt the Holy Spirit prompt me again. “I have one more thing to tell you,” I said.

The look of defeat in her eyes felt so heavy. “What?” she said with suspicion.

“I was never recruited to play basketball at the University of Evansville,” I admitted. “That’s a lie I’ve been telling since I was eighteen. I’ve told it so many times, I’ve almost come to believe it myself.”

To Trish, that may have seemed far less significant than the other things I confessed that morning, but for me, my redemption and the full redemption of our marriage hinged on that confession. I was not only committed to telling her the truth, I was finally committed to telling the truth to myself, no matter the cost.

That conversation wasn’t the finish line—not even close. It was the starting point of a two-year journey through pain and loss and brokenness. That conversation gave birth to the grace, redemption, and restoration that continues to thrive in our marriage today. That conversation gave birth to the burden we now
have to help couples put their ordinary marriages to death so that Christ can resurrect extraordinary marriages in their place.

TRISHA:

Over the first few days after Justin moved out, I began to strategize a plan for my life without Justin. This was what I feared most, but it was something I had to be prepared for. I opened new bank accounts; I had utilities put in my name; I dug into our budget and debt and got educated on the mess we were in financially. After several days of putting a plan together of what life would look like, it was now time to implement it. I was already working as a preschool teacher, but it wasn’t enough to keep the lights on, so I took a front desk position at a vet clinic owned by a good friend of mine. I’ll never forget answering my first call, perplexed that the lady on the other line not only wanted her dog “de-clawed” but that she kept calling it a “dewclaw.” After five painful minutes of confusion, my friend explained to me the ABCs of pet anatomy.

Although I wasn’t knocking it out of the park at the job and was still a bit shaky and clumsy in certain areas of my life, I felt solid in my relationship with God. I knew he was with me every
step of the way, and one particular morning, I felt that God was prompting me to call Justin.

Voice shaking, I made the call, and to this day there are no words to describe what it was like to hear his voice after fifteen days of silence. That one call marked the beginning of being on the narrow path—no longer alone, but together.

We spent the next weeks in counseling, and even though it was painful and exhausting, we began growing closer together as we allowed the waterlines of our hearts to be lowered to a level we never had in the past. The problem was that I
still
had this heaviness in my heart and couldn’t understand why.

Every session when Justin would share about the affair, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still withholding truth. What I didn’t realize was that as I pleaded with God to help me discern the difference between fear and truth, that feeling was the groaning of the Holy Spirit (which Paul talks about in Romans 8:26). On November 10, during the counseling session when Justin revealed the rest of the details about the affair, I understood why the groaning was so strong.