In 1980 I made my first trip to my pastor’s office seeking counsel. I cried as I told him about my boss, a married man I had known for 3 years in my workplace who was flattering me, courting me like a love struck adolescent boy…. I was tempted. And I was ashamed. But my heart was breaking, as well. I told the pastor that I was longing to see that desire and hear words of appreciation and for that kind of attention from my husband. I yearned to feel cherished. That was my lament. His word to me was, “I hear you saying that you want to be affirmed by your husband.” Yes. That’s what I wanted. “I want to be affirmed.” That would become the cry of my heart for the next decade. That is all I remember of our conversation and was my takeaway. I can still see the image of him sitting across the desk from me and saying those words. He gave me the name of a marriage counselor to whom he referred parishioners.
I’d been married eight years and we had two beautiful children. My husband and I were accomplishing our goals, career wise, socially, and financially. But I was longing for something that was absent in my marriage that was being offered in another place, the wrong place. We went to marriage counseling, the first attempt of several efforts over the next decade. As I recall it lasted maybe three sessions. My husband seemed clueless to what I saw as “our” problem. As far as he was concerned it was my problem. At the end of the year I left that workplace and went to an outside sales career away from the daily contact with someone who came dangerously close to turning my head, but not winning my heart.
After another couple of years and the longing still in place, the occasional overnight travel of my job gave me opportunities to test my desirability in some risky and inappropriate ways. I was not looking for a “relationship”, I was exercising power. I felt powerless and hopeless about getting what I wanted in my marriage, but I found I could wield power in other places and ways, passive-aggressively in secret. It was an infrequent secret indulgence and I learned to harden my heart to my longing by taking control where I could. After about six years and a handful of such events, I was no happier than I’d been the day I sat in my pastor’s office.
God brought correction through a means of grace I didn’t expect…… what had been casually offered as a weekend women’s retreat. It became an encounter with Christ, gentle yet world-shaking. I stayed in tears most of the weekend. Tears of brokenness, tears of repentance, tears of relief, tears of joy, tears and more tears. I was exhausted by the end of the weekend, but it was a satisfied exhaustion. I had found freedom from the longing to be cherished. I knew that I was cherished by the Lord. That made the lack of emotional and spiritual intimacy in my marriage less of an aching void. I began to build my identity under new leadership, that of Jesus. The change in me made my husband curious and ten months later he attended a similar retreat for men. He, too, was transformed by the experience. Over the next four years we grew, respectively, through small groups with others seeking deeper lives in Christ. We each grew in Christ. But still there was a void in our marriage, secrets and a lack of mutual kindness and servant-heartedness. We were still far apart. I felt that not so much as a lack of affirmation but as simply drifting apart. My husband was in a men’s group with our pastor who caught me one weekday as I stopped by the church. He asked me if I was okay. I guess my sadness gave away my heart’s feeling that I was very much alone. I told him that morning that I believed, with our move the year before to this new community, that God had removed me from all things familiar and comforting and brought me to a place where I had nothing and no one on whom to depend but the Lord himself. Four years after a renewed life in Christ, I was in the wilderness again.
A season arrived in the 1997, as we were about to become grandparents for the first time, in which God began to stir in my heart in new ways. We had received a new pastor and I sought counseling again in his office. He helped me understand the ways in which God was speaking to me and working in my life. But in the course of our conversion I confessed things I had never told a single person. He asked how my heart was in the matter, had I sought forgiveness of God. I had. I told him I felt no need to go further than that. He prayed with me and I went on my way. Days later what had been a wooing season out of the wilderness by God became a crisis of chaos as I began to hear voices that called me to things that made no sense, that seemed full of danger and risk. It was direction to confess things of the past to my husband. Confused, but told by the Lord to “Trust me,” I confessed my sins during those few years that had begun over a decade earlier of adultrous wandering. It lead to great pain, my husband’s and my own for two months, then led to me being hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for six days to try to pull my mind and my sense of self back together from the pain and consequences of my confession. Upon release from the hospital I went into intensive outpatient counseling with a wonderful woman who became a mainstay in my life for years. My husband still believed all the pain of our marriage was my doing alone. He repeatedly wanted to revisit the issue of how I could have done what I did. He accepted no responsibility for my anger or for me feeling alone. The husband of an older couple that took us under their wings for a few years began referring to my husband a “big dumb cowboy.” He and I, in knowing glances, shared the knowledge of the ways in which I felt diminished by my husband’s benign neglect. But I had Jesus…… and to Jesus I clung and went on about my life. All of that had happened in the 25th anniversary year of our marriage. Needless to say, our 25th wedding anniversary date passed unnoted.
Over the next two years we both healed significantly and continued working at our marriage. It improved. We settled into mostly contented ways. We did both see another counselor from time to time, a pastor friend we both trusted. He helped us work through the occasional impasse. But a day came a few years later when the repeated reminder of my past errors was more than I could take. We went to the pastor and I told them both that I had done my penance. I was through being reminded of my past. If my husband could not forgive me and put that chapter behind us, we needed to give up the effort. I was prepared to accept divorce, something I had feared greatly when its threat was used in our marriage, as it had been from time to time. But I was now ready, if that was all that could bring a permanent peace. I left the office alone with the intent of securing an apartment. By the time I returned home, we had a heart to heart conversation and my husband promised to never bring it up again….. and he never did. The threat of divorce no longer hung over me. He knew that if we could not be supportive and reasonably kind to one another we could call it quits. The way I described it was that we renegotiated the terms of our relationship. It was no longer a matter of either of us feeling we had no choice but to stay together. We had made a commitment to stay together by the choice of each of us and by knowing Christ was in it with us. We could not have made it through the years withoout our pastors, church family, and our respective small accountability groups, what Methodists call bands and a spiritual community calls reunion groups. The years of continued effort improved our spiritual and emotional intimacy. We were at peace with one another and we were happy.
John 8:31-32 “So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” 10-4-21