I have told a select few my story from the last few months. And so far every one of them has praised God with me, and my fears of certain specific ways that they might respond to my story have not come to fruition. So without diving into what those fears are, and in response to the nudging of the Holy Spirit in my life to share my story in this format, I will trust that those fears will also not come to fruition in the minds or words of my readers.
For those of you who read the second post in my War Room series, you know that my marriage was in a really bad place a couple months ago. 85 days ago on the 10th of May, I wrote this:
I always thought because I wanted marriage so much, that the hardest thing would be being single forever. Instead, I found the hardest thing was watching that marriage I had always dreamed of falling apart around me. It was hearing my husband say that he only stayed married to me for the kids. It was knowing that the very attributes my husband knew I had when he fell in love with me were the same attributes that made him seriously consider divorcing me.
You see, my husband and I had both been living in sin for most of our marriage. We stopped really trusting God to take care of us, turned to earthly solutions, forgot to pray with one another, and then the additional sins began to creep in. For my husband, this was anger, rage, and complete lack of compassion. For me it was a need for control, selfishness, and gossip. I want to make it very clear that I was living in sin just as much as my husband. I am sure I inflicted just as much pain on him as he did on me.
I desperately loved my husband, but I couldn't seem to fix anything. And that is what became my driving force, was trying to fix what was wrong between us. I would ask him all the time what he wanted, and wouldn't accept "I don't know" for an answer. I felt like he didn't care and wouldn't listen to me, so I tried everything in the book to get him to talk to me. A couple of times he did come out of his turtle shell and actually answered my questions. But because I was pretty much attacking him for answers and solutions, he would come out with guns loaded. And man, were those weapons incredibly effective and painful!!!
We reached this point where he very regularly told me that he wanted a relationship that was more of a business relationship, complete with contract so we couldn't ever fight about who was supposed to do what. Sex would be for release, not pleasure. He was so tired of fighting, and otherwise had just become apathetic to what I did or didn't do. So if we just made up a contract, the fighting would stop, and we could both live in our own little worlds.
My response? Absolutely not! I was not content with an apathetic marriage. I wanted our passion back! I was not okay with settling for something mediocre. This was where we seemed incapable of finding a compromise. We were on opposite ends. And one night I finally told him in the middle of a fight that he had to pick whether he wanted me. I was tired of getting nowhere in the argument, and I wasn't going to settle for a marriage void of passion. So he could decide whether he wanted to stay in a marriage where I pushed for passion, or he could divorce me. But I wasn't going to divorce him, so he had to decide.
Then I went out to my car and I choked out gut-wrenching sobs. I was completely terrified that he was going to decide to divorce me. I tried to call a friend, who didn't answer, and then my husband started to text me. He told me he didn't want a divorce, but he thought it might be the best choice. I didn't respond to that, but just cried harder. Then he asked me if I really wanted to give our marriage another try. I said yes, and his next text read "come inside."
So I went inside, and after a little bit more conversation, which was much more civilized, we came up with an earthly solution. It seemed so brilliant at the time... You see, I asked my husband if he would like to "start over." As in everything we had ever done to hurt each other, or even the things that we said we liked or disliked or wanted from the other person, was no longer something we could hold over each other.
As soon as my husband knew that I wouldn't and couldn't hold anything over him, he was like a new person. Holding things over him was not a common habit of mine, but it was something people had done to him his entire life, so it was a very constant fear with him and something that he would even often read into scenarios.
This worked for us fairly well for a couple months. It felt like we were able to get to know each other again, since we had both changed quite a bit, and it felt like an incredible breath of fresh air. But it wasn't to last....
This is the beginning of a story, the valley of the story. I hope that you will be patient with me and come back for my post(s) next week telling about the journey out of this valley and the mountaintop moments that are to come.
Other Posts in My Story:
Rebuke or Forgiveness: Does God Always Call Us to Matthew 18? -My Story part 2
Reaching Mountaintops-My Story part 3
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