Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (20 page)

My guess is that it will be much easier for your spouse to forgive you than to trust you. Pay the price. Seek to do the little things that will earn trust.

In every relationship, forgiveness should be free, but trust must be earned.

CONTINUAL FORGIVENESS: AN ILLUSTRATION

I (Trisha) convinced myself about a year into our restoration process that I had mastered forgiveness. I felt like God was prompting me to write my best friend a letter. I told her I forgave her. I told her that in my brokenness, God had helped me recognize that she was broken too. I told her that I understood the part Justin played in it all. I told her I missed her and her family. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but I felt like it brought closure
and a sense of pride that I had been obedient to God. I had truly mastered forgiveness.

A month went by, then six months, and finally a year passed, and I heard nothing in response to my letter.
Nothing.
I was devastated and hurt all over again. The healing I thought I would find through forgiveness only brought me more pain. In my pain I looked for my stone and stayed armed in my anger toward her.

I sat down to journal because that’s the “Christian thing” to do. I tried to read about forgiveness to stop the steam from billowing out my ears. Not only was I angry toward my friend, but I was also angry with God! I remember telling God,
You have no idea what is like to be betrayed by a good friend! You have no idea what it’s like to suffer the consequences of other people’s choices when you did nothing wrong! You have no idea what it’s like to offer something and have it rejected
.

As I looked for Bible verses to calm me down, I found the famous seventy-times-seven passage and continued reading the story of the unmerciful servant:

But the man fell down before his master and begged him, “Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.” Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.

But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment.

His fellow servant fell down before him and begged
for a little more time. “Be patient with me, and I will pay it,” he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.

When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, “You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?”

For most of us, we read this passage and immediately realize who the bad guy is.
I
read this passage and knew that I was the king because I
did
forgive! But as I read and reread this story, it dawned on me that the king forgave with no conditions. The king was left with a debt that still had to be repaid even if his servant couldn’t pay. It was in that moment that I realized I was the unmerciful servant. I sat there feeling the sting of not receiving a response from the letter, but now I had to put my stone down
again
to listen to what God was teaching me in my understanding of forgiveness. I heard God whisper two words:
I do
.

I do know what it’s like to be betrayed by a close friend.

I do know what it’s like to suffer the consequences when I did nothing wrong.

I do know what it’s like to offer all of me only to be rejected.

I do know your pain.

I was not the king but the unmerciful servant. Jesus Christ is the king. Jesus took on the debt of my sin when he died on the cross, regardless of whether I would believe in him. He knows what it means to have to forgive—he is the expert.

Forgiveness is only true forgiveness when you forgive regardless of the person’s response. Grace is unmerited favor, a gift offered with no strings attached. Forgiveness is a gift that flows from grace. In forgiveness, we give up our right to throw our stones in retaliation for the hurt the other has caused us.

Christ loved us enough that he laid down his life so we could have life forever with him. He owed us nothing yet gave up everything. His call for us to forgive is about more than the person who wounded us. Rather, through brokenness, we say, “God, I lay it all before you. I give you my pain, my bitterness, my heavy stones.”

And with that surrender comes the kind of healing that only Jesus can give. With healing comes
freedom
—freedom to live a life without stones. Freedom to live in the extraordinary with the Father, who is always trustworthy. Freedom in the love of a Savior who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Spouses in extraordinary marriages live in the awareness of the grace and forgiveness given them by the Father. They embrace grief, anger, brokenness, and forgiveness rather than ignore them. They live in the knowledge that forgiveness is a process, not a one-time choice, and that it may take seventy times seven to finally feel reconciled. And they live in the grace to keep that forgiveness flowing.

Maybe you have fought your whole marriage to be right. You don’t think your husband respects you. You don’t feel like your wife believes in you. So this resentment you hold on to is your way of proving yourself or of having the upper hand. This anger you keep
just under the surface of your heart is a part of you. You wouldn’t know who you were without it. Your anger allows you to be in control. Living in the hurt of the past allows you to brace yourself to deal with the disappointments and hurt in the future. You find your identity in your resentment.

If that’s the case, the truth is that there is a part of your heart you are not just withholding from the person you can’t forgive. You are withholding that part of your heart from God. And God longs to heal you, to free you, to form you and shape you into the person you were created to be.

Maybe this resentment you’ve learned to accept has nothing to do with your spouse. You take it out on your spouse, but it isn’t really about him or her. Your past hurts have made a home in your marriage and in the process have made your marriage ordinary. You were abused. You were overlooked. You were raped. You were taken advantage of. She broke up with you. He lied to you. She never said she was sorry. Your dad never came back. Your mom never told you she loved you. Your friend abandoned you when you needed him the most.

In reality, you are terrified that if you forgive, you will be admitting defeat. If you forgive, they win. But forgiveness doesn’t excuse their behavior. Forgiveness prevents their behavior from destroying your heart. Forgiveness prevents forfeiting your future by not living in your past. Forgiveness prepares you to move from ordinary to extraordinary.

When you forgive, the person who hurt you doesn’t win—
Christ
wins. He wins another part of your heart. When you forgive, you allow Christ to have not only more of your heart but more of your marriage. Where forgiveness lives, intimacy can be restored.

Author Anne Lamott says in her book
Traveling Mercies
, “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”
⁵
Who do you need to forgive? Forgiveness leads to healing, healing leads to intimacy, and intimacy leads to extraordinary.

QUESTIONS

1. What wounds in your life have a tendency to keep you in the cycle of unforgiveness? Why?
   
2. Think about the difference between forgiveness and trust. Have you confused the two in your relationships? How can you maintain the distinction between them?
   
3. Is there someone in your life you have forgiven conditionally? Why have you attached conditions to your forgiveness?
   
4. In the cycle of forgiveness it’s hard to recognize when and how to move on. Where do you find yourself in the cycle?
   

What if the wounds could be forgiven but not healed? What if our marriage wouldn’t survive? What if we had done our best to put the pieces back together, but our best just wasn’t enough? Those were the questions that dominated our hearts as we attempted to rebuild our marriage, our family, and our lives. As Trisha and I (Justin) pursued healing for our marriage, we also pursued healing individually. It was our individual healing that made the process complicated.

We both needed healing, but for very different reasons. I was trying to recover from how much I had hurt Trisha and was daily coming to terms with the number of people I had wounded. At the same time, I had to figure out how I had allowed my heart to get so dark and what was the root cause of my choices. It was overwhelming at times. Trisha was overwhelmed with her own pain, loss, and grief, yet was daily choosing to fight through her wounds to love me—sometimes because she wanted to and sometimes just out of obedience to God.

The reality was that an apology wouldn’t make everything okay. A two-month separation and hours of counseling wouldn’t solve our problems. Making promises to be better or to do better wouldn’t help. Utter and complete destruction of the person I was and the marriage we had would be necessary. God wasn’t interested in making me a better person. Complete healing—the kind of healing God desires—would only come through allowing the old me and our old marriage to die.

In his book
The Cost of Discipleship
, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
⁶
For the first time in my life and in our marriage, the greatest desire of my heart was to be healed and whole, not “fixed” and fake. I realized that God is the God of resurrections. But in order for something to be brought back to life, it has to die. Living things aren’t brought back to life; dead things are. Was I willing to allow the parts of my heart that had led me to an ordinary marriage to die? If I was willing, what did that even look like?

JUSTIN:

From the moment all the truth was revealed until I moved back with Trisha, we were separated for two and a half months. Our counselor suggested for the sake of our marriage and for the sake of the church that we should move away from Noblesville. It would be easier for us to begin again and easier for the church to heal if I wasn’t visible or available. So in February 2006, we moved for the eleventh time in our ten and a half years of marriage. Trisha had promised to forgive me, but it was a daily battle for her.

While Trisha is the most important relationship in my life, she wasn’t the only person I had damaged. I prayed that God would give me an opportunity to apologize to everyone I had hurt, and a few weeks after I moved back with Trisha, I got a phone call from Dave Rodriguez, the pastor at Grace Community Church. He wanted to meet with me.

Upon my resignation from Genesis, Dave and Keith and some others from Grace led our elders and staff through the process of informing our congregation about what had happened and walked them through the steps they would need to take to protect the church and allow the church to heal. So Dave was not only close to our church, he was directly impacted by my sinful choices. I had no idea what to expect at our meeting. To say I was nervous is an understatement.

I arrived at Starbucks, and Dave was inside waiting for me. He stood up and gave me a hug and tears filled his eyes. We sat down, and I recounted for him the long, dark journey I had made to cheat on God, my wife, the church, Dave, his staff, every person who had supported us, and so many others. I also told him of the restoration God had begun in my heart and the way God was bringing healing to Trisha and me and our family through counseling. He was genuinely happy for us and proud of the steps I had taken.

At the end of our time together, he said something that changed me, my marriage, and everything I do and say to this day. He said,
“I want you to know I am praying a Lamentations 3 prayer for you. Specifically, I am praying Lamentations 3:16 over you.”

I had no idea what Lamentations 3 was about, nor did I know what verse 16 of Lamentations 3 said. I said, “I really appreciate that. . . . Do you mind telling me what Lamentations 3:16 says?”

“It says that God will grab you by the back of the head and crush your teeth on gravel. That is my prayer for you.”

Huh?
Maybe Dave meant he was praying
John
3:16 prayers for me. I like John 3:16. But he said, “If you are going to find true healing from this, God is going to have to destroy you first. Lamentations 3 is my prayer for you.” We hugged, and I left.

When I got home that afternoon, I immediately grabbed my Bible and went to Lamentations 3:16-18 (
NIV
):

     
He has broken my teeth with gravel;

          
he has trampled me in the dust.

     
I have been deprived of peace;

          
I have forgotten what prosperity is.

     
So I say, “My splendor is gone

          
and all that I had hoped from the L
ORD
.”

I wanted true healing, but what did it look like to have my teeth broken with gravel? I had been a Christian for over twenty years and had been a pastor for ten, yet I had no idea what having your teeth smashed by gravel was about. But I began to pray Lamentations 3:16 for me too. I asked God to break my teeth with gravel. I asked him to trample me in the dust and to break my bones. It felt weird at first to ask God to break me, to smash me, to trample me rather than just praying that he fix our marriage. When Trisha and I had had problems in the past, I’d pray a quick prayer, but most of my effort was spent trying to fix what she was upset about, reading a marriage book, or just attempting to do better.

The first step in having my teeth broken with gravel was finding a new job. The only thing I had ever been was a pastor. When
I left the church, I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had forfeited my right to be a pastor, but I had no other job experience as an adult. I had no clue what to do. Feeling like part of my healing was simply doing the right thing, I needed a job to provide for our basic needs until I could figure out my next career. So I went to P. F. Chang’s to apply for a job. I was a huge P. F. Chang’s fan and felt that if I was going to wait tables, at least I’d love the food I’d bring home at the end of the night. I was hired and started the next day.

I went from speaking to over five hundred people each weekend to, “Would you like white or brown rice?” It was humbling and humiliating.

It was exactly what I needed.

One night as I was closing my section, I had a table of several high school students who had come for dinner after their school dance. They were loud and rude, made a huge mess, and hung out so long that I was one of the last servers to leave. After they left, I was on my hands and knees under their table, sweeping up rice and crushed-up fortune cookies with my hands into a dustpan. I stood up and looked on the table. They had left me a measly five-dollar tip!

I thought,
I am busting my butt cleaning up after these kids who couldn’t care less about me. When was the last time I did this at home? When was the last time I gave to Trisha what I’m giving to P. F. Chang’s for a flimsy tip?
Lamentations 3 was starting to make sense.

I worked at P. F. Chang’s for a little over two months. God taught me more in that time about himself, his presence, and the power he has to provide than I learned in five years at Bible college.

Our marriage had been ordinary for so many years because I had allowed God to “improve” me, not re-create me. I had tried to escape the crushing of teeth and the breaking of bones and in the process had also forgone the faithfulness and mercies and salvation and compassion of God. I had created the best life and marriage I knew how to create, but my best was simply ordinary. God
wanted to give us something more, but the “more” he had in mind I couldn’t produce. It would have to come from him.

TRISHA:

Moving twenty minutes away from the city where we planted the church gave brokenness a whole new meaning. We were moving to a city where we had no friends and this time no church welcoming us. We had no identity other than being a family moving from everything and everybody we loved. We moved with help from Justin’s dad and our friend and real estate agent Chris. Honestly, despite our many moves being a touchy subject for me, I was completely content with this new chapter of our lives as long as I didn’t have to make new friends. Although I was willing to work on our marriage, I was done with friendship.

But—seriously—about an hour after arriving at our new house, not just one, but
two
of our neighbors came over to welcome us. One of our neighbors shared with us the names of all the families on our street including a pastor who led a nearby church. It took everything I had not to roll my eyes, give a three-snap “talk to the hand,” and tell him, “Let me define the relationship here: I’m not up for making friends, so could you please not come to my house ever again? Thanks!”

But I didn’t. I shyly extended my hand and introduced myself and our boys to his boys, who were, of course, the exact same ages. I had been obedient in moving because I knew it was the right thing to do, but I became so focused on the move itself that I hadn’t thought through how the story would unfold once we got there.

In the back of my mind I had hoped that moving would allow our family to move on. No longer would we have to fear running into people from church or my best friend. No longer would we have intense counseling sessions and conversations about “what’s next” for our family. “What’s next” was here, and I was ready to move on. It was obvious by my first encounter with my neighbors
that parts of me were still very raw. The path of brokenness meant that
I
needed to pray a Lamentations 3 prayer too—a prayer not just for the present but also for wounds inflicted in the past.

Despite my initial coldness, God used this amazing block of people to help me begin a journey I thought I would never be ready or willing to embrace. God was still writing my story, just not quite the way I would have written it.

When Justin and I started our restoration journey, we realized that in order to find extraordinary healing, we had to turn back the pages of our story to well before the chapters of our marriage, our ministry, and the affair were written. We had to go back to the beginning of our hurt and pain in order to understand how they had shaped us into who we had become.

As scary as it was to examine our pasts, I desperately wanted to find and examine whatever unresolved brokenness I was carrying. As I began to investigate my past, what I thought was
my
story alone was actually interwoven with other stories found in my parents, sister, brother, and the other people who came in and out of my life. And by doing this, I discovered a lot about who I was—and I didn’t like the impostor I found.

JUSTIN:

I discovered that to have a different marriage, I had to be a different person. That wasn’t going to happen without confronting the darkest parts of my heart. From the outside, the issues we faced seemed obvious: my pornography addiction and my choice to have an affair. But deep down I knew those things were symptoms of a much bigger disease. If I could diagnose that illness, then true healing would happen.

Brennan Manning’s
The Ragamuffin Gospel
had been one of my favorite books for years. I read it shortly after I got out of college, and it revolutionized my view of grace. As I sat in our home office late one night and looked over at our bookshelf, I noticed another
Brennan Manning book that we owned but had never read. It was called
Abba’s Child
. Trisha and I had been reading together each night—well,
I
would read aloud while she “rested her eyes”—and I thought this would be a good book for us. I had no idea at the time that God would use
Abba’s Child
to break my teeth against gravel and restore my soul all at the same time.

In
Abba’s Child
, there is a chapter called “The Impostor.” Manning describes “the impostor” as the false self we create to preserve our image and keep ourselves free from the displeasure of others. As Manning described the impostor, I realized the impostor’s direct assault on intimacy. The impostor’s goal is not to be fully known; it is to be known only to the degree that it helps maintain our image, our reputation, or our lifestyle. Here are the characteristics that Manning gives of the impostor:

• The impostor lives in fear.
  
• The impostor is preoccupied with acceptance and approval.
  
• The impostor is what he does.
  
• The impostor inspires us to attach value to things that have no value.
  
• The impostor is a liar.
  
• The impostor demands to be noticed.
  

How much of my life had I spent living in fear? Fear of failure, fear of others’ opinions, and fear of letting others down dominated my life and ministry. I desired the acceptance and approval of others more than I desired the acceptance and approval of God. I found my identity in my role as a pastor. I had confused my calling with my identity. No longer was my calling an overflow of my identity in Christ; rather, my relationship with Christ was an add-on to my role as a pastor. I was a liar. I had not only mastered lying to others, I was an expert at lying to myself. I did all of this in an effort to be noticed.

Manning cut straight to my heart with another statement:

I had learned to find my value and significance in how successful I was and in what other people thought or believed about me. I never learned to find my value and significance as a child of God. God was answering my Lamentations 3 prayers as I took on my impostor.