FOUNDATION

He told me that Jesus screws up everything.

My husband had been on his own journey during those 24 hours and when I met up with him the next day in the presence of our associate pastor and his wife, Chad said he had to forgive me.

He must.

Because Christ had forgiven him of so much.  He wasn’t that different than I was, in his words, and that we all equally were in need of forgiveness.  In his opinion, he didn’t want to forgive me but he had to. For the love of Christ, he forgave me.  And he did so fully. And he still loved me even though I’d hurt him and ruined everything so desperately.  Jesus in the mix screwed up his desire to hate me, to hold a grudge, to be bitter.

Each day that passed I realized my own sinfulness more, understood God’s grace more and embarked on a campaign to clean my own mind of images that used to comfort but now haunted me.  I never defended my own actions.  From the beginning I understood how my own poor choices and pride had resulted in this affair.

I was done with my old self.  I removed phone numbers from my phone, took pages out of my address book and deleted emails and voicemail messages.  I began to try to erase all that had gone before.  And God softened the hard places of my heart and brought me close.

And together as a couple we made some serious choices.   Our marriage had been diseased from the start and we were beginning to realize the gravity of that.  We poured out all of our alcohol and threw out all of the questionable movies we owned. We cut off our cable and went without television for the next two years.  We existed in an almost monk-like state for as long as it took to heal the relationship that I/we had destroyed.

The foundation that our family-house was built upon wasn’t solid. It never had been.  So metaphorically speaking, we had to tear down the walls and start over.

We immediately began attending crisis marriage counseling.

And then I fell in absolute, head-over, crazy love with this man, my husband.  Different and deeper than when I was 18.  It was a love that had been matured, beaten, broken and mended and it was better than it had ever been before.

I started to let my husband lead and he rose happily to meet that.  I backed off and practiced God-designed submission in the marriage relationship.  I started letting him make decisions and gave my own opinion when he asked for it.  And he asked for it a lot.

And it was so freeing.

I read through the Bible that first year.  Cover to cover, Genesis through Revelation.   Knowledge and spiritual gifts, that I’d suppressed for years, began to flood back to me.  God hadn’t left me, he’d just let me walk away or a long time. But he hadn’t abandoned me.

We created boundaries in our relationship where we’d never had them before.  I am never alone with men.  Ever.  And I tell him everything not because he asks but because I want to.

There were times when he wanted to know details of the actual affair.  And I told him all he wanted to know. That eventually subsided because anything he asked and anything I told him tortured the both of us.  Him because any more details just hurt him more during a time he was trying to heal, and me because I was trying to forget it all.  Trying to remember details just brought up everything I was attempting to forget.

The next months and years were hard, excruciatingly so at times.

But I was still a wife, his wife.  And he still wanted me, amazingly.  I was still a mother.  My daughter still loved me.  And I was still willing to do anything with my whole heart to fight for my family.

** ** **

I’m writing my book about this.  There’s more.  SO MUCH MORE.

Miracles.  Healings.  Protection.  Intimacy.  Love.  Renewal.

But I can say that it has been more than 5 ½ years since January 4, 2004. It has been 5 ½ years of restoration, God’s provision, hard work, tears.

Chad has never thrown it back in my face during an argument.

He’s never brought it up again.  And I have remained absolutely faithful.

We rarely talk about it.  But when we do, it’s with forgiveness and grace and amazement about the power of God.

Know that I am the same woman who had an affair, and at the same time I am completely new.  I am the living proof of the grace of God.

I am the woman in the dust who was caught in adultery.  I was given grace when Jesus spoke directly to me and told me to go and be different.  So I did.

He called me

Loved.

Saved.

Restored.

And these are my new names.

Maybe you hate me.  I understand if you do.

But maybe you don’t.   Maybe you see yourself in me.  Maybe you recognize warning signs in your own marriage.  Maybe you are here reading this for a reason.  Maybe you love knowing that one more person is new in Christ.  Maybe this is you and you can’t stop.  Maybe you need to stop what you are doing and get help.  Maybe you need to confess.

Maybe you understand God’s grace just a little more.

[From the beginning, read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4]

Photo by Misty Matz

CRASH

She told.

She told our pastors.

On January 4, 2004 Chad and I were invited into a room at our church.  My pastor and his wife and our associate pastor and his wife were there with us.

One of them said directly to me, “Sarah, we know that there is something that you need to tell Chad.”

And there it was, a choice. I could lie.  I was so skilled at it that no one would know I was lying.  I could say that I was drunk when I confessed.  Or I could tell the truth and it would all be over. Everything I’d been trying to hold together for so long would be done.  I hated myself so much and what I was doing to my marriage that I was willing to accept whatever consequences would fall.

I was tired, to be honest.  I was tired of hiding, of lying, of hating myself.

I asked them all to leave so I could address my husband by myself.  They agreed and waited in an adjacent room.

So I told the truth.  Finally.

Only by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit, still waiting on the fringes of my life, did I have the strength to do this. I never claimed that I did this through my own power, and even at the time I recognized the way I was drawn to confess.

I told him everything.  How long.  With whom.  And he raged.  And yelled and threw things and said things even he doesn’t remember now.

And I broke in half.

I began to realize what I had actually done.  How much I’d ruined.

He left and told me to leave. He told me to go to my parent’s house and tell them what I did.

The next hours are a blank in my memory.  There are things I remember and things I don’t.

I know I was suicidal.  I know that my sister drove with me.  I know that I was without hope.  I know that I might be losing my daughter who wasn’t two yet and my husband who I’d never stopped loving.

Before I went to my mother and father’s I found myself on the living room floor of my associate pastor and his wife.  I wept and didn’t know anything else but that I wanted to be different. I didn’t want to live this life anymore, duality reigning and never knowing who I was.  I wanted to love Jesus.  I wanted to love my husband the way he deserved to be loved.  The way I had promised to love him.

She held me and prayed with me.  She told me who I was in Christ.  She helped me to the feet of Jesus and carried me like the man who had to be lowered in through the roof to be healed.  She bore my stretcher and I broke a second time.

And then I left. There were things I had to do.

I drove to my parent’s house and as I crossed the threshold of the home I’d known since I was 3 years old I told them what I’d done.  The only word I associate with that night is harbor.  For so long I had been without an anchor, but now God’s people were beginning to point me to safety.  My parents took me in and loved me.  She told me to take a shower and eat something and made up their bed for me.   Before I slept, I picked up the Bible for the first time in several years.

Psalm 51.

I didn’t know if Chad would ask me for a divorce. I didn’t know if I was going to be forgiven.  I didn’t know if he would let me see my beautiful baby anymore.  All I knew was that I was finished with my old life.  I didn’t know what my new life would look like but I was quickly becoming prepared to accept the consequences.   I knew that Jesus had forgiven me but I didn’t know if my husband would.

And somehow, miraculously, I was immediately sorrowful.  From the beginning I glimpsed the horror and the devastation I had caused. And although this was so difficult, it is what saved me.

I was ready to do anything it took to save my family and to try to revive what I’d killed.

My new names were

Forgiven.

Grace-Lended.

Found.

[PART FIVE: FOUNDATION and the conclusion of this story will be posted tomorrow.]

If you are new today, begin with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

DRIPPING

I’m holding a colander underneath the cool running water in the sink.

The water is running through and down and around, but I can’t figure out why.

Someone who is involved in sexual sin thinks that the colander won’t leak.  Even though I knew in my brain I was holding a bowl designed to leak I saw it as intact.  I thought I could hold all the water in, but instead it just ran out all over the place.  And I’d made a horrible, devastating mess.

Everything I was doing was beginning to fall apart.

I was trying to hold together two relationships:  one given to me by God and one that I had taken.  I didn’t want to lose my husband and my daughter, but I didn’t want to end my affair.  I didn’t know HOW to end my affair.

But it all began to break down.  I lied so much sometimes I didn’t even know if I was telling the truth or not.  I began to become overly obsessed with my weight including exercising and eating habits.  I thought this other man loved me in a way that was different than my husband loved me and I thought I needed both in order to be whole.  During this time I would try to hold it all together, like water in a sieve, but it all just ran out.

Alcohol in unhealthy quantities was also a regular part of our weekends.  My husband and I would go “out” in groups (after getting overnight babysitting) dancing and drinking and doing things married people, God’s people, should not be doing.  He would be there too, along with my husband.  This was one of the ways I saw him and fulfilled my own twisted desires to steal (someone’s husband), kill (my love from my own husband),  and destroy (both relationships).  My husband and I hated being alone together during this period of time because it was “no fun”.  The truth was, we were too scared to see what would happen if the dust settled and we were forced to really look hard at each other.

So we filled up our emptiness with other things, people, trips…

And through this whole time, we’d show up to church the next day after a night of excessive drinking and act like nothing had happened.  Sometimes I’d still be drunk on Sunday mornings.  But I was great at hiding it.

I became wildly polar in my emotions.  One afternoon I’d be uncontrollably crying and that same night, I might be basking in the attention of being the life of the party.  I was depressed and I loathed myself and what I was doing.

One night, when I was out with a girlfriend and we were both very drunk, she asked me directly if I was having an affair.

I denied it, but I knew she’d seen it in my face, in my demeanor and in my actions.

She asked me again and I caved easily. I told her just enough to satisfy her incessant vodka-motivated questioning.  She told me to end it and tell my husband.

Of course I will…

But I didn’t. And a month passed and she asked me again if I’d told. And I hadn’t.  Because, namely, I didn’t know how.  I didn’t know how to tell the truth anymore.

I’d begun to know myself best as

Faithless.

Disloyal.

Untrue.

The train crash that happened next was both the worst and best thing that ever happened to me.

It maimed me.  But it also healed me.

[PART FOUR: CRASH will be posted tomorrow.  To start from the beginning, Part 1 and Part 2]

PART TWO:  CLICHES

He was everything my husband wasn’t.

He looked different.  He talked different.  He listened to me.  He was there for me.

[Does this sound like a cliché yet? Because it does to me.]

Believe me, none of these are excuses.  But in the long sense of this relationship, there were reasons why I cheated.

No one wakes up one day and decides to commit adultery.  I don’t know what other people have told you, but something like this takes a hundred million tiny poorly-made decisions layered on top of one another.  Never excuses, but certainly reasons.

So I began to take advantage of the lack of boundaries in our marriage and spend more and more time with this man.  I took advantage of my husband’s faith in me. Before text messaging, we talked on the phone.  A lot.  Too much.

And we met to talk and have lunch.  We talked about our spouses and our growing need for each other as friends.  [By this time I’d become a skilled enough liar that not only was I lying to pretty much everyone I knew, but I was also telling myself I needed this man.  I obsessed that only with him in my life would I be happy.]

Our relationship, from beginning to end, would last for nearly 3 years.

I was more obsessed than I was in love.  I was more lustful than I was caring.  I was needy and self-absorbed.  I always knew it would end someday and somehow but I just didn’t know how.  I didn’t know how to extricate myself from this elaborate cage I’d created around myself.

In the middle of this time my husband and I decided we wanted to have a baby.  I know what you are immediately thinking.  My affair, although in full emotional swing before I got pregnant, was not fully physically intimate until later.  I never questioned the paternity of my daughter.  I believe now that this was one of the ways, even in the midst of my stupidity, that God had his hand on my life.

Maybe it was an effort to cement a quickly disintegrating marriage, or maybe we were both being selfish by wanting to create something that loved us both unconditionally.  Maybe we could start over with this new little life…

I thought new motherhood would reform me.

Another cliché.

But six months after my daughter was born, I found myself in the same vacuum I was before: longing for something that wasn’t mine, trying to steal someone’s husband because of my own depression.

This man and I’d spent some time emotionally celibate, trying to piece together what we could of our broken marriages, but time apart only fed our desires.  We came back together with renewed zeal, and this time, entered into a physically intimate relationship.

I’d given him my body and my heart, which really weren’t even mine to give. They belonged to my husband but I thought he was doing such a poor job with them that I was justified in giving them away to someone else.

I will spare the internet world the horrifying details of the next 18 months.

Self-serving.  Lost.  Dangerous. Hateful.  Wrong.

And I began to know myself as

Adulteress.

Ashamed.

Angry.

I searched and didn’t find.  I tried to gather and gain, but it all just slid through my fingers.  The harder I tried to hold on to my own sanity, the more I felt like I was losing the grip on myself.

[PART THREE: DRIPPING will be posted tomorrow. To read Part 1, click here]

PART ONE:  STIFLING

I can be stifling sometimes.

I mean there have been times in my life when I’ve chased people away because I’m so intense. I don’t mean to be; I’m just programmed that way.

No matter how many “times out” I take for myself, or self-analysis afternoons I carve out of my schedule; no matter what I actually change in my actions and relationships, when it’s all over, I might behave differently, but I am still pretty much the same person on the inside. I’m intense.

It’s a good thing because so is my husband. He’s almost as intense as I am.

We match each other word for word, hurt for hurt, and love for love equally. We raise our voices together, we debate issues with intelligence, we both ask difficult questions of the other and expect smart answers in return. He’s never shied away from me and I’ve never backed down from my intensity for him either.

We are a good match.

And that is one of the reasons I got into the biggest trouble of my life about nine years ago.

It is no excuse, but I have a hard time doing anything half-way. In fact, there are no excuses good enough for what I did. I really screwed everything up.

Every good thing in my life had been handed to me carefully, beautifully wrapped with thick gift paper so that just the act of opening it was half the happiness. I had a husband who adored me, a good education, a solid job, a group of friends who were kind to me and loved me. I was 25 years old, the owner of a home, and full of a lot of narcissism and pride. I thought everything I had I deserved.

And I was ungrateful. I was beginning to become unhappy. I was stifling. I had no self-monitor for the passion in my life and my marriage was beginning to fall apart. I was a controlling wife and needed to be in charge to feel normal.

In reaction, my husband turned inward (like any normal husband would with a stifling and overbearing wife) and away from me. We had already developed diseased habits in our young marriage for communication, problem solving and intimacy. Four years in to our marriage, even though I knew with my whole soul that we were meant for each other, I was tired of it. I added to an already sick relationship some initially small, but very poor choices.

Without searching it out, I began an emotional affair with someone we both knew. And even though it began slowly and took many months to gain any ground, soon it ballooned into something I had difficulty controlling.

I’d prided myself on “control” and “passion” but with this, this affair, I felt unable to control my own feelings. It was its own monster that I had allowed to grab hold of my heart, my God-given marriage, and my soul. I’d created it and now it was controlling me.

I hadn’t lost any intensity, but instead I’d transferred it to something, someone, else. Someone who wasn’t mine but I’d stolen anyway.

Fraud. Thief. Liar. Soon-to-be-Adulteress. These were my new names.

I didn’t know it then, but it would soon lead to much more than just an emotional attachment.

It would become a full-fledged affair.

[PART TWO: CLICHES will be posted tomorrow.]