Because God IS Bigger than

There are days I get lost in grief and longing. I know the situation is so much bigger than I am, that is a given. Grief and anger are part of the process to acceptance, I can accept that. I am willing to walk through, it is just that some days as I hurt or am angry and feel so small I seem to lose focus of the most important thing in all of this. God is bigger, and He has a purpose and a plan.

When I get angry because he talks this talk, but shows no repentance, God is bigger than that. When I am sad because he won’t be honest and minimizes what has happened, God will still reveal truth and be glorified in my life.

The truth is all of these things matter, and they hurt. However, when I let my focus shift away from what God is doing in my life and has promised to continue to do I lose hope. Hope is essential. Not hope that my marriage will be reconciled, but the hope that is promised to me in Jesus. Hope that is eternal, the assurances that He will never leave me, that He cares more for me, that He has a hope and a future. I need to just keep focusing on Him and proclaiming all He is doing in me at this moment.

At this moment, He has carried me into a place of being safe. At this moment He is working on my heart and healing me because He cares for me. At this moment He has a plan, and I just need to ask for what I need, because He has promised.

This morning God gave me Philippians 1:12-21. Yes, I see him going through motions saying God this and God that. Yes, I know his motivation at the moment is ‘get her back’. Yes, I am in this for a reason. This morning I read what Paul said as he was in prison “I know what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance.” I am able to shift my focus, and be admonished to conduct myself in a manner that is worthy of the One who loves me most, trusting Him as I do what He calls me to. And this is a good place to be this morning.

Will I need reminding? Absolutely, possibly even as soon as breakfast. I trust though, that God is good, God is bigger than this. I trust that I will be delivered, and He will be glorified. I have hope.

Driving away

I told him I wouldn’t leave him, that the only thing that would make me go was him telling me or God telling me to go. When the porn was discovered God said stay. One year later I explained to him that words were not the only way to tell me to go.

He seemed to understand. I think I was clear. I set the boundaries. He said he would be a man, he said he chose me.

Six months later it turns out his actions were clearly saying GO. And I did, one bag and my dog in the car I came to the safe place God provided. A tearful mess, scared and uncertain, broken I fell apart in the arms of a friend.

One month later I went and moved the last of my stuff I could find. We had coffee and talked first. He went on and on about what he was learning about loving me and marriage. How we both had stuff to fix, that our expectations and communication problems, blah, blah, blah. That he was learning how he was supposed to treat me. Very interesting.

Interesting that the issues he wants to fix are valid issues, issues I have pointed out for years and have prayed fervently over. Interesting in that if those were THE issues this would not be where we are right now. Those issues weren’t enough for me to go. THE issue is infidelity, adultery, unfaithfulness, seeking self instead of God.

He claims to be working on those issues. As he begs me to let him hold me. I hope and pray that is true, and my heart breaks. But he won’t address those issues with me, except to say he understands I can’t trust him. And I say it is time for me to get my stuff. I need to do this.

I thought it would be easy, truth is it is even harder with him there. I am crying, he is crying, and I am at a lost for what to do. I cannot fix this, and I cannot stop. I absolutely must move forward. I must get what needs to go out. The alternative is unhealthy.

He wants me to stay. He wants to comfort me…in truth he wants to seek comfort. In truth, I want to be comforted but I know you do not go to the source of pain for comfort, so I leave. He requests his leather jacket back before I go. I go to what is my temporary home, heart hurting yet again as I drive away.

Safe and secure where I can seek God the pain hits like a hot poker searing through my side. I have lost everything. My best friend, my lover, my husband, my home. I know in my head that they were all an illusion, he was never real enough to be those things in honesty. But I had my dream. I had my vision of a marriage that reflected God. I had hope. Now I have nothing left of that, nothing but a leather jacket I am unwilling to give up yet.

And I tell him. I am keeping it for now. I have to. He begs me to come back. I can’t I need to go to Abba for comfort, I need to grieve in the arms of God who can restore and comfort me. I grieve for what I have lost, I grieve because I left, I grieve because part of my heart wants to go back and finally I grieve that the right choice hurts.

I could go back, but God says forward. I could let him hold me, but I refuse to stand in the way of what God wants to do with him. I refuse to diminish his responsibility for the choices he made. I pray for the strength to stand in that.

I Hear the Words

I hear his words, he loves me, he misses me, he’s working on things.

My head hears those words. I have to remind myself of all the other times I have heard those words, and how they ended with him taking betrayal one step further each time. I have to listen and pray for discernment, because I want very much for those words to be true. In my desire for them to be true I can falter.

I can fall into the lie, that it is all better, that it will be better if I am there. That this time he really means it, and he chooses me. Not that he isn’t working on things, that he isn’t seeking God, that he doesn’t want to work on healing. Maybe he does, maybe he will. But no matter what will happen, I have to live in the truth of now.

The truth of now is he is still keeping secrets, that he is feeling desperate. The truth of now is he is not really choosing me, but trying to get me back. As if for some reason I should be there while he leads a life of duplicity and seeks his own pleasure.

The truth of now is, he says what he thinks will work, but then something else comes out of his mouth that reveals his heart. He is going through motions to impress, but then there is an action that reveals no real heart change. The truth of now is I am out on my own, without a space of my own, in uncertainty of anything but the fact that God has a plan for me and has promised to care for me.

The truth of now is not that he sees I am valuable, but that I am a commodity he is afraid to lose. I am a security that rescues him from his choices. And it breaks my heart because the truth is, I wasn’t perfect, I was too codependent with my efforts to keep some sense of balance in my life.

The truth is, I gave him parts of me that I never gave anyone else. I trusted him to treasure that as much as I had and he didn’t. He used me and kept me on the sidelines of his life, a spectator to a train wreck evidenced by the mangled pieces of my life left in its wake.

I hear the words, and I pray for a miracle. I pray for a miracle and live in the truth of right now.

Responsibility

As much as it hurts, and as angry as I become at times over the changes his choices made in my life, there are certain freedoms I have today that I did not have three weeks ago.
I have the freedom to sit quietly in the evening without someone calling me moody.
I am free from the oppression that was being brought into my home by someone else’s duplicitous life.
I am free to learn and change.

One of the many things I am learning is, even though I taught the boundaries class, I easily become an enabler or rescuer. I allow myself to be responsible for people rather than to people. It is something that slips into my heart quietly, as an effort to love, an idea to help, even the idea that this person can learn.

He said he wanted to learn and change, but that wasn’t true. I didn’t catch that and spent years being responsible for him, therefore enabling him to continue with his unhealthy patterns. At times it was a survival mechanism. I was responsible for making sure the bills were paid. Certainly he was not good at finances. In relationships there is often one who is and one who isn’t. The one who is handles the finances and the one who isn’t supports that person. I believe that is okay and healthy. Healthy has to do with balance.

There was no balance, in the beginning we combined finances. Since I was the major supporter for the first few years that was unbalanced. I eventually had to remove him from our checking account as the fees were becoming more than I made. It seemed obvious that he could deal only on a strictly cash basis.

When he worked and got paid he gave me cash for bills. I would budget ‘with’ him, so he could see how it was done, putting cash in marked envelopes for the bills. This worked for a bit, but soon I would go to get the cash and take care of the bills. Twenty would be missing and then one-hundred or more. He had ‘needed’ the money for something else. He was short on gas money or whatever. Where did his money go? “I don’t know” was a standard answer. Or I spent it on this or that. It was exhausting, frustrating. I would get angry, scared. It was important to me to have a roof over mine and my sons head. It was important to have things like electricity.

We talked about budgeting, about needs and wants. About things like “Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries happen the same time every year. You have to plan.” There was the talk “You KNOW you have a visit with your daughter coming up, you plan, you do NOT take the money out of the rent. ESPECIALLY without talking to your wife.”

At one point last year, I was tired, on the verge of a breakdown from the stress in our marriage. I gave the bills over to him. Soon all of the rent money would be gone, and the check I had given him was deposited in HIS new checking account (in which he was constantly overdrawn). Repeatedly I had to scramble to pay the lost money. Where did all the rent money go? Same answer “I don’t know.” Knowing now about the girlfriend I have an idea.

It turns out it was all my fault. “I don’t know how to do this and it is too stressful for me.” So we did it together. Same thing, money missing, so I hid the money rather than use the envelopes. When I found out he wasn’t paying all the rent, even when I had given him all the money on his way to pay the rent, I took on full responsibility. The money went into my checking I paid rent and bills out of my account.

That was when he started stealing cash out of my drawer and even my special day stash. Cash meant for my sons senior year and our special days. I had to become more creative.

Of course finances aren’t the only thing I took responsibility for. Birthdays, Christmas, our Anniversary. I made sure his daughter had gifts at Christmas, that we had something for his family members, him, and my family. I took responsibility for the household needs, including his personal needs. He wouldn’t even go buy himself socks. To a degree, in a healthy relationship, this can be okay. In an unhealthy relationship it is exhausting.

Add to that taking the responsibility for the unresolved and unidentified stress in the relationship. No wonder I was always exhausted. Working forty hours a week, taking care of everything and everyone. Believing that he wanted to learn how to do this stuff, he had never learned and I was helping him.

I am not sure how I slipped into the enabler role, the rescuer. I am not sure what he was able to reach in me that continually brought that out despite my efforts to NOT be these things. I do know that this is not who God calls me to be. Being a rescuer, an enabler, taking responsibility for another person made me become frantic. I did things that contributed to our finances out of fear. I would shop for more groceries than we needed, out of fear of not being able to. I would say no to things we should have been able to do out of fear that the money would disappear. I became a stranger to myself. I failed to see who I was and WHOSE I was, God is working on that in me. That took separation though.

Before I left, I was praying about the many boundaries I had set six months earlier that had been crossed. I didn’t know what to do exactly, but I knew I had given choices and had said that if he couldn’t choose me or keep my boundaries I would have to go. God was clear when he said “Wait”. Two days later God was clear when He said “Go”. He also made it clear that my enabling was not okay. That instead of letting Him work, I was trying to do His job. I needed to step out of the way.

Stepping out of the way. Letting go and letting God. Turns out the husbands problems aren’t mine to fix, turns out I deserve more.

Walking Wounded

It started out with so much pain. Now there are waves of anger and pain.
Last night was difficult. Anger. I am displaced because of choices he made. I was not his choice and, regardless of his claims of ‘working on our marriage’ and going to counseling, I am still not his choice. He can’t choose me, I know this, he can’t face truth and until that can happen he simply cannot choose me.
Years of blame, lies, and pain swirl through my head like a little twister not sure where to land. I want truth, I want him to be honest enough to acknowledge this is wrong and HE did this. I want the hurt and anger to go away. Just the lies from this last month, the ones that set the pendulum in motion, are huge. He can’t face them.
He denies the affair, he denies what he told me, he denies the truth when I present it to him so clearly that it is staring him in the face. As if denial will make it all go away.
And I don’t know how to work through this anger. When I start to something else comes up.
I listened to his denial last night, his offer that I could come home. He would stay in a separate room. Come home, to what? The same thing? I pray, I work through some of that and something new greets me. Today it was walking right into his girlfriend at Walmart.
I so rarely go to Walmart. I hate it there. Today I thought a quick trip, what I needed would probably be cheapest there and it was close to where I was heading. All is well, I run into a few familiar faces, ones that don’t know anything about my personal life, so personal questions are avoided. One last thing before I head out, around the corner, and there she is.
We’ve spoken, she told me some of the truth. Not all of it, she has a family and job she is trying to protect, but she is 23 and young enough to think she can fool me. There I am looking my betrayal in the face. in Walmart with her husband and children. And then there I am, lost again. Hurt, angry, lost. It’s not fair.
I know life isn’t fair. I know God is good. At this moment what I don’t know is HOW do I work through this? How do I process all of it, his betrayal, my part in it, my life where it is? How do I process and function and continue to move forward in those moments where I don’t even want to look at any of this anymore?

Endings and New Beginnings

It’s been so long…not that long, months though. I thought we were on the right path. I thought.
The changes looked real at first. I believed him, but it wasn’t real.
First it was the odd thoughts in my head…I didn’t know where they were coming from.
Then it was the money stolen from my special day stash.
Then it was the irresponsibility, the messaging other women. The boundaries I had set in place during reconciliation had been trampled.
I had set the boundaries, and let the first ones slip by. Healing includes regression right? I prayed, with a clear answer of wait, I continued praying.
Two days before Christmas…The girlfriends husband at the front door. Making threats to me, toward my son. All for something I had nothing to do with. His choices.
BOOM.
Like that, my life changed.
My heart shattered, my trust evaporated, my belly full. Time to step away from the table.
My life went with me in my Mustang to a place God had appointed beforehand. Safe with friends, my son safe with his dad. My heart wounded, but surrounded by support and love, and care like I haven’t had from him in years. So foreign it was hard to accept. But my Abba insisted that I be in it, and after all He is trustworthy and loves me truly.
The first days were so painful, I thought I could go back just to stop the hurt.
I cried and I prayed, and I confessed that I felt I could go back, that maybe just for a minute the house would be home and being surrounded by my things would help.
God spoke to my heart directly and gently “You don’t go back to the source of pain for comfort.”
With that He wrapped me tighter in His love, with more friends and love and support.
Two weeks on auto pilot, my friends vision of me facing forward and God wrapping His arms around me being fulfilled. Taking care of myself, making sure I was secure, God revealed missing checks, girlfriends, and more.
And now.
Now the texts “I love you, I miss you. I am working on our marriage.”
Really? Without me? Why? Why not have done that with me? Why not work on truth? Cycles of grief and anger while I try to function in my everyday life. But God has me even in that, and that is for another post.