Nearly 5 years ago, the life I knew began to disintegrate and crumble around me. The marriage I thought was good (although I secretly longed for more) began to shake and tremble, large fissures appearing. I desperately hung on to what was familiar, trying to hold our family together. But overnight, the landscape changed and I found myself listening to an angry man tell me all the things he disliked about me, that our marriage had been a mistake from the beginning and that he had found someone he truly loved and wanted to be with.
There are some days you wonder how you lived through. That was one of them.
Something precious inside of me died that day. Anyone who has experienced the destruction of their marriage knows what I’m talking about.
For the sake of our children, I stayed with him, much longer than I should have. But from that day on, he no longer was my husband. It felt as if aliens had abducted the man I loved and an enemy was living in his body. I swallowed all his statements about my failures as a wife and internalized them as truth. It took several years to heal all the damage in my heart and to see what was really truth and what was a lie.
But in those desperate, lonely days of heartbreak, I ran to God and clung to Him. I cried in the shower so my children wouldn’t see. I begged Him to love me and love me hard because my heart was overwhelmed by the intensity of rejection and the shame of betrayal. And He did.
When I lay awake in that huge, empty bed, my body aching with pain, I asked Him to carry the hurt and heaviness in my body, and He did. Every time I asked, the cold hardness in my stomach would ease, warmth would flow over me and I could finally relax and sleep. In the morning, I would wake up empty and longing for love and I would beg Him to hold me. Immediately, I felt loved and comforted. That was when the words, “Surely he bore our sorrows and carried our grief” became real to me.
In the beginning, I told no one. I was too ashamed to speak. But as the affair went on and nothing improved, I started to open up. My close friends surrounded me with words of truth, wisdom and life.
It would take months and months to heal from the devastation. But every single day, the Lord was lavish with His kindness and tenderness to me, winning my heart with His deep and faithful love. In the early days, He gave me these verses from Isaiah, ones I had never read until this time.
“For your Maker is your husband – the LORD Almighty is his name – the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth. The LORD will call you back as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit – a wife who married young, only to be rejected,” says your God.
Isaiah 54:5,6
This is my story – a story of beauty from ashes, treasures mined in the dark places, God redeeming and restoring His beloved one.
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