Week 25: A Better Story Pt. 4

I pray you find strength and hope through this concluding post in “A Better Story” series, written
and shared by a guest blogger:

A Fork in the Road: Entrusting my story to the Ultimate Storyteller

Where do I go now that I have been forced to this fork in the road?

How will I ever forgive him?
What will I tell my girls one day?
What would be the ‘better story’?

These were the question plaguing my mind as I found myself surrounded by the smoldering pile of wreckage that I had—only hours before—believed to be a happy, healthy marriage. We had just celebrated 5 years of marriage with a trip down the Oregon Coast. A trip that was spontaneous, joyful and fun. We had enjoyed a beautiful summer with countless road trips, family outings, and more freedom than the previous years of infants and pregnancies had allowed. It was on the heels of that last hurrah of summer—Labor Day Weekend—that things began unraveling. It started with the discovery of some texts that led to the confession of an inappropriate emotional relationship.

An exchange of “feelings.” A mutual attraction.

This was enough to feel the wind completely knocked out of me.

A few days later, my husband came into my room ready to confess the whole bloody truth. He had had an affair. It had crossed the boundaries of emotional into the physical. He was broken for his sin. And I broke.

My vision literally blurred and I felt suspended in this weird, sickening time-warp. I have never been punched in the face, but I can imagine it would feel something like this. The physical trauma of betrayal was something I had never experienced at this magnitude, and I honestly had no idea what to do.

I screamed at him for a while, I think. A dear friend swooped in and rescued our girls. And then I sat at the piano and began to play “It Is Well.” I had no voice to sing through the sobs, but my heart wrung out the words, and begged them to be true. I could hear Nate sobbing behind me, face-down on our living-room floor, but the chasm between us was excruciating.

The man I fell in love with so quickly, the man who felt almost instantly “like home,” to me, had become a perfect and utter stranger. Worse—he had betrayed my love and my trust, and had treated our family as worthless.

This is heartbreak. When your heart loves so deeply, and is trampled by the one you love.

I was forced to this fork in the road. I had come to the end of my marriage and life as I knew it, and I had two choices: pack my bags and take our girls and get the HELL out of this wreck; or stay and believe God for a miracle, both to transform Nate and to allow me to forgive him.

The first path spelled JUSTICE for me—that he would pay for his actions, and that he would get exactly what his actions deserved. The second path held the flickering hope of a “stable” home for our girls, but looked impossible outside of a real work of the Gospel. Neither option was an easy one. I hated the fact, by no fault of my own, I was now forced to make the hardest decision of my life. I was forced into suffering. And isn’t that so often how it is? Sometimes our suffering is a consequence of our sin, but more often, it seems, we suffer as a result of a broken world, beat up by circumstances we have no control over.

Here, then, came the question. What would be the better story?

There was the narrative in my head, the single-Mom- raising-two- toddlers-on- her-own while hemorrhaging-from- a-messy- breakup. Years down the road, telling my teenage daughters the reason their Daddy and I divorced when they were 2 and 3. Or the attempt at new love, weighed down by trust issues and relational baggage. This story is an all-too familiar one.

But I kept catching glimpses of a different story.

The story I still struggle, at times, to believe is possible.

The story that only works in light of a God who transforms hearts and heals deeply broken things—a God who stares the ugliest sins in the face and offers grace and forgiveness.

This story looks like one day sitting on a couch with my husband, Nathan, and telling OUR girls about God’s healing work in our marriage. How, way back when they were just toddlers, our marriage was totally wrecked by sin, and very well could have ended. That their reality could have been one of seeing their dad every-other- weekend, or maybe just over the summers. It’s not an uncommon story, and I’m not even saying it’s an inherently bad one, but…

I truly believed, 7 weeks ago today, there was a better story. That the story God was writing for
us was far from over, though ‘Act 1’ may have come to an end.

I heard God saying, “Stay and Wait. Allow ME to work on your behalf. See what I can do with this mess. See how I am making all things new, including your marriage, including you.” So much of Scripture is laced with this narrative. Of an all-powerful God working miracles on the behalf of His people.

“It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.” -Lamentations 3:26
“O LORD, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works.” -Isaiah
26:12

“In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and
wait expectantly.” Psalm 5:3

There’s no way I could walk this path without Him. To forgive, to trust, to rebuild oneness where it’s been totally obliterated… this is all way beyond my capacity. But I believe he is writing a second act to our story. One that involves complete dependency on him for the forgiving and the trusting and the rebuilding. One where he takes the broken pieces of my heart that I offer him, and gives me His own heart.

The forgiveness I have extended, the moments of peace amidst deep emotional agony, can only be explained by the miraculous nearness of God. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the journey to wholeness is far from over. I feel it daily. The hurt, the joyful memories that will forever be tarnished by the lies that were buried underneath. There is significant loss in the wake of betrayal, it’s a death of what was. It’s a loss that must be grieved, it’s pain that must be felt.

But I know this – I am never alone in my grief, nor do I mourn as a person without hope. In my brokenness, in my husband’s brokenness, God has come close. He has become our hope, and He is perfectly faithful and trustworthy. Our God is the ultimate author, and I believe all of this mess is being woven into a beautiful story. A better story.