Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (19 page)

I’m certain I had this whole “confession” thing nailed down by the way I cried out to God that night. By morning, with some sleep to bring me back to my senses, I was painfully aware that confession is useless if it doesn’t lead to transformation. So I prayed.

Everything within me wanted to go numb and divorce Justin. It seemed impossible for him to speak the whole truth. He was the master manipulator, and I was done with that. But in this little prayer, I felt God whisper,
One more time
.

One more time for what?
I thought.
If he was able to lie through these past couple of weeks, why would one more time make any difference?

But that’s why God is God and I’m not. This is life on the narrow path. Its curves are sharp, and you can’t always see what’s around the bend, so you have to constantly rely on the Father to know which way to turn. It’s not a one-time deal where you hop on the path and it’s easy going. It’s a path that takes faith—faith that makes you stronger each time you choose to trust. It’s a faith that allowed me to keep moving forward, knowing that I no longer had to carry the baggage because Jesus would carry it for me.

So that Monday morning, Justin walked into the house, and the only thing I could get to come out of my mouth was, “I want to know everything.” And at those words, he told me everything. That feeling that had been with me all those years of our married life went away! We had finally hit rock bottom, and although it hurt when we landed, at least we had a surface to stand on. So
together, with tears streaming from our faces, we stood on new ground.

Sometimes the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is simply our commitment to pursue the relationship at any cost.

JUSTIN & TRISHA:

THE CYCLE OF UNFORGIVENESS

Forgiveness
is a word with a simple definition, yet the concept it represents is so hard to live out. There are some great quotes on forgiveness. There are Bible verses that talk about it. But when you read the word
forgiveness
, does a quote or Bible verse come to mind, or does it evoke an emotion or cause you to think of a certain person or situation? I (Trisha) think that for most of us, we associate forgiveness with a wound that has been inflicted on us.

Moving had become my wound. With each move, I experienced this intense sadness that at times felt like it could take my breath away. I was grieving. Moving meant leaving our church, home, and friends and starting all over again. I would take my grief and stuff it down deep into the back of my heart and mind. With each move, my grief turned to anger. Over time, my anger seemed to subside, but the reality is that my anger had become bitterness, a silent killer.

Maybe this is where you find yourself: your wound may be old or fresh, but your sadness is crippling, and the only way you know how to deal with it is to stay bitter.

Bitterness is like picking up a stone to throw and holding on to it so you’ll have ammunition the next time you’re wounded. We take our stones, hold them tight, and find comfort in them. But if we dwell in bitterness long enough, resentment is sure to follow. Over time I allowed my resentment to skew my view of Justin in other aspects of our relationship beyond just moving. My stone became ammunition in my fight to always be right, but the person I was hurting most was myself. Where resentment lives, intimacy dies.

This is what unforgiveness looks like: grief that is not mourned, which becomes anger that is not resolved, which turns into bitterness that is unconfessed, which becomes resentment that is unforgiven. But forgiveness calls us to lay down our stones and our rights in order to live in the extraordinary realm of true intimacy.

CONDITIONAL FORGIVENESS

The cycle of unforgiveness is understandable. We have been wounded. The people who wounded us were wrong. They owe us. Forgiving with conditions feels fair. We will forgive when they make up for what they’ve done.

But this expectation for compensation will always leave a void in your heart—there will be times when they
can’t
make it up to you. Nothing they say will take away the pain. Nothing they do will ever erase the memory. Nothing they buy you will ever restore the hope that was lost.

Conditional forgiveness is not really forgiveness. Conditional forgiveness will do just as much damage as unforgiveness, even if it won’t be as noticeable. Conditional forgiveness has the appearance of grace laced with the anticipation of performance. You will develop negative feelings if you expect compensation.

• You will become suspicious.
  
• You will become resentful.
  
• You will become insecure.
  
• You will manipulate and guilt-trip to get your way.
  
• You will live out of fear and worry.
  

The bar can never be set high enough for you to find the intimacy you are trying to re-create when you forgive only conditionally. When you are waiting for your spouse to make it up to you, your spouse will always fail, and you will be left searching for one more thing that will relieve the pain. The forgiveness you’re look
ing for can only be found in Jesus. Trying to manufacture intimacy through your spouse’s performance will never give you the marriage you desire. It will always leave you in ordinary.

EARNING YOUR FORGIVENESS

Before the affair, I (Justin) had a misguided view of forgiveness. I knew that God’s forgiveness was unconditional, but I still thought I could earn more of his favor through my performance. I carried that view into my relationship with Trisha. She would be wounded by our move to a new city, and I thought I could make it up to her through my performance. I could make it up to her by providing her with stuff she wanted. I could make it up to her by trying really hard not to make her mad or hurt her again.

No one wants to be in a performance-based marriage. A performance-based marriage will never allow you to attain true forgiveness. It will leave you in a cycle of unforgiveness and ordinary. When you live with the mission of compensation in marriage:

• You work hard to not make your spouse mad.
  
• You walk on eggshells because you don’t want to cause an argument.
  
• You stop being yourself because you feel shame and guilt.
  
• You feel that your spouse is more like your parent than your partner.
  

Do these traits sound similar to some of the other things we’ve talked about in this book? It’s because they put you right back into the cycle. Living in a performance-based marriage will never build intimacy.

Here is the hard truth: you can’t make up for whatever it is that you’ve done. You can’t redeem yourself. When you spend your time and effort trying to perform and make up for your
mistakes, you rob God of the work that he needs to do in your heart, and you put your spouse in the place of God. There is a better way—an
extraordinary
way. The redemption you desire can only be found in Jesus.

THE CYCLE OF FORGIVENESS

If there is a cycle of unforgiveness, then be assured there has to be a cycle of forgiveness. I (Trisha) had an unrelenting desire to figure it out, and as I did, I realized how the two can look eerily similar yet are polar opposites.

If you choose forgiveness, you will still feel grief. Grief is living in the truth that you have been wounded, and it needs to be dealt with rather than ignored. Often we Christians rob ourselves of the right to grieve, fearing that if we allow ourselves to feel the reality of our sadness, we somehow lack faith. But grief marks a pathway to begin the healing process.

When you forgive, you still experience anger. Grieving is essential to start the healing process, and anger is what propels you to take action. When people get angry, it causes them to take some kind of action, whether good or bad. What can become sin is the
action
we choose to take through our anger. But I believe that anger is a gift from God that allows us to step onto the path that grief has carved and to actively respond to that grief. Unforgiveness takes our anger and turns it into bitterness. But when we choose to forgive, our anger drives us to take the action God is calling us to: walking the path of brokenness we discussed in the last chapter.

But in this chasm of confusion, of figuring out what to do with our anger, many of us choose
blindness
. We believe that if we ignore our need to forgive, somehow our wound will heal on its own. We convince ourselves that when we get that promotion, or the new house, or the better house; when we get married; when we have children—that somehow these milestones and achievements
will heal our wounds. So we forget our anger for a while, but when we realize that none of these things have provided the healing we thought they would, bitterness and resentment set in. Blindness just delays our inevitable bitterness.

Forgiveness is choosing to grieve and acknowledge that you have been wounded. Forgiveness uses anger to fuel your willingness to deal with your wound, and brokenness bridges the chasm between anger and healing. Brokenness is a complete surrender to God and his way, and with brokenness comes healing.

Here’s what this looked like for me. My wound was not the affair but broken trust. With each move, I felt that Justin had broken my trust. Now with the affair, I had to grieve the loss of my marriage, my best friend, and my church family. I became angry and begged God to show me the path to healing. In God’s amazing grace, what he asked was that I become broken before him and recognize my own need for his grace and forgiveness. When I lived with a posture of gratitude for Jesus and his work on the cross, it prepared my heart to forgive and experience healing.

This is what forgiveness looks like: grief that is mourned, which turns into anger, which causes you to choose brokenness instead of bitterness, which allows you to experience healing.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FORGIVENESS & TRUST

A common mistake some people make is to confuse forgiveness with trust. Forgiveness, according to Scripture, should be offered unconditionally. In fact, if there are conditions, it isn’t forgiveness. But trust has to be earned.

The currency of any relationship is trust. I (Justin) had not just broken Trisha’s trust with the adulterous relationship; I had broken her trust in a lot of different ways. My decisions to move us frequently broke her trust. The way I creatively worked our finances broke trust. My exaggerating and withholding truth broke trust.
The pornography addiction I admitted to revealed a ten-year period of being untrustworthy. A few months after the affair, Trisha and I were talking about forgiveness. With tears in her eyes she said, “I know I can forgive you; I just don’t know if I can ever trust you.”

So many marriages drift to ordinary and stay there because they have confused these two aspects of a relationship: forgiveness and trust. When we’ve been hurt or betrayed or abused or lied to, trust is broken in that relationship. When trust is broken, so is intimacy. Being fully known isn’t possible when there is a lack of trust.

There is no doubt that forgiveness is a process, but trust is a prized possession. Once your trust has been broken, it becomes even more valuable, and it becomes imperative to know the difference between forgiveness and trust. If you are struggling to figure out the balance between these two important aspects to your relationship, can I give you this advice? Offer forgiveness freely; offer trust slowly.

Healing doesn’t come all at once. When you’ve been hurt, lied to, or betrayed, your heart is in a vulnerable state. What you want most is what you used to have: before the porn, before the sexting, before the lie, before the cheating, before the Facebook relationship. The temptation is to equate forgiveness with trust. When you do that, you short-circuit your own healing and the restoration of the one who has broken your trust.

Trust is built one day at a time, one act at a time. And it is built
s-l-o-w-l-y
. When Trisha and I were separated, she asked me to bring the kids home by 7:00 p.m. so she could get them ready for bed. I always had them there before 7:00. I got to see them three to four evenings per week, and there was not one time I brought them back later than she asked. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a big deal to her. Before the affair, I rarely came home when I said I would. I was rarely on time going
anywhere
, so for me to be on time in getting the kids home made a huge impression on her. I was beginning to regain her trust.

Jesus communicates this idea in a powerful way in the story of the woman caught in adultery mentioned at the beginning of
this chapter. He said to her, “Neither do I [condemn you]. Go and sin no more” (John 8:11). In this statement Jesus offered forgiveness (“Neither do I [condemn you]”) but also gave the woman an opportunity to earn trust (“Go and sin no more”).

Give the person who has hurt you an opportunity to earn your trust. Don’t withhold forgiveness in this process. Communicate honestly and openly, and allow the Holy Spirit to prompt you. You shouldn’t be fearful or paranoid, rather wise and discerning.

If you have broken trust in a relationship, it can be so easy for you to confuse forgiveness with trust. I know the feeling:
If you had really forgiven me, we wouldn’t be having these conversations
. Ask yourself this question:
Has my spouse not forgiven me, or does my spouse not trust me?

Your marriage may not have the trust issues ours did. But anytime you wound your spouse, trust is broken. In small and sometimes unnoticeable ways, but broken nonetheless. You can do your part in the healing process by earning trust after forgiveness has been extended.