Life radically changed after the incident. We went to counseling. We quickly put our house up for sale. We moved in with my mom. I quit my full-time job for…peace of mind. You see, the person who physically threatened me was a police officer – a police officer who worked in the town I lived in and with whom I was having an emotional affair.
My husband could have left me then, but he didn’t. He hung on for over two more years. In those two years, we tried to make things work – him doing what he knew to do and me doing what I knew to do.
In the midst of the chaos, I was offered a job with my church. It was a job that would bless me beyond measure. I grew so much spiritually in the four months I worked there. It was during that time that I started to fervently pray that I become the wife God had called me to be. The closer I grew to Jesus, the further my husband and I grew apart.
The summer of 2016 was a whirlwind. I had a minor surgery in late June. It was at this time that I came to realize that my husband was no longer present in our marriage. I had noticed signs of him pulling further and further away prior to then, but I had clung to hope that our marriage would be restored. On a mid-July night, when I finally was courageous enough to share how I was feeling and to open the lines of communication, he said the words, “It’s time we get divorced.” He was surprised when I didn’t fight it. I had been fighting for our marriage for years; I was tired and beat down. His concession gave me permission to stop fighting.
The days and weeks to follow were brutal. As much as divorce was something that I had wanted for years, the reality of it was not easy to digest. The paperwork. The separation of things. The walking away from a relationship. The breaking up of a family. All the emotions.
Not long after we filed our initial divorce papers, I heard God’s voice loud and clear. He said, “You weren’t able to show him my love while married. But now you can.” I wasn’t certain how I was going to do such a thing, but I knew that there were many feelings and emotions I’d have to set aside in order to make it happen. That, and a whole lot of prayer and leaning into Him through it all.
It was now that I began to see how God uses all things together for His good, even those things that rock our world.
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