Restored

How do I even start this post?! Starting one of these is always the hardest for me. I guess before I can get to the good stuff I have to go back a little and share some of the bad. So what I'm going to give is an overview so you can understand our story and where I have come from.

In July of 2013 my marriage as I knew it was over, I discovered that my husband had been unfaithful. Over the following week upon discovery I found out the details which included physical intimacy with 3 women and emotional intimacy with a couple more. To say I was crushed is a massive understatement. I didn't know how a marriage could ever survive something of this magnitude, after all when we got married we had both said that cheating would be the one thing that would be a deal breaker for both of us. Only by God's strength did I tell him that I would stay and we could TRY to work things out. I didn't even know what that meant at the time and we really had no plan. We did a little counseling in the beginning but our church only paid for a few sessions and we couldn't afford more so it didn't last long. Mostly it was a lot of late nights of talking, me asking a million questions and wanting to know every last detail so that my brain could try to wrap around what happened and why it happened. That first year was long and extremely difficult, in June of 2014 we ended up moving to Texas, it was kind of a whirlwind of events leading up to the move but we felt like God was pulling us here, although we didn't understand why at the time. It felt a little like we were running away from our problems, but we both knew that wasn't true because your problems will always follow you anyways. A month after we moved to Texas we hit the one year mark of me finding out everything and I was crushed all over again, I was NOT prepared to be hit with the devastation, it felt like it was happening all over again and I was beyond frustrated. I felt like after a whole year I should be on my way to healing. Little did I know that healing was going to take over 9 years!

Over the next many years there was A LOT of emotions and hurting and fighting for our marriage. Our fights, no matter what started them, always ended with me throwing his mistakes in his face. The argument could've started about something simple and small and it would always end with how he cheated on me. I threw it in his face every chance I got, I thought I was justified in doing so. There were some self help books and a ton of late night talks. No counseling yet because again we couldn't afford it at the time. Then one night at an encounter night at church I had a bit of a breakthrough and was feeling better and I started learning to trust Terry again. I quit bringing up his mistakes all the time and was actually feeling hopeful that we could move on. Moving forward some more we did eventually get some counseling here and there and eventually I felt like we were in a good place. We were leading life groups at church and sharing our story with others walking through the same thing and it seemed like God was really using this awful thing for his good. There was still pain there in my heart, my heart still felt broken at times but I assumed that was just par for the course with something like this, if you didn't know it there isn't a "What to Expect When Your Husband Cheats" book to tell you how to do it all! I'm being silly, but seriously, nothing could ever prepare you for healing from a marriage trauma like this and honestly there isn't a one size fits all. I would say healing from infidelity isn't the same from everyone, although there are staples I think everyone in this situation needs, like counseling, accountability and the need to be completely open and honest with one another. Fast forward a little more and what I thought was healed came back to haunt me. I think what actually took place was not so much healing as it was me getting really good at shoving everything deep down inside so I couldn't feel it anymore....what could possibly go wrong with that right?! When you shove things down inside they usually don't stay there for very long, imagine trying to sweep dirt under a rug, it works for a while and you probably can't even tell it's there, but do it long enough and you start to notice it and before you know it the dirt is oozing out the sides of the rug, the rug can only contain so much dirt before it spills out and gets on everything around it. This is what happened to me, slowly my dirt I shoved way deep down built up to the point of oozing out and it started affecting the way I was parenting and the way I was treating my husband, it was affecting my thoughts to the point that I was an extremely negative person and was pretty miserable to be around. I didn't even like being around my own self at this point. This showed up in the form of yelling at my kids, yelling at my husband, talking down to myself and even thinking that the world would just be better off without me. I was in a pretty dark hole and when one night I got mad at my husband and told him to just divorce me because he deserved better than me, I followed that with some really negative comments about myself which I'm thankful I can't really recall, after that he told me I HAD to go back to counseling. I wasn't thrilled with the idea of that but I knew he was right, so I contacted my counselor and set up weekly sessions. For 6 months I went to weekly counseling and while it took a while for me to get to the heart of the matter I finally did and we started digging into the infidelity and the effects I was still struggling with. It seemed like every session got harder and harder, I would almost always talk to Terry about my sessions and sometimes that was good and sometimes it meant I hurt him with my honesty. But we both felt hopeful because I was actually working through all of the pain and emotions.

At one of my last sessions, however, I felt defeated, I only seemed to be getting worse, my attitude, my resentment towards Terry, my pain, the deeper I dug into it the worst it got and by this point I had pulled all of the baggage out and had gone through it all but I didn't FEEL any better, and it was then that I thought "this is my life, I'll never get any better than I am right now" this led to a conversation between Terry and I where we both sat there and said "where do we even go from here" I had asked him what happens if I never get better and he said "I don't know" which wasn't a definitive statement and to someone else may not seem like an impactful statement, but those words told me that our future was extremely uncertain because up until that point he had always assured me that he would never leave no matter what, but the uncertainty of the "I don't know" told me that he was no longer willing to assure me that he wasn't going anywhere. It was the first time I actually thought maybe our marriage wasn't salvageable. This was basically my rock bottom, the point of no return I thought. When I look back at this moment it's like I can see myself in the very bottom of a pit and God is at the top with his hand reached down to me and he says "now will you let me help you?" I don't believe this is what God intended for me but I think it's what I needed, I needed to reach the end of myself to realize that no matter how strong I think I am I can't do it on my own.

To know what God did next you can check out my blog post entitled "Transform & Renew" I don't want to repeat it all here. If you haven't read that you can go read that and then come back here and finish reading this one. It was that weekend that God started the work in me to restore my heart.

This past weekend I went to a retreat called Tres Dias. Terry went to the men's weekend back in the spring and he wanted me to go to the women's weekend that was the weekend after his because he had an incredible experience but I had about a dozen excuses why I couldn't go, truth be told I just didn't want to go. I was in the midst of my counseling and was in a really dark place. So as a compromise I committed to going to the one in the fall, mainly to get everyone to quit bugging me about going. But my amazing best friend, Aida was sure to sign me up as soon as the signups were posted and so I was in! By that point it was after Father's Day and I had experienced God in a new way and he was already working in me. I feel like from Father's Day up until the day I left for my Tres Dias weekend God was preparing me. Going into the weekend I actually felt excited to go, I also kept hearing the word "Restoration", then I got to the camp on Thursday and see that the theme of the weekend is "Restored" I was like okay well that's coincidental....then on Saturday we were all blessed with a word, my word was Restored! Ok now I was convinced this was no coincidence, this was God. I feel like he was telling me this was my weekend, this was my time, this was the end to this very long painful chapter of my life. Saturday night I experienced God's love in a way I never had before, his love felt tangible, as real as the love we feel here on earth from our loved ones and while it felt amazing I knew I was only feeling a small portion of His love because we could never fully comprehend His love here on earth! That night I felt the hurt leave my body, I have never sobbed in that way before, it was a deep soul cry, it was like God was reaching in and pulling all of the pain out and mending my heart. I also experienced a tangible version of what God's grace looks like, God’s perfect grace wipes away our past, he doesn’t even remember it anymore, and while I know that we can’t forget things like that I know that God covers our past with his grace and he plucks it out of the past and places it in front of us as our testimony, so it no longer has the brokenness attached to it, it has his love, grace, forgiveness, goodness and restoration attached to it.

On Father's Day God began a work in me by restoring my mind and taking away the negative thoughts and the resentment I felt towards my husband, this weekend at Tres Dias God finished that work, as I sat in Chapel Saturday night I heard God say to me "It is finished" and I knew He was telling me that this chapter of my life that had lasted nearly a decade was finally over! He confirmed that when I read a letter from a sweet friend and in her letter I read the words "It is finished". God has restored my heart, and my marriage. He has restored my mind and my emotions. He is opening new doors already and I can't wait to step through them. I walked into this weekend not realizing I still had many broken places, I walked in not understanding God's love and grace, not understanding who I was in Him. I walked out of the weekend with a comprehension of His love and grace that can't be explained only felt and I am walking in the truth that I am a daughter of the King, I am His beloved. Guess what though....so are YOU, if you are reading this I can tell you I am not the exception, as much as God has done for me He can do for you too, He loves you with an unending, never failing unconditional love that you can't even ever fully understand, you just have to sit in it and feel it wrap around you. There is absolutely NOTHING that can separate you from his love!!