Letting Go of Disappointments and Painful Losses (8 page)

Open your ears, God, to my prayer;
don’t pretend you don’t hear me knocking.
Come close and whisper your answer.
I really need you.…
My insides are turned inside out.…
I shake with fear,
I shudder from head to foot.
“Who will give me wings,” I ask—
“wings like a dove?”
Get me out of here on dove wings;
I want some peace and quiet.…
Haul my betrayers off alive to hell—let them
experience the horror, let them
feel every desolate detail of a damned life. I call to
God; God will help me.
At dusk, dawn, and noon I sigh
deep sighs—he hears, he rescues.…
Pile your troubles on God’s shoulders—
he’ll carry your load, he’ll help you out.
He’ll never let good people
topple into ruin.

P
SALM
55:1 – 2, 4 – 6, 15 – 18, 22,
T
HE
M
ESSAGE

I remember reading the Bible and wondering where God was in this mess. I read stories of God’s healing and grace and thought,
What a
crock! These words must have been written by people who were out of touch with reality.

It was hard for me to trust anyone, much less God. I did a fine job of protecting myself from Him and everyone else with a shield of angry detachment. The only one I allowed anywhere near my heart was my best friend, Karen.

Karen stayed close in this dark valley. She prayed for me each day. She talked about God’s love and about her high hopes for my future. She listened to me. She cried with me. She did not judge me. And she didn’t tell me what to do.

During our separation, Doug visited the children periodically for a few hours at a time. Our kids were broken by the sorrow of our fragmented marriage and the uncertainty of the ongoing separation. I was barely able to function under the stress of the changes. I think the only reason I kept going was because I felt the deep need to relieve the children’s pain. It was strictly for their sake that I reached out to others and persevered.

These were dark years that caused me to take inventory. I took a long, hard look at me. I remember crying in a heap on the bathroom floor, asking God to change me. I begged Him
for strength to cope with the bone-crushing weariness that came from my unrelenting efforts to hold our family together. Eventually the blinders were lifted from my eyes, and I could see that I was absolutely powerless over Doug’s choices.

I also asked God to heal the pervasive suspicion and fear that had consumed me. Healing began when I was completely honest and said,
God, I don’t trust You, but I see people who do and I
want
to.
Even though fear distorted my picture of reality, I knew deep down that God was the only one who had the answers that I could not find within myself.

Do not let it be imagined that one must remain silent about one’s feelings of rebellion in order to enter into dialogue with God. Quite the opposite is the truth: it is precisely when one expresses them that a dialogue of truth begins.

P
AUL
T
OURNIER

For several years, though, it seemed as if I had lost my way with God. I continued to
wonder if there was something terribly wrong with me and if somehow Doug was justified in his choices. I filed for divorce and remained silent about Doug’s infidelity. People questioned me. They asked why I couldn’t forgive him. Surely, they thought, we could have worked things out.

But they didn’t know the whole story, and frankly, I didn’t think it was any of their business. Trying my best to go on without Doug, I slammed the door shut on the guilt over filing for divorce and the unresolved grief over losing our family.

I had long, angry talks with God. I raged. I asked Him where He was when my husband was betraying me. Why hadn’t He protected me and the children from this abuse? I told Him how desperately unsafe I felt in this God-forsaken world. I wondered about the next shoe He planned to drop.

All the while, God listened patiently and continued sending blessings that were difficult for me to see through the dense fog of my grief.

I was so overcome with the injustice the children and I had suffered that I wanted Doug to pay. Vengeance seemed like a practical and logical solution. If I just opened my mouth and told all, I could have destroyed him.

But something constrained me. Actually, Someone constrained me. The Spirit of God began to speak to me about letting go of my bitterness. Everywhere I turned, somebody was saying something about forgiveness. The lady on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
The song on the radio. The preacher at church. My friend on the phone. They were all delivering the same message: “Forgive.”

Forgive?
I cried to God.
Impossible! How do you forgive people who don’t deserve forgiveness?

“You pray for them.”

But, God, I don’t want to pray for Doug. I don’t want to pray for his sideline attractions. They betrayed me. I will hate them forever!

“Not if you pray for them.”

It was about the time that this war was going on in my head that Karen gave me Dr. James Dobson’s book
When God Doesn’t Make Sense
, which explores the subject of suffering unjustly. As I read, the doctor brought me face-to-face with a set of choices. I could either continue my descent into bitterness and resentment, or I could turn to God. Neither choice seemed very appealing.

I wrestled with these ideas for months before I was able to bring myself to tell God that I couldn’t let go on my own. A gratifying sense of power came from holding on to my anger
and resentment. There was a part of me that wondered if I would crumble if I released it. I needed God to give me supernatural strength to do what He had asked me to do: pray for those who had betrayed me.

Moments of fleeting relief came as I journaled my uncensored feelings in a daily diary. Revealing the most intimate details of my life helped purge the pain. I read about a man named Job who was able to put words to the anguish I was feeling. I found solace in his life story and in the fact that God was the one who had the final word in his life. Not his friends. Not his family. Not his acquaintances. It gave me hope to know that God’s last word in Job’s life was one of total restoration.

It is true that the injustices I suffered from my husband’s sexual addiction stole my sense of worth and personal dignity. But looking back, I can see that the bitterness I hung on to for several years robbed me of the ability to heal and move forward. A turning point came when I realized that I could not afford to leave unchecked the hatred simmering in my heart.

I had to acknowledge that what happened to me
happened.
I was not crazy. My children and I bore the scars of a terrible injustice. But denial was not the answer. Neither was
amnesia or sugarcoating the truth. I had to face the facts and grieve the reality of the injustice if I was ever going to be able to move beyond it. I knew I couldn’t keep trying to cover the cracks in my heart for the rest of my life.

Somewhere along the line, I heard someone say that if we all lived by the rule “an eye for an eye,” the whole world would be blind. It reminded me of the many mistakes I had made in my life and of God’s unending compassion and grace to forgive me. How could I not forgive when God had forgiven me of so much? I made a conscious choice to let go of my quest for justice for Doug and the women who had betrayed me.

I felt nothing. But I did what I knew God had told me to do months before. I prayed for them and released them into God’s hands. I decided that from that day forward it wasn’t my job to set them straight or to make them pay. Their wrongs were between them and God. My energies were going to be focused on my own health and the well-being of my children.

To this day I have moments when the past, with all of its hurts and memories of failure, sweeps in like a raging river and leaves me gasping for air. I visit the pain every so often, but I no longer live in it. I am now one of those
stories of hope that I used to read about while consumed with anger.

I’m convinced that nothing will kill a woman’s spirit faster than holding on to resentment. And nothing will dissolve bitterness more effectively than choosing to let go and forgive. Forgiveness doesn’t come easily, and believing it does will likely ensure that we never forgive. If we call a spade a spade, forgiveness is often unattainable from a human standpoint. But when you factor in the divine, all things are possible. God can supernaturally empower us to release our death grip on rage and let it go. We simply have to say,
God, I’m willing to be made willing.

I told the Lord several years ago that I was willing. And from then on I began to sense that God was touched by my pain, that He had taken up my cause, and that He held both me and Doug in His hands. He would have the final say in both of our lives. Eventually I embraced the peace that only God could give. The pain of abandonment will probably never go away, because we suffered many severe losses. But the girls and I have moved on with our lives, and while we grieve our losses, we are no longer controlled by them. There is life beyond Doug. And it’s a good life, blessed by God.