Sarah and I have a similarity in our life journey’s we’ll both never be proud of… yet it brought us together in our healing. I’m thankful for this because I’m quite certain we’ll be healing for the rest of our lives on earth.
I often find myself nodding and “mmhmm”-ing as I read Sarah’s writings because I’ve been there. I remember the feeling. I STILL feel it… however, at the same time, I find myself learning something new as I read. God has given me clarity in my own emotions in reading Sarah’s work. And in my connection with Sarah, I find myself understanding and accepting grace in a whole new level.
Brian and I are SO thankful for our friendship with Sarah and Chad… and I’m so excited to host some of her words today.
For more of their story, watch it HERE.
Sarah’s blog: www.sarahmarkley.com
Sarah’s twitter: @sarahmarkley
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My husband and I had to go through a divorce.
Not a dissolution of our marriage, but we had divorce ourselves from the old way that we lived and breathed.
After I confessed to an extra-marital affair, after God had broken my heart and soul and I experienced true repentance, and after my husband had forgiven me we had to figure out how to pick up the pieces. We knew we had to leave the old people that we were back where they belonged.
Stuck in time.
Stuck in a bad place.
And we couldn’t be those people anymore. I couldn’t be that girl anymore.
I mean, who had done this before? People do recover from affairs but no one we knew had or no one we knew had been open about it. How do we survive this?
We were scared because no one we knew had actually gotten through this to the other side.
Every memory we had of the first seven years of our marriage was tainted by this giant, oil spill filth. The confession, repentance and mutual work of moving toward healing was as if we’d capped the spill. But the muck, the dirt was still there.
How do we stay married and live remembering what had happened? By this time I was as disgusted with my own actions as my husband was with them too.
In the beginning he asked me specifics. When? Where? How did it happen? Was it when he was gone travelling for business? Was it early in the morning when I went to the gym? Had it been going on for a long time? Yes, and yes and yes. I buried my head in my hands. I was so ashamed.
And I was trying to forget all of this. I was trying to forget the man I’d almost sacrificed my marriage for. I was trying to divorce myself from those tethers and regain the bridge to my family. To my daughter and to my husband.
I’d been gone for so long…
I didn’t want to remember the details. I wanted to just divorce myself from the past several years and just move on.
I took my face from my hands and I told him the when’s and the where’s and even the how’s. {I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the why’s. Those would come later because, honestly, I didn’t know what to say.}
He wept. He was wounded and he shook his head. Because he’d been faithful when I had not been.
We looked at each other and we knew we had to go through a divorce.
Not the kind that normally comes from an affair, from a heart turned so far away from what it was meant to love, but divorce of everything we had known before.
He stopped asking questions. I stopped thinking about the where’s and the how’s and the when’s of my affair. And even in our therapy sessions we began to look forward rather than backward.
It hurt. That divorce. Because laced in with the filth was some love and some beauty. We even had to forget most of that because it was almost impossible to extract from the filth. Like the spill. It couldn’t really be filtered well.
But it was the best choice we could have made.
And today we stand, still divorced {at least from our old life} but newlyconnected with new bonds and a new covenant built on Someone stronger than ever before.
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