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Kim Duckworth --
I had been married for almost 20 years when I learned of my husband’s long-term affair. We had had our problems before, but with each fall, I would try to forgive and vowed to be a better wife, a nicer person, a more spiritual Christian. This time, though, it was different. It wasn’t a one-night stand. It wasn’t short-lived. He had fallen in love with this woman. She was more than a cardboard image; she was his real, three-dimensional ideal.
After all those years of trying to make it work, so hurt with each rejection, each instance and criticism fed into the lie that I was such an unlovely woman that even God couldn’t make things right. This God who I thought had promised me a happy ending if I believed enough, if I submitted enough, if I tried hard enough. This God who said He loved me but who didn’t step in the save my marriage and, as a consequence, didn’t save me. I not only felt rejected, I felt abandoned.
I was so hurt; then I became angry. Even as a backslidden Christian, it was unacceptable and fearful to be outwardly angry, so most of my anger brewed within. I became hard and rebellious. My reactive thinking was, “Well, if God can’t ‘save’ me, then I’ll save myself.” The decisions I made to save myself reflected the accusing anger that nested in my soul.
I stepped into the world, made compromises, sold myself for the immediate. The spiral of self-reliance, of choosing the lies, took me so far down that I cannot adequately describe the shameful condition I was in. Lost. Black. Despondent. Self-loathing. But God . . . but God never let go. He never abandoned me. He never rejected me. He had to let me go my own way, to let me fall, in order to get me to look up to see Him reaching towards me. It was His offer to join Him in fellowship, to turn my life over to Him, to abandon myself in Him.
I’m sorry to say that my breaking was more of a cry of “Uncle” than it was a spiritual act of submission. Yet God knows. He knows me. He knows what it took – what it takes – to bring me to Him. He’s taught me that I’m not the one writing the story with my preconceived happy ending. He is. He asked me to trust Him with it all, especially with my future, that unwritten part of my life.
Do you know what makes a literary work a masterpiece? I’m sure it’s in the depth of the characters, the author’s detailed descriptions that mentally impact our senses and in the author’s ability to touch our innermost being. But mostly, a good novel is one that, when you finish that last page, you put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction and think to yourself, “That was good.” God is the Good Author. He has prodded me with the belief that He can take the primer of my own self-reliance – my own thinking and plan and schemes – and replace it with His masterpiece novel for my life. And in the end, I believe that I will say with satisfaction, “God is Good.”
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