2 posts tagged “reconciliation”

A year ago today The Wife and i went to a Red Lobster in Georgia and sat down to discuss either reconciliation or divorce. Truth be told, it could have gone either way very easily. The Church i attend, MercyHouse, had paid not only for the marriage retreat we were at, but for the plane tickets as well -- and i will say right here and now that i do not expect to ever find another Church like this one, who puts their resources and love where their mouth is to people who do not deserve that kind of treatment. We arrived in Atlanta on Sunday, and were done on a Thursday.

We were pissed off and hurt, and it took a long time for us to learn how to actually apologize to each other, which is why the night we went out was so late in the week. For me the decision to stay with The Wife boiled down to this simple point: did i believe unconditional love existed? Which of course really means if i believed that the gospel of Jesus Messiah, God's physical incarnation of unconditional love, existed. Was i a Christian? Why my wife decided to stay, i will probably never know, although my hunch is that both of us recognize that neither one of us would ever find another person like the one we are involved with now. In other words, we were made for each other in a very strange and unique way.

I'm not saying this past year has been some storybook perfect year where we begin to live happily ever after without further conflict. However, the difference of the past year in comparison with the five before it has been startling, like noon day is from midnight. We have tried our best to take what we have learned at the retreat and make it part of how we live our lives. I know that what i used to think was an apology was really an empty joke, and that my love for The Wife has actually grown over this last year. I always say that happiness depends upon circumstances, and my relationship with my wife makes me happy, and is one of the few bright spots in my life at the moment.

I am so grateful. God has had mercy on an entire race -- the human race -- and has offered rescue from the illusions of grandeur we are all have willing fallen victim too, thinking that humanity is somehow the measure of all things. When i think back upon my life it is with the knowledge that i was the author of my own misery, that i have always been, while living for myself, my own worse enemy. I thank God for Messiah Jesus because it was only through His radical action of human sacrifice and resurrection that enabled me to escape the prison cell that i had willingly made for myself. What we call the "Beatitudes" is actually Christ's proclamation of the gospel of grace. Blessed are the morally and spiritually bankrupt beggars, for they truly know just how desperately lost they really are. I is part of the dark night of the soul to realize that i am the guy at the traffic island with the cardboard sign begging for help because i cannot pull myself up by my own bootstraps. It is a time of death, and death is always ugly despite all the well-meaning platitudes about death being just another part of life. There is something stark and obscene and final when death finally comes calling, and it is only a friend when it ends a nightmare of pain and suffering. With a friend like that, who needs enemies? But Resurrection is well worth the death of our selfishness and self-interest, and the gospel that makes Christianity unique is simply this: That Jesus Messiah was crucified, dead, and buried; that He descended into hell; and on the third day rose again. If this isn't true, then like the Apostle Paul says, we are of all people to be pitied, and we should eat drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. I am truly grateful that there is something, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Messiah, that isn't in some way some type of Nihilism...

And i thank God for my wife every day as well.

Today is Epiphany, when Christians mark the arrival of the Magi to visit the Christ Child. It is a celebration of the end of an old era and an old regime, and the beginning of when God makes things right thru the Kingdom of God thru the rule of Christ the King.

Gotta admit, I didn't grow up liturgical in any way. Pentecostal worship happens to be, actually, the antiliturgy. It is the apex of the democritizing of North American Christianity, the triumph of modernism in Evangelicalism. It is living in the Republic of God, rather than in the Kingdom of God. It is a rule where the governed choose the One who will govern instead of a King electing His own subjects, a community where those in the body chooses what part they will be instead of being assigned their role by the Spirit. The consequences have been obvious. Fortunately, I don't live there any more, and today I celebrated Epiphany.

These couple of weeks have been the culmination of five or six years of walking with my eyes wide open thru the middle of a shit storm. I left the ministry, my marriage went south, I declared bankrupcy, and i began an exciting career in food service. Everything was turned upside down, and everything turned into a desert of pain, an ocean of suffering that could only be endured because everything was completely out of my control.

But instead of coming to the end, I find myself now at a new beginning. I feel like Bill Murray waking up to something different on the day after Groundhog day. I'm almost done with school, inside a year I will be certified to teach High School in Massachusettes with a Masters in Education. We don't have any credit cards, and we are living within our means, with the exception of trying to clear the last three grand of an old Student Loan. I am involved in an excellent church, and last August God breathed new life into a dead marriage. Things are changing.

The major lesson I have learned, the epiphany I have experienced, is that God has basically said no self-determination for me, I'm just gonna have to trust God in whatever circumstances He places me in. This, of course, is not welcome news to the me that was born to rebel, the guy in love with the illusion of being the captain of my soul, the idiot savant who thinks he can count the cards in a Reno casino.

Last night I was at the Spoke and T was there, drunk off her ass and horny as hell. She had been going with her dream guy, but a friend he had always wanted to date had told him she was single and interested. T told him he'd have to choose, and unfortunately, he did, and it wasn't her. I came to say hi, and she introduced me to a couple of people as, 'This is Martin, who needs to divorce his wife and fuck someone willing.' Sigh. T is nothing if not direct and blunt.

They were gonna have to walk to her house at last call, more than a mile or so away, so I took 'em home. Bad mistake on my part, because T is not what God has for me and this gave my baser nature an opportunity to stage a coup. I was suprised to learn I seem to be far more vulnerable to this crap than when I was in the middle of my past difficulties with The Wife for some reason, which is very strange. T doesn't even try to get into my pants anymore because of how consistent I've been over the last couple of years in turning her down, and last night it would've taken almost nothing to have gotten me in bed with her. Yet God still wills to save me despite myself, and she decided to throw back 1/2 a valium and hit the hey. I kissed her on the forehead and took off.

I went home, and thought about the nature of abject stupidity. That would be all I need -- she's an alcoholic, she has had herpes since she was a teen, and she's emotionally wounded beyond my ability to comprehend. What the hell is the matter with me? Then it hit me, the role that God has determined for me: to love my life like Jesus loved the Church, in giving Himself away Himself for her. I may still, on a level in a place I barely know exists, be very angry with my wife about the past couple of years. But I know that I have to forgive as I have been forgiven, and I was as guilty as hell when God came looking for me. Jesus didn't come to do His will, but the will of the Father that sent Him. I need to look after her, and in doing so trust that God will heal me while I try to fulfill His purpose. He loves The Wife far more, and far better than I can ever love her, and she needs me to be God's kindness and love toward her in physical form.

So today was Epiphany, and for that I am grateful.