Forgiveness and My Testimony

This week in DivorceCare, the ministry I serve in at Watermark, I shared my testimony. I'm in the heat of finals (papers, projects, insomnia, terrible last-minute dining decisions, you know...), otherwise I'd write more about the process of composing my testimony. Writing this out was one of the most glorious labors I've ever undertaken. I cried multiple times, wrote and deleted huge chunks, and could only write effortlessly when it concerned the gospel. Nothing else matters if it's not me telling His story!

Things to know: the topic for this week in DivorceCare was forgiveness, so it's told in the context of that. It was also a requirement that it be written out. It's just over 10 minutes.

So, here's the audio link, and the transcription I read from follows.

God's Story Through My Story

Transcription:
A lot of you in this room have probably read Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. One of my favorite authors, Tim Keller, says in his book Prodigal God that this name is kind of a misnomer, and it could be more aptly titled “the tale of the two lost sons.” For most of my life, I read that story with a tinge of disinterest and had a hard time identifying with it...until I understood that there were not one but TWO acts of rebellion in that story, and that one of them was mine.
    I spent the first 18 years of my life in a Christian home with two parents who loved the Lord and loved each other well...love for Jesus that allowed me to witness my dad reading his Bible nightly since before I can remember, and love for each other that made my siblings and me cringe at the sight of mom and dad making out in the kitchen again. By most measures I was a pretty good kid. And by “pretty good, I mean “Queen of the self-righteous goody-goodies.” I had a big preoccupation with doing what I thought to be the right thing. I stayed out of trouble, my friends’ parents adored me, and was even elected Student Body Chaplain my senior year of high school. For all intents and purposes, I wasn’t just ON the spiritual A-team, I WAS the spiritual A-team.
    It was with this extremely high regard for myself that I met my husband. We met at Calvin College in Michigan when I was 19. We dated for three years and during this time we faced two years of long distance, a revelation of a porn addiction, and several sin struggles physically for he and I before getting married in 2006. We moved from Michigan to Dallas in 2007 and started attending Watermark almost immediately. We were plugged into a community group, became members, and, ironically, served in the ReEngage marriage ministry together doing music. I did everything I could to set us up for success and walk in obedience.
    In the spring of 2011, around year 4 1/2, everything went from what I assumed to be fine to hitting the fan. My husband and I had been talking about starting to try to have kids in the fall. Well, May of that year he told me he didn’t love me anymore and that he had been looking at pornography during our entire marriage. In June he wrote me a letter saying that our entire marriage was a mistake and he wasn’t sure he wanted it to work out. In August I confronted him, and he confessed to having an affair and asked me to move out. Just two months later, in October, I was served with divorce papers. Whatever idiom you think may apply here did, and I’m sure many of you know the feeling well--My world turned upside down, the rug was pulled out from underneath me, I was punched in the stomach.
    My future was gone. I was 27 and felt old, unattractive, and alone. I knew the Lord must have a plan, though (Psalm 139:16--All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be). I hoped His plans would be for my ex and that they would involve softening his heart and bringing him back to me...but there were things He accomplished during that painful time and ever since in my self-righteous heart that He could not have done until He allowed my heart to be rent. When He in His sovereignty allowed that which I prized so highly to be taken out of my life, the state of my heart was laid bare. Fortunately for me, so was the state of God's.
    Over the last two years that I’ve been on this journey I’ve journaled like crazy and have had countless conversations about the heart-wrenching but amazing changes happening in my life. But I’m going to attempt to sum up what I’ve learned about God’s incredible forgiveness and His grace that leaves no square inch of this life untouched in two earth-shattering lessons: my sin IS really that bad, and the cross IS really that good.
    When I first found out that my husband was giving up on the marriage, I was completely shocked. My incredulity, however, was due less to the depravity of my husband, and much more toward a God whose actions I didn’t understand. I had walked in obedience, been a faithful spouse, served the church, extended reconciliation to my husband, and made every attempt I could to establish a Godly marriage. Where were the blessings I was promised? Where was the fruit of my labor? (Hopefully you just threw up in your mouths at the sound of the disgusting entitlement in my heart, because it was definitely there.)
    What had lain in the darkness of my will was a hope--no, a certainty--that walking in obedience would somehow secure God’s blessings (like a good marriage)...as if following Him was some means to an end. I wasn’t obeying Him simply because He was my benevolent Father who loves me. I had a front row seat to the darkness in my husband’s heart, but in my many quiet moments after he left, I was finally faced with the wrenching ugliness of my selfishness, control, anxiety, and fear. Not only had I been dishonest with myself about my own faults and sins during my marriage, but I had been an unfaithful bride to the Lord through my own sin.
    God put me on a journey through Scripture that had me aghast for the first time at my own depravity. He led me to Romans chapter 3, which showed me that “no one was righteous” and that without Him, I’m so dead in my sin that my throat is an open grave. I was reminded of the fundamental reality that without Christ’s sacrifice, according to Romans 5:10, I am God’s enemy, and worse than that, I’m powerless to change my separation from Him, much less my own wicked heart or my husband’s.
    I wept with joy and gratitude when the truth of the gospel penetrated my spirit. Yes, I am hopelessly wicked in my self righteousness and worship of control and dominance. Yes, my husband was wicked in his affair and despair that led him to leave. And yes, we are both screwed and powerless to change this. But! “BUT now, a righteousness from God apart from the law has been made known”…”righteousness from God that comes through faith in Jesus Christ” (3:21-22)…”You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, (when we were God’s enemies) Christ died for the ungodly.”... (5:6, 10)
    Understanding this changed everything. To forgive my ex, I had to first accept forgiveness. I couldn’t impart to my ex what I didn’t have to begin with. And to accept forgiveness, I had to understand what I did wrong...namely, understand my own sin. It was easy to be angry over my husband’s sin, but I didn’t understand how much I needed forgiveness until I experienced a righteous indignation over my OWN sin and the sweet, tender forgiveness of my heavenly Father.
    So while my poor heart was exploding with joy all the time, my great Forgiver prompted me to examine my life and take practical steps toward forgiving my ex. Meeting with a counselor and talking with my community group helped me identify destructive patterns in my life that likely made my marriage more difficult. It was through this new understanding of my own sin and process of accepting forgiveness from Christ that in September of this last year I sent an email to my ex husband asking for HIS forgiveness. Whether in reality I was responsible for 10% of the dysfunction in our marriage or 50%,  I needed to own 100% of my portion. I needed to walk away from the growing threat of resentment. I needed to quit drinking the poison and waiting for him to die. I needed to submit to the authority of Scripture when Paul says in Eph. 4:31-32 to “Get rid of all bitterness, rage, and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you.”
    So with guidance from the Lord and other believers, I asked my ex to forgive my worship of my idol of control, my constant competing for headship, my worrying and anxiety, and also for not taking some big red flags seriously while we were dating. I hit the send button completely at peace with Christ, knowing that I’ve been forgiven by Him. I had no expectation or need to hear back from my ex. A few days later I did hear back, and his passive aggressive response didn’t phase me for a second...because my soul was free. Free of the need to ask questions I’d never get answers to, free from the need to try to manage my circumstances, free from the desire to see my ex punished, and free from the debilitating guilt that had plagued me for so long over my failed marriage.
    See, y’all, Sin isn’t extraordinary. GRACE is extraordinary. And although I have a new understanding of the Parable of the Two Lost Sons, and that’s been really meaningful, nothing has changed me personally more than focusing on the lavish, extravagant, extraordinary love and forgiveness of the Father and the pursuit of BOTH children who rebelled against Him. My husband’s rebellion was outward, and my rebellion was inward, but the Lord in His steadfast faithfulness opens His forgiving arms to us both and calls us back home to Himself.
    Take heart, friends. Forgiveness is a decision, but it’s also a process, and once it’s been decided, it’ll have to be decided again and again. We don’t condone hurtful things done to us, just as the Lord doesn’t condone us when we hurt Him. Forgiveness doesn’t mean it won’t hurt anymore, and it doesn’t mean we can just forget. Since our hearts are selfish, forgiveness isn’t natural and is often a labor rather than natural. But we don’t forgive because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy. We forgive because we’ve been forgiven, and it’s a step of obedience toward our benevolent Father who loves us and has commanded us to do so.
    So we’re divorced, we’ve hurt someone, and we’ve been hurt deeply. But above that we’ve been ransomed, pursued, adopted, known and loved by our Eternal Spouse...and that means EVERYTHING.

Divorce, Identity, and Restored Humanity

My sister suggested to me that I was not done writing about identity yet.
...She was right.
This gets more to the heart of what I was talking about in my last post...and isn't as long. :)
It's also much more easily delivered through the context of my own story.

Having gone through a divorce and being involved in a ministry that works with divorced people, identity is a topic that I deal with a lot.
It's obviously not just me...everyone has a story that shapes, destroys, or rebuilds his or her sense of self, but divorce is one that employs all three.

So.

One of the repercussions of dealing with divorce is loneliness. This is not something I struggle with often by any means, but in the days, weeks, and months after my ex asked me to move out, I experienced somewhat of a shock to the system at being forced to adjust to coming home at the end of the day to...no one.
Sure, I missed having someone to talk to, cook with, and watch random nonsense on hulu with. But what struck me most deeply was the wrenching emptiness of feeling unknown.
DON'T GET ME WRONG...I have amazing people in my life who go to GREAT lengths to love me well.
The incomplete nature of this life on earth, however, makes this love very fragmented in some ways.

For example...
My dear friends here in Dallas never knew what I was like as a single person before I was married. My friends from high school and college never really saw my marriage. My family never really saw my marriage because I lived in another state. Any friends I made after September 2011 don't know what my life was like in the context of marriage.
Lives are so multifaceted...there are so many components of our stories that, even as much as we do life together, we can never fully know each other.

This, though, is what makes knowing Jesus valuable so profoundly necessary. We are temporal, and in order to live our lives, to pay attention to one aspect of our lives (either the fact that I was married, or the fact that I'm single now) is to necessarily neglect the other aspects. We simply just don't have the capacity to take in the whole story as one...in my case, no one can know me simultaneously as single and married. No one can address all parts of my story at once.

BUT (my favorite parts of Scripture often begin with "but")...Jesus gets it.
Because He's outside of time. Because He's orchestrating my story. Because He made me.
And this makes it so much more necessary and BEAUTIFUL to abide in Him...because He knows the whole story of our lives without having to neglect any of its parts in order to give another part of it attention.

What about all that stuff I said in my last post about losing ourselves in order to find ourselves? What about all that "I must decrease so that He may increase" business? That doesn't sound like being known...it seems a complete contradiction to say that in order to realize our uniqueness or be fully known, we have to essentially be depleted of everything about us.

HOWEVER...this mysterious decrease of our "selves" is actually the increase of our ultimate Self. As we become more like Him...(He, the ultimate reality, the One who has always existed and has never changed, He who is so wonderfully complex that if He placed a single, solitary unique attribute of His into every human He created, there would never exist enough people over the span of time and space to even begin to house all of His properties)
...rather than losing our humanity as we put our flesh to death, our humanity is more fully restored. Only when we purge ourselves of our love of self do our real Selves begin to take shape.

We've kind of constructed this depressing conundrum where we think that God wants us to lose our uniqueness and become absorbed into some amorphous, homogenized mass.
Good golly. That WOULD be depressing.
The joyful reality is that it is only in becoming more like Him that our uniqueness and humanity can hope to be fully realized.

Christ, in becoming human, redeemed the essence of what it IS to be human.
He doesn't deny us our humanity. He provides the only venue in which we can fully realize it.

Without this ultimate fulfillment of self in the Maker, we walk around like shades...shadows. Becoming less substantive, less real, less known with every self-oriented thought.
Being real means being known...and known especially by Someone who will never stop knowing you, never have to neglect a part of your story to focus on another part, and who has fashioned every detail of your life for His glory.
His glory is much more real than our inhumanity...so really, the crucifixion of the flesh is the crucifixion of our inhumanity.


So for me personally...going through my divorce jarred me to my core...because at my core, I was still finding parts of my identity in my role as a married person. I prized that relationship so much that it became an inextricable part of what I drew my value from.
But God has constructed these elements of life to be enjoyed...NOT to have an identity constructed from them. When we build our value/identity/meaning on something temporal (albeit wonderful, but temporal) like relationships, vocation, political beliefs, intelligence, talents, interests, or anything else created, ANYTHING created is susceptible to change.
Anything, then, that can act as an agent of change in life is not just an agent of change, but a great and real threat to our identities. 

So I've put the role of a married person to rest...and in doing so I have embarked on a journey of losing my need to live for myself or find my identity in anything that changes.
I've been wrestling with the Holy Spirit over what other things I let define me other than Him. It's pretty staggering...my appearance, my intelligence, my potential, my work ethic, my responsibility, my date-ability, my knowledge, my opinions...
I am known...fully...unique and special and loved not because of my temporal roles or changing interests...but because I'm made uniquely in His complex image.