Today's guest blogger is Jessica Cleveland Thoms. Jessica lives in middle Tennessee where she currently teaches high school English. You can usually find her writing, shopping, attending concerts, laughing at her own jokes, loving on any animal she can find, and purchasing unnecessary items covered in glitter. She and her husband, Tristin, are both members at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Orlinda, Tennessee, and this is her second post in a three-part series on marriage. You can read more of Jessica's writing at Grace for Sparrows.
First of all, I hope readers will understand the true motive of this three-part blog series on marriage. It is not for the purpose of airing dirty laundry or showcasing even slightly perceived self-righteousness. The reason I was even approached about telling my story on this platform in the first place is so that it could encourage others who are in the trenches of marriage and ultimately become a mirror that reflects the incredible glory and power of God. With that sole purpose in mind, I share with you part two of this series.
In today’s extremely disposable culture, a five-year wedding anniversary is something to be celebrated.
Last summer, I had spent most of my time off work lining up the most perfect anniversary celebration for my husband and myself; I had ordered a gown, made restaurant reservations, dry-cleaned his suit, booked a hair and makeup appointment, and even orchestrated for a photographer to take anniversary pictures of us before dinner. It was going to be perfect.
My husband didn’t seem to care one way or the other, but that wasn’t unusual. I’m used to him humoring me and going through the motions because he loves me and trusts me to handle the adulting.
And then, just a few days before our anniversary, an intuition that I can only attribute to the Holy Spirit hit me.
Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. And when he became increasingly withdrawn and sullen and wouldn’t talk to me about it, I followed the evidence trail to the biggest shock of my life.
An ex of his had resurfaced on social media. They had spent hours on the phone before and after work for weeks. She conveniently lived close by. And while he promised that it had not manifested physically, they had pledged their love to one another and commitment to building a new life together.
I do not exaggerate when I say that my entire world was shattered. I had known that our marriage was not in a great place (I had posted “The Marital Slaughterhouse”—part one of this series—on my personal blog just a few weeks prior), but I was hell-bent and determined to celebrate the fact that we had made it to five years at least. Besides that, I may not have been happily married, but I was still married and planning on staying married.
My initial reactions were definitely of the flesh. I wept, I pleaded, I begged, and ultimately, I went to stay with my parents. I couldn’t fathom how he had seemingly turned this switch off, how he could just be “done” with no chance for us to truly work on anything. Despite my great level of unhappiness, I had told myself I would never, EVER give up the way that he had.
The night before our five-year anniversary, my husband sat down to talk with both me and our pastor (who married us) about the whole ordeal. My husband’s expression was completely flat and emotionless as he looked at both of us and declared, “I have been done with this marriage for a long time. I don’t love Jessica, and I’m ready to get divorced. NOTHING will change my mind.”
I still couldn’t believe it. This was not my husband. I truly believed that, based upon his years of fruit and public profession, my husband had saving faith through Christ. This was NOT supposed to happen, and especially not to ME. I had done everything right. I had gone to church and served in church and gone to college and held a job and respected my parents and got my husband in church and posted Bible verses on social media and all of those other little things that, if we were really honest, we often tell ourselves are enough penance for God to “reward” us with an easy and blessed life (more on that foolish and damnable ideology later in part three of this series).
The next several weeks were a roller coaster. I canceled all of my fancy celebratory plans and convinced him to go eat dinner with me on our actual anniversary. He even stayed in our home that night but assured me it was solely to appease me and that he would be living with his parents until the divorce was finalized. I begged him not to file any paperwork for at least two weeks, to which, by the absolute grace of God, he agreed to, and he even agreed to spend every other night in our home instead of his parents’.
Friends, let me just pause here to tell you how sweet Jesus is. He is sweet in a way that I never even understood until I was absolutely alone in that apartment in the wee hours of the morning, that fresh and bright little apartment that I absolutely loved and spent so much time decorating and making into a home for us that year. Do you know what it’s like to lie on the floor and weep Psalms to the Savior at 3AM night after night? It’s humbling and heartbreaking, among so many other things.
No matter how broken I was and how much I wept, I 100% absolutely and without a doubt had peace about the entire situation. This fact is not logical or scientific by any means whatsoever. Friend, if you have never had your world ripped out from under you yet and you don’t have a strong hold on the total sovereignty of God, I beg you to prepare by trusting in His sufficiency now. I would not have survived this ordeal without that foundation of faith and trust. This did not alter my extreme sadness and heartbreak, but it did give me comfort in knowing that God had a reason for what was happening or it would not have happened.
It was extremely clear to me at this point: my husband was going to divorce me. He was only waiting to file in order to honor a last request from me. He was still communicating with and seeing the woman he claimed to love. He was excited about becoming a dad to her kids. Our marriage was indeed over, and yet, Jesus continued to supply me with indescribable peace amidst the heartbreak.
I taped Mark 9:24 to my mirror and prayed it dozens of times throughout the day. I prayed Psalms. I played and sang out hymns, just as David did. I laid in the arms of my sweet mama and cried. At the recommendation of a friend, I began listening to an audiobook of Martha Peace’s The Excellent Wife, where my perspective of marriage and understanding of how to be a wife was completely obliterated. If you’re a wife and you haven’t read it, I implore you to do so, regardless if your marriage is great or falling apart or your husband has already left; there is literally a chapter and biblically sound advice for every single situation.
One of the many, many key things I took away from this book was how selfish I had been by focusing on what my husband failed to do in my eyes, especially in the wake of everything that had recently happened. Peace argues that even if the greater percentage of a marriage’s problems belong to one spouse, the other spouse must own 100% of THEIR percentage of the problems and failures. I had wholeheartedly failed to do that. I was also convicted of the fact that we had “normalized” the concept of divorce in our household during our many months of marital strife. It became commonplace for us to speak of what would happen if we got divorced, or how we would definitely still be in contact with one another on such and such holiday, or how we would still text and hang out, or that we should go ahead and have a child together even if we split up because there was no better person in our immediate realms to procreate with and we weren’t getting any younger. I cannot express how vital it is to the wellbeing of your marriage for the word “divorce” to never escape your lips. We live in a world where it’s extremely easy to get caught up in divorce becoming a viable option, even (especially?) within the church. Fight this temptation. Fight it hard.
What the Lord prompted me to do next is going to fly all over some readers. The following words have lost and will continue to lose me respect, empathy, and even friendships.
They will place me on a metaphorical pedestal of mockery in the wake of a feminist, marriage-hating culture that cries out, “Men ain’t crap,” though men be the very image-bearers of the Living God.
They may even make an entire community turn their heads in disgust and question how an “educated woman” can be so utterly “stupid.”
I vowed that even if my husband was going to leave me, I was going to do everything I could, by God’s grace, to be humble, serving, and Christlike. I scrubbed our apartment by myself until it was spotless because I knew he liked thing orderly. I cooked his favorite meals on the nights he chose to stay at our home. I continued to read Scripture and pray. I confessed my inadequateness both to him and to the Lord in all respects. I apologized for my shortcomings, despite the fact that he was not sorrowful about any of his. I bit the inside of my cheek until it literally bled when his mistress shot me looks in the streets of our small town. I prayed for more meekness. I prayed that I could be silent when needed. I prayed for boldness when I needed to speak. I listened to theological podcasts. I read Lysa TerKeurst’s timely story of marital redemption and prayed for more faith. I prayed for the right spirit and attitude, not just for this situation, but for the rest of my life regardless of the outcome of our marriage. I prayed for a miracle, but I prayed for peace even though our marriage was over.
At first, my husband was terribly mean in the face of my actions. Looking back now, I can clearly see that this reaction was an outward display of his internal pushback against the Holy Spirit’s drawing in and conviction of his glaring sin. A few nights into our new norm, he asked me why I was being so nice to him after everything he was doing to me. I could only respond in tears then, but the answer was and is that it was the only way to behave as a true follower of Christ, and He alone gave me the power to do it. Trust me, I wanted to retaliate. I wanted to beat the other woman senseless. I wanted her to hurt the way I was hurting, especially since I had always tried to be nice to her in the years that I had known her. I had to continuously remind myself that God in the flesh was reviled by the world and had done nothing, and yet, He didn’t open His mouth or retaliate once (Isaiah 53:7).
The end of the two weeks came, and no paperwork was filed. He had stopped staying at his parents’ house. We laughed and cried and talked into the early morning hours. His communication with her slowed and then became virtually nonexistent. I thought that the worst was over, that we just might have made it through the fire, for better or for worse. He had not yet apologized or asked for forgiveness from me, but I could see traces of his true personality coming back. God indeed had intervened; He had prevented the progression of the worst at this point. It was nothing short of a miracle. But unbeknownst to me, the Lord was still preparing me for the repercussions of this trial.
I will stop here to remind you that this post is not a recipe for divorce prevention. I dare not tell you that following these same steps will stop the end of your marriage. I am confident, however, that faithfulness to following God’s will and Word always brings about the results that are for our good and His glory in some way, even if we can’t see it immediately. I am still married, and God is good. I feel the ripple effects of these events every single week in some form or fashion, but God is still good. Even if my marriage had ended and I was completely alone, God would still be good. He is good—always. And His goodness was about to be revealed to me in new ways—even in the amplified heartache that was still to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment