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Forgiveness
The first years of our marriage were very difficult. My wife supported us while I worked at home trying to start a new business. For three years I did not make a penny and she was the bread winner in our family. But she resented that I did not work and so she really did not like me. She found fault with everything I did – so it seemed. I remember my self-esteem was so low after working at home for three years and with no interaction with the outside world … I remember I could not even carry on a meaningful conversation with other men at church.
My wife is a social light. She loves to go to parties and go to church social events. I remember those early years, at Christmas time, our calendar was full. We must have had an event to go to every night for two solid weeks before Christmas.
It seemed each time we attended an event my wife would receive undivided attention from all the attractive husbands. And she loved the attention. She ate it up. On more than one occasion I noticed she never even talked to me during the event.
I remember sitting beside her at a dinner while she talked all night with the good looking man across from her and with another to the left of her. Not once did she pause to talk to me.
I became jealous and would confront her after the events. She would become very defensive and become angry with me for being jealous. I would cry and try and talk to her, sometimes all night; and she would fall asleep and wake occasionally to console me. She would wake up enough that it would ruin her sleep.
After those first three years of our marriage I began making money. The work at home began to pay off as my earnings increased to over $300,000.00 per year. With the success, my self-esteem increased. I began to realize my wife was not capable of taking criticism from me or feeling much compassion for me because of her own lack of self-esteem. I also realized that it is very normal for women to enjoy the attention of other men – even if the man is the Pastor or the music director or the small group bible study leader or the husband of one of her best friends.
I began to reach out to her and build her up and encourage her. I became less and less jealous of her. I used to watch her eyes when we went shopping to notice if she was looking at other men. I stopped doing this and decided it was fine if her eyes wandered. After all, I reasoned that this was a way she built her self-esteem; by noticing that men noticed her.
But we still had sore spots. Both of us had areas of pain. These areas would surface at times and cause arguments between us. I finally realized that we both needed to sit down and write down all things we disliked about each other. We each wrote down all the things we held against each other and all the things we wished the other would change. Then we took each others list, and we sat down and each asked each other for forgiveness for each thing that we had down to hurt the other. And we went over the wish list that each of us had for the other and we either committed to change or compromised to expect less of each other. After a few years of working at forgiving each other and trying to be the best we could be for each other, we began to fall deeper and deeper in love with each other. Of course, not having to struggle financially also helped our relationship.
Because we were willing to forgive each other, now we are very happy. Now, I rarely get jealous when my wife gets attention from other men, because I know the attention is good for her – it builds her self-esteem. And when she is happy, I am happy. In the end I know that no matter how much attention she gets from the husbands of our friends at church, she is mine and she will always be mine. I am secure in her love and she is secure in my love.
It was our strong belief in God and the prompting by the Holy Spirit to never give up and continue to do things God's way, that helped us through those hard times.
And we both were committed to staying married. If either of us had been a bad apple and secretly in our heart wanted out of the marriage – we would have found a way out and we would have divorced.
I'm convinced that divorces occur for only one reason. That reason is that one or both of the persons in the marriage was never committed to their spouse in the first place. Instead they are committed to their spouse as long as it is convenient. Because if they were committed to their spouse, they would have stayed with their spouse and never given up.
I believe divorce happens like this. At some point one spouse decides their spouse is not worthy of them. They decide they got a raw deal or a bad deal. And so they want out of the marriage and after that the other spouse can not do anything right, because their spouse is just looking for an excuse to leave. Once the spouse crosses that line and wants out of the marriage there is not much hope left for the marriage.
And so if a married couple is separated or thinking of divorce, the solution that will bring them back together is simple. The one spouse who wants out of the marriage needs to obey God and change their mind and decide they are going to do things God's way and stay married. And then if they each will forgive each other, and if they both are committed to being the best they can be for each other - God will heal their marriage.
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