For those of you who have read all my past blogs, I know this is the particular blog you’ve been waiting for; to tie all the others together and make sense of what I’ve been saying. To be honest, I have had a good bit of this typed for weeks now, but it has taken a lot from me mentally and emotionally to finish writing this one. On top of that, there have been several things keeping me distracted— some of which were some car troubles that I’m trying to get fixed. That has been “fun” to deal with, but despite that, I am determined to finish writing! I do want to give you a heads up before you continue reading… this is going to be very deep and lengthy as I plan on sharing my story, followed by my encouragement to you from the title I have chosen to give this blog.
So, with that being said, let’s dive right in.
Back when I began my blog in 2018 I made the choice to not go into detail regarding certain matters that pushed me to begin writing in the first place. There were things going on in my life at the time that I could not necessarily share with others, mainly because it was not just my story to tell. All I knew was that I was hurting and felt very lonely, and I didn’t want anyone else to ever feel that kind of pain and have to carry it alone. So I began writing. Not about “It” necessarily, but about what I was feeling and thinking and learning as I was going through “It”. I found that sometimes people just need to know that they’re not alone. The more I sought the good in my situation to encourage others, the more I actually believed the good in my situation. And the more I believed the good, the more I saw just how present God was and is in my life through it. This blog, my readers and supporters, my pain, my story, all of it put me on a path of discovering what it means to truly have a relationship with my Creator. So that’s where I am now; a broken and very weak woman in complete awe of how good and faithful her God is. And after much patience and prayer, I decided it was time to share those parts of my story and testimony that led me to this place.
As a young girl, the thought of your future wedding and marriage is often a magical and beautiful thing. I know for me personally, it was always something I was eagerly looking forward to in my life. From a young age, I had almost every detail of my wedding planned except for the most important one… who I would marry. I knew where I wanted to get married. I knew what kind of decorations I would make for the reception. I knew the kind of colors I wanted. I knew the kind of altering I would have done to my mother’s wedding dress. And for many years of my life, I looked forward to that special day as most young girls do… But nowhere in my plans was I prepared for the years that followed that special day.
It’s fitting for me to be publishing this blog in August, because exactly 4 years ago is when it all began. August 8, 2017 was the day we got married. Everyone I loved dearly was there— my family and friends. So many of them stepped in to help make everything perfect despite the weather. After the alterations, mom’s dress fit like a glove, and it was more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. All my little beach decorations and light blue accents came together perfectly as I had planned. I had my childhood bestie standing right there with me as my Maid of Honor, and I deeply loved the man that I walked down the aisle to. It was everything I had wanted, and as I sit here and reflect on it, it is a day that brings me both joy and sorrow.
July 2018 the first big challenges started to arise. I was still lacking in knowing my value and where my true identity was found at that point in my life, so I easily believed everything that was said to me and about me. I was in desperate need of spiritual growth and my marriage was becoming an unhealthy distraction from that— it was becoming an idol. I determined my own value by how “good” of a wife I could be as things started to become more and more difficult in marriage. (As I tried to understand my husband and what I needed to do, that was when I wrote this blog “Love them, Don’t Fix Them”.) But as I felt like I was failing to be everything that I needed to be in order to rescue us from the brokenness, I started to forget my value completely… I started to forget who I am. And as I grasped around for hope and comfort, I realized other people could be feeling how I was during that time. So I started writing my blogs that year, and they became an outlet of hope for not just others, but for myself as well.
June 2019 was the month I heard these words— “I’m going away for a while. We need time apart to determine if this is right.” In that one sentence, everything I thought I had planned and the life I had started to build all seemed to come crashing down; As if the past 4 years of effort, in a relationship, not just marriage, to get to that point had been for nothing. (That is when I wrote this blog “Take the Next Step”.) The long nearly 8 months of separation that followed almost destroyed me emotionally; I was in a very dark place. My body physically encountered many losses, one of which I chose to carry on my own emotionally. I was still in school trying to finish strong and get my marketing degree, but also having to pick up extra hours at work and push my brand’s business to afford bills by myself. All things I never expected to go through as a 21-year-old. This wasn’t the life I had planned…I was keeping my friends and family at a distance because I didn’t want to talk about it or answer questions that I didn’t even have answers to. I also didn’t want them to see me hurting the way I was.
January 2020 there seemed to be a small light breaking through the darkness when he decided to come home. I was under the impression that we would be fighting through the brokenness together this time. It was everything I was hoping for; two broken people coming together before God to work on a broken marriage that only He could save. I saw glimpses of hope that my waiting was not in vain, and my prayers were about to be answered; that I’d have this amazing marriage testimony to share with my friends, family, and blog readers.
February 2020… not but one month later. Our scheduled counseling was just one week away. Looking back, I can honestly say that, that month was the darkest and lowest point of my story. COVID had just caused complete isolation, so loneliness took on a whole new meaning. I can still hear those unexpected words in my head… “We don’t have the same beliefs anymore. This isn’t going to work. I want a divorce.” (That is when I wrote this one “Not Over Yet”.)
Growing up in a Christian household and going to church, you only ever really hear that the “D” word is bad. God doesn’t like divorce, so when I got to this point in my life realizing how real that word could possibly be for me, I had no idea what God wanted from me. So for the months that followed, I tried doing things and guessing if this was what He was asking of me. I tried to fix and redeem something that was completely out of my control, and in the process, I nearly lost myself AGAIN. It was an exhausting cycle of begging and pleading, having him come and go, and finding out things the hard way about another person involved. I was mentally, emotionally, and physically sick. My feelings and emotions were constantly overpowering the truth I knew deep in my heart. The number of lies that I let in overtook me. I felt my other relationships start to slip again. The advice was being given to me from every angle. Some people were frustrated that I continued to allow myself to be wounded. I was frustrated with myself. I was lost in a sea of confusion, heartbreak, and betrayal, while still assuming my role as a wife in every way that I could. And I lived in that confusion for nearly 15 more months… And for 15 months, my blog was silent.
April 2021. I knew I needed to do something healthy for myself, so I took Easter weekend to go visit my family. That Sunday, my life changed. You see I had been engulfed in a cloud of smoke. I couldn’t see clearly and I couldn’t breathe or think clearly because of it. God broke through the smoke that was surrounding me and pulled me out of that dark place that I had been in for so long. In that sermon I heard “Sometimes as believers we classify ‘sacrifice’ as the same thing as ‘surrender’. We think that when we sacrifice certain things and areas of our life, that we have fully surrendered our life to Him. But that’s not the case. Surrendering your life to Him means everything in your life gets laid down at His feet. Even the things we want to keep grasping on to.”
For so long I kept my marriage, my husband, and my future grasped in the palm of my hand. I held my hand out several times to give it over to Him, but I never seemed to actually let go. Until that weekend… after I got back home, I knew for sure what God wanted from me (1 Corinthians 7:15). It wasn’t easy, and in some ways, it was more painful than anything else I had yet experienced. Because I loved my husband, and I loved God. And what He was asking me to do didn’t seem like love at the time. But I had to realize that God has a purpose far greater than I could have imagined for allowing this to happen, and I had to fully trust Him with that.
I will honestly say to anyone that asks, that it takes two people to make a marriage work, but it also takes two for it to be broken. There is no blame game in something like this. I am a human and I carried my faults and weaknesses into my relationship as my human spouse also did. I idolized my spouse and my marriage and put them both before God. The value I saw in myself was dependent on the situation and how I was viewed by my spouse and others. Of course, I look back and wonder how I could’ve done any of it differently. I look back at my lack of faith at the time, and wish I could have only been stronger; that I could have been a better example as a believer to my spouse. When it’s all said and done, these are 7 years of my life that I won’t be able to get back or do over. But I hope you can hear me when I say this— without those 7 years and what I experienced, I would not know the beauty of Grace in my life. I would not have the relationship that I now have with my Heavenly Father. (“Mistaken Grace”.)
After I fully surrendered my marriage and my future to God despite my plans and the outcomes I was wanting, I found myself in a season of waiting. So that’s my story so far. And that’s where I’ve been for almost 4 months now. I’ve been waiting.
This is where my hope and encouragement for you comes into the picture— you know somewhere in each of our lives after we go through a traumatic experience or some sort of big life change, we find ourselves in a season of waiting. And as human beings, we don’t like to wait. In fact, one of our greatest enemies in life is our inability to wait. Waiting is difficult when we’re constantly looking ahead to the next thing. I catch myself skipping ahead to where I might be in the future after the divorce. Sometimes so much so, that I tend to miss some of the things God is doing right here, right now inside of me, during this season of waiting.
Maybe that’s you right now. Maybe you’re coming to the end of a chapter in your life, and you’re wondering and growing anxiety over what comes next. There are 3 things I’m learning and want to encourage you with during this season.
1.) There is a temptation in the waiting. Since waiting is something that we’re not good at, there are often times many temptations that come our way. One really big one is the temptation to walk away from the belief in a loving and working God in our life. In the waiting, we can start to doubt that He is working or that He even exists because we don’t see Him doing things around us, externally. We can get so focused on what we want the outcome to be, that when the outcome has not happened yet or does not happen the way we want it to, we think that means He’s not working. There’s also temptation in the flesh because when we think that God has abandoned us, we can turn to sin for that comfort. Be on guard in the waiting, because your heart is very vulnerable and will find ways to express that. We look for external evidence of God in the waiting.
2.) Don’t act in revenge in the waiting. This kind of ties into one of the temptations you’ll face. Bitterness became so real for me in the waiting. There were many times I found out information and could’ve acted out of that bitterness in revenge, and was very tempted to. But God in His grace and mercy for me reminds me that bitterness is a foul root in the heart. That acting out of that root, would in turn cause more damage. If you search your heart and mind in the waiting, you’ll often find that you are not pleased with where you are at. Whether it’s financially, physically, emotionally, mentally, or even spiritually. And very quickly we can attach another person as the ‘why’ behind not being where we should be. We look for external evidence of God in the waiting.
3.) Try not to strategize your own fix in the waiting. We love being in control of our lives. And when we are in the waiting, those tend to be the times in our life where we lack any control of the situation. When we try to fix it ourselves and force the outcome we want, we don’t run to God as we should. We don’t fall down at the feet of the only One in control. You see, it’s hard to go to God when you already “know” what needs to be done. We look for external evidence of God in the waiting
Can I tell you something pretty powerful?… The evidence of that loving and working God in your life is not going to be found in the external things and outcomes happening around you. It’s not going to be found in my marriage being saved. It’s not going to be found in the sickness being cured. It’s not going to be found in the job promotion, or in the lost daughter returning home, or in the addict becoming sober or giving up the pills. The evidence of a God who loves you and works in your life is found inside of you! Because in the waiting, He is working in your heart and mind in ways that you cannot even imagine. He is doing something inside of you and setting the stage for something far greater than you even know.
400 years. There is a blank page between the old and new testament in the bible. That blank page represents 400 years of silence from God. His people didn’t hear from Him as they were hoping to. They didn’t see Him working around them externally. They were in the waiting for 400 years. And with one turn of the page, we open to the new testament— to the story of the Gospel of Christ. And you see that in that waiting, God was working and setting the stage for the greatest gift and outcome.
Pay attention to what He’s doing in you in the waiting. And you’ll discover as I have, how good our Father is.
I love you all dearly and I’m so thankful for the support and love y’all have shown me through the years.
