Pain...

Pain, pain, please go away and don't come back another day.  

I seriously desire for the knife in my back to go away.  And yet, I wonder at times if that pain in my back is the real reason that he finally left me.  And yet I know that the pain and brokenness that I suffer is not the reason that he finally left.  In the end it was my unwillingness to compromise my sexuality within my relationship with God.  Now for those of you who don't do well with fifty dollar words, I objected to bringing another person into our relationship.  In this world of friends with benefits... my desire to only be with my husband in our bedroom must seem like a blast from the past.

You see...  I view marriage as a sacred bond between partners.  And while I have made my share of mistakes, I eventually reached a point in my life and marriage where the pushing for more was something that I just couldn't give into.  As I sit here in physical pain...  I am recalling the emotional pain that I have survived within my marriage.

To give you a brief idea...  I have no idea what sex really is.  I do know what it is like to spend hours focusing on my husbands needs.  I know what it is like to have reached a point where the physical pain in your jaw makes you want to cry, but you have yet to fulfill your husbands needs.  I know what it is like to listen to your husband spew the equivalent of acid in order to help himself fulfill his needs.  I could go into graphic details, but we all are flooded with way too much details in our day to day life.  And honestly the details are not important. 

It began with a single step out of my comfort zone.  Then another, and another.  Each time I let him convince me that the connection between us needed this next step.  And without any boundaries and limits that were talked about, it slowly became anything he wanted to do... I did.  I will admit that the advice my own mother gave me the night before my wedding...  only helped to set the stage for his desires.  Yet, as I desired to please him more and more...  I lost my voice.  

And with my silence...  I became sick.  In no way am I saying that their is a correlation between the two.  Yet, my silence had me living in pain and more pain until I reached a point that I couldn't walk... and while I have been rebuilt, sometimes the pain overtakes me and I can't sleep...

All I desire is sleep...  To be able to close my eyes and lay down...  For the pain to go away...

Tick Tock...

A year ago we were facing homelessness...  I didn't have a clue where we would live.  My husband had filed for divorce.  I couldn't bear to live in the home we had purchased together, let alone afford to live in it.  And to add the icing to the challenge, my mother had died and I we could no longer continue to live with her in her house.  

I was numb.  I knew that we needed to find a place to live, and yet couldn't begin to start the process to even begin to find a place to live.  And at the same time I was facing the fact that my divorce process had just started moving forward.

Somehow, I began to find the ability to find a place to live.  And then attempt to move out of my mother's house, trying to sort thru what we needed verses what we just had to let go.  In that process we had to let a lot of things go.  We had already let go of the house.  I signed it over to my husband in order to be able to have a place for us to live.  And in that process... oh so much was left behind.

And yet, that is not the reason of this post.  This post is about the beginning to move forward.  I have reached a point where in just over a month I will be divorced.  And we have come a long way from facing homelessness to actually looking for a house.  

All my life I have wanted a place to call home.  Now, years after praying to God to give me a home... that possibility is within my grasp.  I am in shock!

For once in my life I am beginning to feel that out of the ashes, God just might give me something that I have desired for so long...  a place to call home forever!

Fear...

Fear can take over my life rather quickly.  And this past week it has.  You see, I met with my pastor and we talked.  Now to most people that would be a good thing.  To me it is a double edged sword.  One that I needed, but was not ready to face.  Hence the fear.

You see, I understand love when it comes to me loving others.  But to hear the words God loves, well that is enough to send me packing and looking for where I can run away to.  I can handle love, when I am helping others.  I can handle love when I am on my knees.  Hell, I can even handle love when my own life is in danger.  But in all of these cases I am loving someone else.  

I loved my mother, but struggle to even understand why at the very end of her life she told me that she loved me.  I can remember the fear that I had for so much of my life trying to make up for a mistake that I am not sure even now how I could fix.  How do you fix the fact that your own mother regretted that you were born?  I did my best to be the perfect daughter for her.  And yet I always lived in fear that what I did was never going to be enough.  I couldn't maintain a household the way she wanted.  I couldn't clean or do any of my jobs to the level that she desired.  I never could be smart enough or have good enough grades.  And at one point I can remember that she had me tested in school to join a fast track.  So, I took the test to quantify my intelligence.  As my luck would have it when the results came back I had scored one point below the score required to move into the gifted classes.  Yet, the score showed that I was extremely intelligent.  Here I had tested at the level of a genius, and yet was stupid and a failure all because of one point.  Down the road I would take the test again in high school, but I never heard what those results were.  I just was not what my mother had wanted.  

In school, I struggled through.  I only was able to maintain a B average.  And at times I was taking classes below my own level.  Math was like a foreign language to me.  And while I could trudge through it, I never found it to be easy.  I dabbled in languages trying Spanish, French, German, and even Latin.  And in English, I avoided a great deal of the books that we were required to read.  And yet I was always reading.  But then who really wanted to read Lord of the Flies?  My brain could absorb random facts, but even in History and Science the simple memorizing of facts left me feeling pulled under.  The funny was that in 10th grade biology I did a report on mitochondrial DNA, which my own teacher said did not exist.  And reading Shakespeare was easier than understanding Moby Dick.  All this time in my life...  I feared that I wasn't doing enough.  I couldn't keep my room perfect.  I couldn't be first at all that I did.  And I barely had any friends.  And the friends I had were just the kind that a mother wouldn't want.  They introduced me to smoking, and some eventually to drinking.  I feared getting caught, but the calm that smoking gave me was worth the fear.  

I moved on with my fears in life to add not having picked the correct major in college...  not having good enough grades...  not working enough hours to help support my family...  The list that I feel is branded into my very skin grew longer and longer.  Each day adding more and more failures, which in our world were sins.  And the daily repentance that I needed to do before God became a weight that I still feel is dragging me under.

Yet, within all of those fears... one fear existed that dwarfed the rest.  The fear of secrets being revealed.  You see, we didn't talk about things unless they were being used to help someone else.  So, when my mother learned what had happened to me as a child... we could talk about it, if we were going to press charges to help my aunt and cousins out.  The minute that I said no...  we never spoke of that past again.  Though we often spoke of my burden to save my cousins from their own choices as they grew up.  I was required to reach out and help them... to save them.  And that added to another of my failures. 

But the fear of the darkness escaping and secrets being known...  that is enough to still want to send me packing and find a place on this earth where I can hide even from God.  Yet, God never leaves us or forsakes us.  So, where can I hide?  And where was He in all that darkness?  I wish I had answers for those questions... but I don't right now.  What I do know is that in talking to my pastor the darkness escapes.  With that the emotions come... and the fear inside of me grows.  Those nights when I prayed to God to disappear and still was found on the bed are shared with this human being.  And I am breaking the biggest rule in our family...  Nothing is spoken of outside of the family.  But then nothing is spoken of within the family.  These have been moments of darkness that I have been carrying by myself for years.  I learned how to package them neatly in nice little boxes with all the feelings and memories... and built inside of me a vault to hold all of these boxes.  

In these past few years... those boxes have been shaken up inside the vault.  And the darkness began to find a way to reveal itself.  My desire for death became visible.  And the panic that I live with began to show itself even in church.  And in my fear of death, I began to talk.  And that would be why I met with my pastor this past week.  And while I could tell you all the details which would take a whole additional post...  I will leave you with this.  He and I talked until we reached a point where He said that God always provides a way to escape the action.  And that has brought me a new level of fear.  If I could have escaped, what did I do wrong that I didn't.  What moment did I miss that would have allowed me to escape the darkness?  This has been added to my already ongoing conversation inside of me of what did I do to deserve the punishment that I was given.  And when the two conversations are going full force...  I find that fear is my constant companion.  It is not something that I want.  And maybe in the near future I will be able to let fear leave my side.  But for right now... fear is on the double edged sword that I face in talking to my pastor.  The good of talking is that for a short period of time my mind is quiet... but the bad is fear.

Till Death Do Us Part... NOT!!!

I can remember the magic of my wedding.  I can remember the fact that we took vows, till death do us part.  And when I walked out the door of the church into the rain storm that had come, thinking of the blessing that God was giving to our union, I would have never thought that death might be possible before old age.

You see, I took the vows before God very seriously.  I had my priorities in order.  We were married, we would own a house, and then we would have children.  Yet, despite all of my order in my life, I found that things were not in order.  

Within weeks of our wedding, my husband began to have panic attacks.  These panic attacks drove us into a level of isolation.  And yet, I was the perfect wife...  I never once complained.  I took over all the things we use to do together.  It was me working, and then heading to the store to shop for groceries.  In time the isolation grew and I found that our friends were only occasionally calling and I couldn't remember the last time I saw them.  

We made the choice after some time to live with my parents.  My father was sick, and my mother needed the help with him.  While we had moved much closer to our friends, we still rarely saw them.  And with the demands of my mother, I found that I lost even more friends.  I am still not quite sure how, but in a short period of time I had no friends of my own...  every friend that was left was my husband's.  

We did start looking for our house and property with my parents.  The plan and order was that we would live in the house on the property and they would live with us until they built a house of their own.  In keeping with the plan, we found the house and property, but we signed the deed just shy of two months after my father died.  And my mother didn't want to follow with us.  So, we now owned the house and found a greater level of isolation.  We didn't know a soul where we had moved.

In this new level of isolation, I began to be challenged as a wife.  

First it was the fact that he desired his friend to come live with us.  So, in my desire to please my husband I gave in despite the complaints from my own mother and brother.  Then it was the fact that I became sick and spent three months in the hospital.  While I was in the hospital, my husband stayed in a hotel.  And spent more time away from me than with me.  And yet, in the end we both came home.

Once we came home things began to change.  I found that his needs began to change.  He desired to bring others into our marriage.  And to me the four walls of the room we called home were something that I considered holy.  A space that was just for the two of us and God.  And yet, here I was as a wife trying to fathom bringing another soul into our bedroom.  Still every night that I gave into his needs, I listened to him dream about who we might bring thru that door into the space God had created for us.

Years went by with my living with his dreams.  And each time I found it harder and harder to focus on his needs.  This continued until one evening when I refused to meet his needs.  While my reasons for refusing are not a topic for this post... it did create an argument.  And that evening I was left black and blue, but I also had to face down my husband with a gun in his hand.  While he loaded it and chambered a bullet, I was looking down the barrel.  He meant to kill me.  I am still not sure why, but at the last minute the bullet did not pass thru my head.  Instead it went thru the wall of our bedroom.  This was followed by listening to my husband say that he should just kill me, followed by his desire to kill himself.

In the next few hours, I entered into a night mare of police, attorneys, and working to get my husband the help that he needed.  My husband was committed to a psychiatric hospital for five days.  When I finally went to visit him to discuss his return to our home, I was meet by him pounding his cane on the table.  Demanding of me to go to the court and make the charges he was facing go away.  If it had not been for a suggestion of the staff, he would have come home then.  So, I then entered a new arena of court in getting an order of protection that made my husband homeless so that he could get the help that he needed.  

Because of my faith, I worked with my husband to lessen the demands of the charges.  Community service, counseling, marital counseling, and the other demands of being on probation.  In time I started to see the man I married again.  And just as we were starting marital counseling, the push on his part to move home began.  And by Thanksgiving I had given in, but in the next few weeks his moving in for good began to sit with me wrong.  Lots of things were said that could probably become their own blog posts... but I spent the time we were together and when he had needs... running to the bathroom after trying my best not to vomit.  I wish that I could say that I was pregnant, but I wasn't.  I was so disgusted with the words that had come into my mind.

Christmas came and went... and then he once again threatened to take my life again...  Finally two days before the new year I walked out the door.  And then began to rustle with the fact that I would not be married until my natural death...  An idea that became a fact on Valentine's Day when I was sued for divorce.  Which began my new struggle with what divorce meant for me and my faith.  Divorce was a word that we were never to use...  and yet here I was staring at the paperwork.

That day was just over three years ago...  In that time I have learned that my husband abandoned and broke the covenant that we had we with God long before that day when I was served with papers to end our marriage.  I struggle with what life is going to look like as the reality of the divorce becoming final is fast approaching.  I never expected to face life as a single mother.  In the midst of all this change I am learning more about my faith than I thought I could learn.  I am beginning to understand God's love, even if I can't understand what love is right now.  I am finding that abuse is a reason to be allowed out of the covenant.  I just am not sure how to tell you all what I am learning... but maybe that will come in time...

The one thing that I can tell you is that I am alive... and I am not living with my husband.  He is currently sitting in jail for the harm that he brought to my life.  And that despite all this and my commitment to him till death...  I do NOT have to stay married until he takes my life from me...  That is a choice that only my God can make.

Worth?

What are we worth?  And what does worth even mean?  I am struggling with this all inside of my mind... so what do I do... Look up the definition of worth...

The quality that renders something desirable, useful, or valuable (From the thefreedictionary.com)

So what is the quality that renders me desirable?  

This has been an ongoing question in my mind lately.  And honestly my answer is the only thing that renders me desirable is my faith.  Without my faith, I am not sure of what I would be.  I can see so much wrong that I have been a part of in my life...  I am constantly reminded of each and every one of these choices that created pain in my life.  And many times, I have had no say in those choices.  Most people think that it is a person who chooses to bring harm and sin into their life, and yet in so many places and instances it is an outside force that bring them harm...

In my life that first harm came to me in the dark of night...  Asleep in my bed, awoken by someone who should have cherished me as a child, made the choice to teach me about a world of adults.  It was at the age of 5, when I thought that I could do anything that I learned harm.  Like so many others... I thought it made me special... chosen.  Not that I could understand that what was happening was wrong.  To me, those  moments on fleeting nights I believed gave me worth.  They made me feel like a princess, and yet I was not allowed to share what exactly gave me my worth.  Though that idea began to crumble when I was a freshman in high school...  That was when I learned that I was not alone in being special.  And yet many years later, I faced the fact that it is believed that I only got what I was asking for.  Yet, how did I ask for this introduction at the age of 5?

When I found out that I wasn't alone in being chosen to be added to a marriage... I lost my sense of worth.  And yet I knew that I was suppose to protect myself for marriage...  but I had already been married... and discarded.  What worth would I have to anyone in the future?  

As of late... many years later... facing a failing marriage again... these questions are being raised.  And yet, I can begin to understand that at age 5 I didn't make a choice for harm.  That choice was made by others around me.  And yet I prayed to God to make me invisible...  to keep me safe from that harm.  And each time, though I felt special, I also felt dirty and used.  

I may not have explained my worth to you as of yet...  but I hope I have given you an example of something that no one could ask for as a child...

One year...

A year ago at this point in time, I was facing the loss of one of the most important people in my life.  

My own mother...

And to most of us that would create a feeling of sadness and loss.  

Yet, her loss in my life also created for me a new sense of freedom.

Honestly to this day I love my mother.  I have striven to always honor and obey her.  Sadly my failures in being human and prone to making mistakes did not always create the best relationship with my own mother.  She was the type of person who liked everything in a very neat orderly manner...  and in my world it was just a little too neat and orderly.  I could never understand how moving the garbage can a millimeter was such a matter of life and death.  Yet, in my mother's world it was just that.  And since it was such a big deal to her, it also became a big deal in my life of mistakes that I was lectured about... punished over... and eventually started to just understand that I would never be perfect enough to be the daughter that my mother needed, and at times I would wonder if she was even happy with the very fact that I was born.

This desire to be perfect for my mother was not an idea that came to my mind in an instant, but one that would be created over years.  And it is only now that I have come to understand that it was not just an issue of how my mother communicated to me, but also an issue of how I understood what she was trying to communicate.  I spent years lost in trying to understand how to prove to my mother that I really loved her...

It was only in the last few years before I lost my mother that I began to understand that she had spent so many years trying to communicate to me that she did love me...  I just didn't hear the message.  All I ever seemed to hear was how much I fell short of the mark that I thought was set for me.... Perfection!  

In the days right before my mother died...  she said three little words that I still hear in my mind.  Years I longed to hear these words...  To know that I was the daughter that she wanted...  To know that I had shown her that I loved her...  And in the end... her last words to me meant more to me than all the fighting and miscommunication over the years...

Her last words to me were...  I love you!  

And right now... though I struggle with her loss.  I struggle with the changes of being an orphan...  at least I know that somewhere deep inside of my mother...  

She loved me despite my lack of understanding and perfection.  And maybe for now that is enough!

Storms...

I have spent a great deal of time as of late reading about leaving...  And the one thing I wish I could leave behind is the storms of emotions.  And yet, how do you leave behind something that has become such a part of your life.  If I hadn't spent so much of my life learning how to function with simply figuring out how to bury the emotions... leaving them might be easy.

Here is a simple case in my life of not dealing...  About a month ago, I wound up in the hospital.  And while to most people going to the hospital might be a simple act of having a spouse watch the children... in my life it is not that easy.  And I honestly wish that I could say that I wound up in the hospital just because I had an infection.  That wasn't the case.  

I wound up in the hospital because of the new medication the doctor tried wasn't covered by the insurance.  And in my attempts to deal with this... I went off of the medication.  Well, without the medication the hold I have on living life just began to slip away.  And in, what I can only call a God moment, I wound up in the driveway of my pastor and melted down.  Did I meltdown because I lacked faith... No.  But I did meltdown.

Thankfully in my life my pastor is one of the few people I completely trust.  And he understood what was happening to me, when I couldn't even open my mouth and talk to him.  When I lacked the words, he was granted the wisdom to know what needed to be done.  Which of course included needing to find someone to take care of my daughter... while I went to the hospital.

Once I was in the hospital... and the choice was made to keep me.  I began to be able to talk.  It is not easy to know that you are going to be sent to a locked ward, with the understanding that nothing is there that you can harm yourself with.  That once again the mental struggles that you face have demanded that you be in a space where you have the simple choice of life or death removed from your control.  And yet, once that choice is removed... it makes it easier to start to talk and figure out what to do next.

In my case that was simply to be put on a new medication.  One that the hospital fought to get covered by my insurance.  And my church helped me cover the cost for the week that it took to get it covered.  And yet that new medication has brought me to a new awakening.  It was like I was sleeping for so many years...  And it brought me a time of encouragement from the staff at the hospital.  In the past I would have given into the insane need to cut and attempt to stop the pain in my life in so many ways... this time...  I melted down and was able to get help before I walked too far along the path into the need to cut.

Well... Here is the reason for all this history.  The day I got out of the hospital I was given a lecture by a friend.  This friend meant well, but didn't use the best words for how I look at the world.  And that day... I just bite my tongue and didn't say a word to anyone...

Fast forward to this past week... And all the thing that my friend said turned into another meltdown.  The storm of emotions that I refused to face that day when she spoke... came flooding back to me like a class 5 tornado.  And in my attempt to deal with them... I left the trail of destruction like the tornado inside of me. Her disappointment in me and her insistence that our pastor was too nice to say things... now had me convinced that he believed that I was an unfit mother.  To add to the destruction, it also included his wife and the fact that they were telling people things about me behind my back.  And that list could go on, but I think you get the point.  

So, the fall out of this tornado should have been in my mind being thrown out of church... never allowed to talk to my pastor again... and a whole list of other punishments that my mind was quickly coming up with.  And when I found silence... That list grew.  And the tornado inside of me grew.  

Once I finally had allowed the tornado of emotions inside of me to do the destruction and they had begun to calm down...  A simple phone call from my pastor showed me that I needed to seek the truth... And the truth was that if he was thinking anything like I thought he was... He would have talked to me.  And the other lesson that I learned was to explain when asked that the emotions from a month ago had caught up to me.  And while to the rest of the world it was far from urgent... to me it was the most urgent thing in my world.

But as far as leaving behind the storms of emotions... I don't think that is possible.  I am beginning to understand that despite the cost to me currently that I need to walk thru these emotions...  I need to face them and feel them.  And at the same time I need to practice how to simply be in the presence of God.  To know that in time I will be able to sit in front of a candle and simply focus on God... knowing that the emotions exist, but that I can be calm and present with God.  A simple idea, but a challenge that I have to keep sitting down and working towards.  Because after so many years of living life numb... I can feel.  And if the price of feeling and being able to focus on God at some point is walking thru these storms...  The sign me up!  Anything has got to be better than hating myself and loving God... and always wanting to love others better than I love myself.

Detours...

I seem to have been on a great many detours as of late.  Some of them are to be expected... the divorce process has hit a standstill.  It is surprising that a divorce process can be stalled by my mother-in-law.  She needed to step back to access her health to see if she could handle the divorce process continuing.  No warning, no explanation, just a e-mail to stop the entire process.  And the repercussions include my panic on why does my husband still care for me, and what does our continued marriage mean for me.

Thus began the detour.  A detour that made me feel like I was flushed away, and then found a whole new world.  You know the movie, "Flushed Away".  I had never seen it until after I made the choice to walk out of the house.  Needless to say that once the movie had been watch by my daughter...  It has become one of her most watched movies.  Well the premise of the movie is this house mouse, gets flushed down the drain.  And of course the mouse thinks that he is being flushed to his death.  But much to his surprise there is a whole world that exists in the sewer system.  A world that if he asks can help him get home, but also has a great many perils.  

I seem to be on a detour into a new world, different from the one found when the mouse went down the sewer, but still full of help and peril.  My issue has been learning who is safe to reach out to for help, and who will add to the perils I already face.  With the divorce, it has felt like I have been flushed away.  And for a long time, I thought it was to a death.  A death of committing myself to being completely alone for the rest of my life.  My only contact with the world would be thru my daughter.  And though I felt that I was being sent to my death... I would willingly submit to anything if it meant that my daughter was safe and could grow up to love God.

During this trip towards my death within my marriage... something has changed.  I no longer feel that, if my husband were to show up on my doorstep, that I would need to just submit to his desires.  Still being married to him has been a constant struggle in thought.  Thoughts that included questioning not just our civil marriage, but also our marriage in the eyes of God.  It has been more of a struggle to understand how God sought me to move forward.  And maybe that is where I am discovering that in this moment of drowning in the flushing... I have landed in a better place.

In the past few weeks, with many detours that are topics for later, I have come to the realization that even though I stood before God with the man who would become my husband...  that the covenant before God came with promises and conditions.  Promises that we would cherish each other and only be with each other.  This part of the covenant I understood and took to heart.  It was the conditions that I didn't know existed...  and those conditions only became real when I finally stopped to look around in the new world that I had landed in.

Those conditions include a built in escape plan.  An escape plan that is designed to save those who honor the promises that they have made before God.  In my design to honor God, by submitting to my husband, I did everything he asked me to do.  As our marriage continued, the things that he asked of me grew more diverse and to me often disgusting.  The part that bothered me the most in the early days, was his desire to bring a third into our marriage.  Having been that third, it was something that I agreed to with great hesitation, but never approved someone to be that third.  When it became unbearable was when the focus for a third shifted from seeking out someone to train the very person that I loved more than myself... my daughter.

Now here is where the escape plan God created comes into play.  His desires to hurt me with bringing in a third, along with his desires for training our daughter.  Apparently these actions, even just as thoughts he was planning, are valid reasons to be able to escape the marriage.  And right now, they are for me a great relief.  An understanding that God is going to allow me to be released from our marriage.  That if my husband shows up on my doorstep, that I never again have to give into his desires...  and that detour in learning has meant a new sense of freedom. 

Covenant of Marriage...

I have been spending the past few weeks trying to understand what is in store for me.  Each day is a struggle, because a covenant is to death.  And right now I would rather be dead than spend another day in the same house with my husband.  So, where does that leave me?

Matthew 19 : 1 - 12, talks about #divorce.  And before you start going on about that... Divorce was a word that was banned in my world.  It was understood that if you never used the word in your life, than your mind would never consider it an option within your marriage.  I always knew that marriage was work, not some wave that you are caught up in that is full of fun.  And even now I am struggling with the word.  But that struggle is for another day...

In a constant discussion that I have been having with my pastor... we have been talking about marriage.  And reasons that you might want to walk away from a marriage, but also about how to continue to honor the covenant that you made.  

"God's best is for us to marry and to discover the oneness that God intended in marriage.  But humans sin.  They do this in lots of ways.  And humans refuse to change with regard to their sin.  That is they keep doing it.  That is the hardheartedness that Jesus talks about."

This makes sense to me.  That marriage is forever and that it is what God intended for us.  Where it became hard to comprehend is when human sin comes into play.  When you add in people refusing to change...  well that stumped me.  You see in my world we are taught that we need to admit our sin and seek penance to change how we behave in the future.  This is to avoid ever repeating the sin.  We also are required to seek out the person that our sin harmed, even years later, and pray that they are willing to forgive the sin that harmed them.  And yet in Matthew, Jesus spoke of permission to divorce, because your hearts were hard.  And here I find that the discussion comes back to sin and a person's desire to not change.

"So the unrepentant attitude of a spouse allows for divorce, when that unrepentant behavior is related to the marriage: 'for sexual immorality'."

And yes it is saying that if the behavior is related to the marriage that divorce is possible.  Not exactly the idea that I grew up hearing.  And currently has me in a tail spin.  You see, I love my husband.  And I never want to live with him again.  How do you love someone and walk away?  How do you walk away and honor God?  That answer seems to be covered in so many ways in the unrepentant behavior.  But, and yes there is always a but in my mind.  How do you know that the behavior you are seeing is "sexual immorality"?

In that question...  I was given a list.

Sexual immorality = "it may be adultery, it may be violence, it may be sexual involvement with children, adults, etc."

If you are anything like me that list will shake you up.  I always knew that if you could catch your husband in the act of committing adultery that was the only reason you could walk away.  And here is a list that is much more than catching your husband with his secretary.  The humor in me even saying that is that is how my husband came to exist.  He is the product of a office worker and the cleaner though.  

The addition to the list of violence is what took the wind out of me.  And maybe in other ways it brought me to silence.  Here we are looking at reason to end a covenant.  Reasons that I always thought were so clear cut.  I lived in a world of black and white, now to only to realize that the world is actually so many shades of grey.  The grey is creating a confusion.  And in that confusion I am struggling to take the addition of violence to the list with adultery.  I am finding that things are not so clear cut...

Sadly my confusion has raised more questions.  And I have no answers right now for myself, let alone for anyone else.  A friend of mine gave me these words...  Ask the Lord to guide.  And right now, that might be the best advice I have to share with anyone.  Seek God and maybe the grey will become clear.

A Journey...

I know that if you saw me in church, you might think that I never pay attention to a word being said.  And yet, most Sundays my mind is going so fast that I am not only hearing all that is being spoken, but I am also replaying many other things that have happened in the past week... let alone in the past years.

You see, my mind doesn't have the luxury of being able to just focus on one thing.  I would love to be able to spend a day just focused on one thought.  Yet, my mind is constantly processing at least three or four different things as well as listening.  Let me tell you, it is not fun.  I seem to take multitasking to a whole new level, which usually means I am processing so much information that nothing I do is really getting done.  Or at least it feels that way.  The funniest part of this all is people have tried to tell me that they understand...  and I am always shocked to hear that they understand the journey that I am on.  

Don't get me wrong, I know that there are people in this world who truly do understand this journey.  It is the others who attempt to understand a world that they can't imagine that make me sometimes just want to double over and laugh.  These are the same people who feel that I am personally attacking them when I get protective of my daughter.  You see... my journey... has a path of staring down death.  Not once, but twice.  And when you have seen death pass you by, it has a very sobering effect on a person.  And when you add my multitasking mind...  Stand back.  

Today alone at church...  I am listening to my pastor talk about the journey that we will travel on this year to Easter.  And how we are also going to examine the journey in Exodus.  At which point my mind was also realizing that Easter is early this year, and the last time that I have a real memory of an early Easter was the year I tried to take my own life.  Followed by the fact that I was served divorce papers three years ago, and this past week my Mother In Law shut down the divorce process with regards to mediation.  And what does that mean for me, a whole lot of questions and a great deal of panic.  And if that wasn't enough, I was thinking about how this is all going to effect my daughter, and the typical day to day struggles of a single mom.  And then this heart in throat feeling of not being worthy enough for what Christ has done for us all.  And then people can wonder why I will attempt to distract myself by listening and playing a game...  I am trying slow my mind down to let the actual sermon sink in.

Today was the first time that something that was said in the sermon managed to shut my brain down to a much slower gear.  It is a very infrequent occurrence, but a memorable one when it happens.  The sentence that shut my mind down was the comment that people think a pastor has their prayers listened to better because they are a pastor.  Which is in my mind illogical.  I guess I have always thought that it was the opposite...  with such great responsibility they have to learn to rely on God in a different way.  And yet, I can't begin to explain why that is what I think.  Which is often a challenge in my life.

But back to this idea of a journey...  I am on one.  It started just over three years ago, when the idea of leaving was planted inside my mind.  With that idea, I was eventually able to take my first step forward and walk out the door.  The sad thing is that three years later, I can't begin to explain to you why I stayed for so many years.  I can't tell you why after he tried to kill me, I let him come home and forgive him.  And I still don't know why I walked out the door.  While I don't live in a constant level of panic where I felt like I was constantly walking on egg shells...  Life is not easy.  

Still... it is a journey.  I wouldn't change the moments that I have been granted in these past three years for anything.  The time that I was given with my mother.  The ability to watch my daughter grow into a young lady, and still be able to keep the innocence that we all strive to protect in our children.  And it is a journey that I might never have been blessed with if I had stayed...  because staying would have been putting my very life at risk every single breath I took. 

The start of a season

Last night I had the privilege of being to share a sacred season with my daughter.  The same way that the season had been shared with me as I grew up from a baby to a young lady. 

It is a challenge to share faith.  And I know that many people find fault in faith.  And yet, things are defined in my life by my faith.  And yesterday was a day to be reminded that we are all bound together with out faith.  It might not be your faith in God.  It might be as simple as your faith in the fact that the sun will rise each morning.  Wherever you hold your faith, it is a start of the new season for us all...

Within that season, we seek spring.  And in my faith I step forward to celebrate Lent.  And while Lent to me is something that I just know and accept, for others it might be a foreign concept.  So, if you don't know what Lent is... check out Wikipedia here...  And yet even those words can't describe the revelations that I had last night at church.

My pastor was talking about grace and belonging.  Now the first is a concept that I know we all struggle with on many levels.  The sense of belonging is something that I struggle with each and every day.  I feel like I am the person who just stays exactly where I am told to and watch all the action around me.  Until last night I would have thought that I was the only person in the whole world who struggled with belonging.  And to listen to my pastor tell a story of a time when he felt like he didn't belong, really got me to thinking.  That maybe, we all have stories of times when we don't belong that we keep locked up safe inside our minds.

And it amazes me to think that deep down inside that everyone really has the ability to understand what a woman faces when they make the step forward to change the way their life has been.  To take a step forward away from the abuse that she suffers in silence.  And that pain that they hold inside, we all need to provide a place where they can start a new season and feel safe...  A place where the stories that you hold inside of your heart and mind are shared, not to show the people around you hold good you are, or even what you have accomplished...  But a place to show those around you that they can risk themselves and open the dark corners of secrets...  and begin to find the words that move them forward.  And with those words, maybe they can start to feel like they belong...  and with that belonging they might find this new season that offers them grace...

And my prayer would be to teach them about my season of Lent, but first we have to give them an ability to be able to breathe... 

What is real?

As the days get closer to a day that the world celebrates love...  I find that I am most likely the only person around who is not overjoyed with the thought of a celebration of love.  Valentine's Day is a day the world seem to open up its wallets trying to purchase the tokens of love that they think will bring them to the one that they seek.  They think that it will bring them that "feeling" we all seem to call love.

And yet, what is love?  How do we perceive it in this ever changing world?  

Well, I can not speak for others.  I can only speak based on the experiences that have lead me to ask what of love is real...  It is something that honestly confuses me.  A huge part of the experiences are clouded by one simple fact.  That fact is that my husband filed for our divorce three years ago, on Valentine's Day.  That one simple act started us on the path that is leading to the end of our marriage.

And yet that one act was not completed in a vacuum.  And yet, even the years of demands doesn't make me feel any better about the process of divorce.  I could handle the expectations of being able to turn on my body for my husband like a light switch.  I could handle the being asked to jump and take care of his latest need.  The constant jokes about how often I have to go pee, were just another thing to let roll off my back.  Like the fact that each and every time we were together...  I was left wondering.  And I am still wondering about the one other point I felt that I was suppose to prove love, and somehow failed.  Yet, even with the simple fact that a gun was pointed at me, I still know how I failed.  

Now, with the impending annual holiday to celebrate love...  it is no wonder that I am cynical about what love is, and even harder to actually understand how we do perceive love in this world.  And it makes me question, how does God come into play with our perceptions in our changing world...

Who am I?

I am starting to wonder who I am.  I have been obedient my whole life.  I have honored my parents, even now that they are not living on this earth.  I took the vows I made seriously when I married my husband.  But none of these statements tell me who I am...

In addition to reading the book for bible study, I am rereading a book that I read three years ago, "the buddha & the borderline".  I am at a point in the book where Kiera Van Gelder is talking about bringing all of the different parts of herself to a table to listen to them.  And somehow her true self is the person who oversees the meeting...  yet in the description she talks about each stage of her life as a part of herself.  In reading this it has raised the question in my mind, having traveled thru so many different churches has created rules in my mind.  Is each of those rules a part of my self?

If that is so, then we would be looking at the me at home, at each school, at each church, in each Girl Scout troop, and that list could go on...  Where would this list end?  And in the midst of all these versions of myself, where would the true self be?

I am beginning to wonder this because it has become clear that in the midst of the choices that I made in marriage, are being used to judge the person I am currently.  It baffles me that our simply being present in a place changes the risk to others that much.  And yet, I can understand how other feel.  And while I am struggling to figure out who I am... I am still willing to pick up yet again and walk away from another place that has started to feel like home.  I am starting to wonder if that is who I am.  A follower of Christ who is going to suffer great loss and pain while on this earth.  It seems like a great burden that I am being asked to carry, and it makes me feel so isolated.  It raises the question, if we as Christians are called to belong to a community, which we call a church...  how can the church ask us to walk away again and again because of a threat that was made years ago?  

I am realizing that I have so many more questions than answers.  And that right now I might just have to accept that I have a mind full of questions.  I also seem to be being asked to accept the fact that friendships only come with distance, and that in order to make others feel safe, that I must move on again.  I wish I understood the need to live in a bubble of safety in life.  I just have no comprehension.  I have always known that the world would seek us out and attempt to destroy us.  That no where we lived and went was ever truly safe.  And maybe it is that understanding that I have that scares others...  

Right now, I may now understand... yet I am willing to suffer, if that is what Christ asks of me...

I HAVE BEEN THERE!

I have been reading a book by Karen Ehman called "Keep It Shut".  And honestly as far as I have gotten it is a good book.  Yet, in the end of chapter two she writes...
"God intentionally orchestrated the relationships in our lives.  He knew who would share your last name - or your four walls"

Well, in having lived in an abusive relationship, this is a big idea to swallow.  And yet in many ways I was seeing in print an idea that I have always felt.  I felt that God sent me into this relationship with my husband.  That I was following God's will and that we would become one and seek God together and be showered with his blessings.  And in some ways I have seen God's blessings, even when I felt I was living in hell.  And yet, it wasn't until I read another words that I was able to see more clearly why I got stuck on that quote...
 
 "This has been heavy on my heart because I know some of us have been in abusive relationships and feel like WHY DID YOU PUT ME THERE? I know that Karen said God orchestrated every person he puts in our life, on our path. Some ladies are seeing those words at the end of chapter two and taking that to mean that in some way you were at fault for being abused or hurt by someone. I want to say this to you today. You were never being punished when you were abused. God did not say it is time to teach her a lesson. He knew what would happen if the person you were with decided to behave a certain way. We all have free will and choices in our lives. We don't have to choose to sin. We don't have to choose to hurt. Some people do and eventually they are punished for their actions. Just as we don't have to choose to hurt someone. God may take that wrong that was done to you and use it to help someone else by putting you in their life. Giving you a chance to say “I HAVE BEEN THERE! And now, I will help you. There is a light on the other side and let me tell you his name is Jesus." Don't read those last paragraphs in chapter 2 and feel shame or sadness or that you were being punished for something. Read that and know that when it was happening, you were never ever alone. God was there, He saw it, He heard your cries for help and He never ever left you. He held your hand and walked you out of that place and said, you are worthy of love and you are loved. I am here to take care of you. And I will never leave you or hurt you. Listen for my voice and follow my lead. I will take care of you. And if you are on the other side, you know He was faithful in that promise. If you are not there yet, hang on tight and ask God to walk you down the path to freedom with His guidance and love. Ask God to put people in your path that will help you. He will! I know he will! " ~ Anonymous

And I am hoping that this can also help you...  That my struggles and my openness are able to bridge a window of clarity to you while you are surviving and seeking to move beyond that help that an abusive relationship can be.

True Freedom?

We often tend to focus on wanting the truth to set us free.  But how does the truth set us free?

Is it simply stating all the things that took place in dark corner of time?  Or is it even in confronting those who were involved with those dark actions?  I wish I could give you or anyone an easy answer, but when I don't have a single answer it becomes impossible to offer advice.  But truth in many ways has changed my own life.  It was speaking the truth of a dark day that took my husband ultimately to jail.  A truth that lead to a world that I never could have imagined.  

Yet in the roller coaster of life, I find that truth has many ways to be viewed.  It is often like changing the color of the lenses in your glasses.  It can seem rosy if you have a red lens.  And it can look crazy if you are wearing rainbow lenses...

In my world I am starting to understand that the truth of Domestic Violence.  It is still not something that you can blame or question why someone stayed.  And yet, it was my choice to allow many years ago a pushing of myself out of my comfort zone.  We didn't just get married and then wake up the next morning with him trying to kill me.

In many ways it was the simple challenges to my comfort that started the slide to our path.  The simple jokes of store clerks who I saw frequently became called boyfriends.  And the simple thing of joking when I was going to date them instead of the man who became my husband...  It also was followed by a whole list of things that in time eventually did lead to that night, but each thing was a little step or push away from the things I knew to be true.

And yet, in reading a book recently a comment struck me.  "True freedom: it was something inside.  Something beautiful."*  And maybe now in these past few years I am beginning to see that freedom within me.

*Quote from The Promise Box by Tricia Goyer

How shall I live my faith?

Faith to me is as important as breathing is to most people.  And yet, in the midst of a divorce... it can be the easiest thing to walk away from.  In this desire to move forward we can focus on revenge instead of the will of God.  And yet, I have moved closer to God in these days of waiting.  And that is what a divorce is, many days of waiting and facing each day with the challenge to remind yourself that you might be physically without your spouse, but with God you are never alone.  

And yet, in the process of divorce, you have to learn so much more about what God means to you.  And come to terms what your faith means to you and the path you will walk forward.  Because in this world divorce is treated like changing our underwear, but in God's world divorce is breaking a promise to God.  And yet, God does allow a very few reasons to leave a marriage.  It is not a free pass, but a very narrow line in continuing to honor God and yet be let go from the promise you have made to God.

I wish I could tell you that divorce is a free pass to move forward and marry again.  Yet, even three years into this divorce process I am still unclear about what it will mean.  It is a challenge of faith.  A reason to pray, to search God's word, and to find peace in your heart for each step.  I am struggling to figure out the path that is being laid in front of me, but know that I must constantly answer the question of how shall I live my faith...  because without my faith and God, I am nothing.

So, I do my best each day...  I spend time in God's word.  I pray, sometimes as much as I breathe.  And in this process I am also finding time to place importance on worship (church).  It has not meant a walk in the park, but a constant testing of trust.  And in that a learning process of how we are all to live our faith.  The list of my church goes beyond these basics, and yet I am still learning to walk forward in faith and find peace with communion, family prayer, and even fasting or abstinence.  I am finding my faith, and in each step I learn a little more about myself and God.  

I still wish for answers...  I got married with the idea of till death do us part, and I didn't expect to face death at the hands of my husband.  And yet, even a divorce in court does not change the promise I made to God.  Time will show me what God has planned with this challenge...  and I know in many ways God wants good to come out of this darkness.  I just have to learn how to live my faith...  and I pray that you can also live your faith thru your darkest hours.

Each small challenge is another death.

Yesterday in the process of this dissolvement of marriage that we call divorce, I faced the death of another part of our lives together.  This time it was the car.  And for some reason the death of the car brought forth a flood of emotions.

I can remember the process of picking the car out.  He wanted a much bigger car, and when I looked at the cost of car insurance I fought for something less costly.  A car with a $200.00 a month insurance payment, is like an albatross.  And lately even this car without the higher insurance payment has begun to feel like an albatross.  

My day started out like a normal day.  I was walking thru my list of things that required our presence.  And while I managed to get thru the start of the list.  I found myself sitting in the car.  Here I was a few blocks from the meeting spot, and my car would turn on, and even purr... but travel in any direction... Nope.  And this has not been the first time that this has happened.  Within months of walking out the door...  the car had stopped dead on the road.  And that time required several weeks to correct.  

And while I was sitting in the car... waiting for the insurance agent to pick up the phone and send help... all these cars with drivers were upset with me.  Upset that here I was sitting on the off ramp, where I had stopped for a red light, stuck.  The honks and gestures were something that I wished that I didn't have to witness, let alone witness with my own daughter in the car.  



As the minutes ticked by... the panic level inside of me grew.  As a single mother, a car seemed to be a life line when I first walked out the door.  And yet, with the car dead for the God knows how many times... it suddenly felt like this huge weight pushing me down into the abyss of death.  Yet again I have to figure out how to afford to fix the car that he wanted.  And at the same time I needed to figure out how to get to the meeting and then get us home.

I am trying to navigate thru the divorce that I have been served.  And it seems like the simple everyday things that create the challenges.  And these challenges really do feel like deaths.  Things that normally would have been taken care of by your spouse seem to be the biggest roadblocks.  And in my life, the car is one of those roadblocks... as a kid, I lived with the if it was broken, daddy please fix it life.  And then in marriage, my husband took that role.  Now, I just don't know what is next...  and while most people would figure out how to just take care of this thing.  I am finding that the death of the car, is also a death of another part of the relationship that use to exist with my husband. 

Each task that I have to take over that my husband use to take care of...  is a vivid reminder of what I don't have support over.  And it is a knife to me, knowing that I am being replaced in his world, because I am required to fill the shoes and take care of each and ever task he did for me.  And eventually these little deaths will eliminate my husband from my life... but how do I eliminate him from my heart?  Sigh... maybe more time will answer that question.

Tick-Tock, Divorce?

I have watched the last few years tick by at a record pace.  I am really trying to focus on what is to come, and not what has been.  And yet, the words that seem to bring the freedom from that past tend to get stuck in my throat.  Words given voice instead of held inside...

How do you give words to the secrets that drove you away from your husband?  I find it a challenge since I am not sure that I really was driven away.  I still deep inside love him.  Even with that, I am not sure what it would take to even begin to rebuild the trust that use to exist between us.

Which brings me to the fact that I am still feeling the ticking of the clock.  A clock that has grown louder inside knowing that the divorce will come to pass.  At one point in time, I will go from being separated from my husband, to the world of a divorced woman.  It is amazing that I am still considering how to rebuild trust... even with the fact that he wanted me dead.  Never mind the other things that I listened to him tell me that he wanted to try...

Somewhere along the way I came to cherish love within the bounds of faith.  And the words of becoming one...  became a point of focus with in me.  As I listened to all the things beyond the line of just him and I... I found that within me I wanted to vomit.  Not sure of what I was hoping for in all the days of willingly submitting to each idea.  How I would keep the challenge of doing what he desired... yet, I felt worse and worse.  It always seemed like I was never enough... 

And I still wonder, did he ever love me?  Or did he just love the fact that I was submissive, doing what he asked of me to make him happy.  At some point, I felt that even the family dog was worth more to him than me...  And while I still have questions.  I wonder about love and trust moving forward...

All I can hear inside is the tick-tock of the clock to divorce.

Abuse to self?

I have just spent a night awake... and many people would say that it was a form of abuse to self.  And yet, last night it wasn't about me, it was about others and the lack of sleep was an act of love.  

In that time of staying awake, I had a lot of time to read...  and what I have been reading about is self-injury.  It is an issue that I have spent years struggling with.  The temptation is always so great to find the knife and slowly run it along my wrists.  The need to continue that motion until I draw blood and feel a physical pain eats at me, until I give into it.  And in that giving into the temptation, I find a sense of peace.  For me it seems that in the physical pain that I have caused myself all the emotions and stress seem to have a focus that removes me from the forces that are inside of me.  

I have been facing this struggle for a long time, but not as long as I have been abused.  In high school, after years of moving, I found this simple act that moved me to a place beyond the day to day problems of life, especially those faced as a new student in high school.  In those days I found that I was always seeing the negative in my life.  I was the walking and talking failure in so many ways.  I could see it in the simple looks from my mother, and hear it louder in her voice.  I felt like I was sinking so fast, because my mother felt that my actions were the reason that she could make the choice to walk out on my father.  And in her desire to walk away, she made it clear that I would not ever be allowed to follow or even go with her.  It was my place to remain by my father's side and to take her place in every way that he might ask me to fill.

This conversation was not a new one to me.  I can recall it starting when I was in elementary school.  We were living in a small town, and even the simple acts of love my father did to correct his mistakes never was enough.  Thinking back, one of her birthdays was forgotten, and we (my father, brother, and myself) walked into town to find cake to make the issue disappear.  Well, we came back with cake.  It just happened to be in the form of cupcakes.  Now, in my world the Tasty Cake Chocolate Cupcakes with a single birthday candle and us singing to her...  that is a memory I cherish.   But even now, with her gone, I know that our devotion to her for her birthday was a failure to her.  Another forgotten day in a series of things that always seemed to slip my own father's mind.  

There were other birthdays that my mother celebrated with me making a decorating a cake for her.  And while she would always seem to enjoy the attention, I always felt that she wasn't happy that it was me thinking of her.  That my attention never mattered, and the one person who she wanted to have their undivided attention... well that attention was shared with me.  So, all these years later, I can still recall the love that I saw in my father's eyes as we walked together from the house towards the center of town in search of cake for my mother's birthday.  Yes, it was last minute.  Of course it wasn't the magical world that I think my mother wanted.  And yet, it is a simple act of love that my father did with a pure heart for the woman he loved.  And that is still something that I held as a standard for the man I would eventually marry.

Somewhere between that act of love and the first few months of high school, I found the world of cutting.   And last night for the first time I found a book that actually had a in its pages the very words that my voice can't form that explains why I am drawn to cutting.  The desire to stop all the feelings that swirl inside of me with one simple motion that allows me to see that I am alive still.  And that motion, brought everything into focus.  Now, to see all the reasons that my voice could never find worlds to explain in print...  just about took my breathe away.

I have not finished the book yet... but do know that I will.  Right now, it is enough to know that someone has understood how my mind works to bring my desire to find the correct words to print.  This allows me the chance to breathe a bit right now...  Just praying that in my breathe I find the courage to finish reading the book and within those pages of print find a way to step away from this temptation that has threatened to control my life for so many years.

And I am sharing this cover of the book, so that if you wonder what might be abuse to self... you might seek it out and find words that you have struggled to find to voice...

A New Beginning...

Each day we have a chance for a brand new start, but most of us look at the change of year as the point in which we have that new start.  And yet, for me that seeking of the brand new start began on November 30, 2014, with the start of Advent.  I wanted to seek not just the changes in this world, but also to better know the God I worship.

In this past year... I have come to start a process that I never expected.  And maybe the chance of moving forward, finally three years after I walked out the door.  I can remember that night, as clearly as anyone can look out their window and see the night sky.  It was a chilly night, but it also was the night just before the world started to ring in the New Year.  And here I am three years later, in many ways counting down the days until the simple piece of paper that we rely on to keep us separate from my husband... to expire.  And I have come to a very different understanding of what that piece of paper really has meant.

Three years ago, I lived in a level of fear.  I tired to view the order of protection from abuse (PFA) as a kind of shield.  A covering that would keep me alive and hide me from the very man I loved and was married to.  It is far from the shield that I could imagine it to be.  You see, a piece of paper is nothing against a bullet.  And that was what I was dealing with.  A man who thought he was above the law and nothing could keep him from owning a weapon, not even the PFA.  The court system, and law enforcement are left with the legal record of what weapons my husband owned.  And in this world of friends, and people thinking that they are above the law...  It is all too easy to provide someone who has proven that they are not in a position to own a weapon a weapon.

The legal system which protects our rights, also protects the rights of those who want to harm us.  And I am not saying that it necessarily bad or good... It is just a fact.  And yet, what wife in seeking a PFA doesn't want to know that with the order the person who seeks us harm is isolated from all weapons?  And yet, legally we are required to trust the word of the person who desires to harm us.  There is no legal recourse for us when we know they have firearms, and they choose to say that they don't.  It is a double edged sword that I have no answer with which we can solve the issue... just more questions than answers.  
 

And yet, now three years later...  I do know one small thing.  That we as women and men need to have the constant discussion on how can we begin to protect those who are being hurt by the very people who claim to love them and desire to protect them.  And maybe, with discussion we can find a way to provide a level of protection that is much more like the shield that I dreamed the PFA to be, instead of the simple pieces of paper that will never stop a bullet.  Then we can create a PFA, and a system for dealing with both sides that will provide a higher level of protection that we can even imagine now... A way to make victims of abuse feel safe enough to start to see themselves as survivors.