Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (16 page)

When the cruise ended, we had some time to kill before leaving for the airport. As we sat down for lunch, before we could even order our food, Justin’s phone rang. He answered it without skipping a beat. We hadn’t even been off the boat an hour, and someone else was already calling for his attention. All the peace and perfection of our four days together melted into a puddle at my feet. Our glimpse of something new was just that. It had been merely a brief break from ordinary.

I cried softly, and when Justin finally hung up, my cries became heart-wrenching sobs.

“I don’t want to go back!” I told him.

I didn’t want to go back to ministry. I didn’t want to go back to the breakneck pace. I didn’t want to go back to being invisible.

But I knew we didn’t have a choice. I was in love with my husband, yet I knew that the battleground we were returning to would not cultivate our relationship like a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean. I knew life was about to get hard again, but never in
my wildest dreams did I expect us to drift as far and as fast as we did in the days to come.

JUSTIN:

A few weeks after the cruise, I got a call on a Sunday afternoon from someone on our board of directors at the church. Not only was he on our board, he was also one of my closest friends and advisers. I respected him, and I trusted him even more than I trusted myself.

He asked me if we could ride four-wheelers together. I’m not an outdoorsman at all—I don’t fish or hunt or camp—so his invitation meant a lot to me because he enjoyed all of those things. I said I’d love to ride four-wheelers through the woods!

About halfway through our ride, we stopped for a few minutes next to a creek and started throwing rocks into the water. In what I know was a God moment, he shared with me some things that were on his heart and some things that were happening in his marriage, and he asked my advice. These things weren’t groundbreaking or earth-shattering confessions, but he was vulnerable. I wasn’t just his pastor; I was his friend.

I stood on the side of a creek, but I also stood at a crossroads. I felt a prompting from the Holy Spirit:
You can tell him. He’s safe. You can tell him of the problems you have—the issues you and Trisha are going through.
At the same time, another voice said,
He’s your biggest contributor. He’s a member of your board. At best he will leave the church and take his money and influence with him; at worst he will have you fired, and it will cost you this friendship.

I chose to stay hidden. I chose not to come clean about the dysfunction in my marriage, about the sin I had allowed to creep into my heart, about some choices I was contemplating.

In my mind, confession would cost me something. Confession would put me at risk. Confession would be the end of my ministry. Confession would jeopardize what he thought of me.

Not confessing in that moment proved to be one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

TRISHA:

The following Sunday, I went to an elder and his wife between our Sunday services and completely broke down. I told them I was struggling and that Justin and I were at a very dangerous and dark place in our marriage. Relieved I had finally come clean, my tears turned into soft quivers like those of a two-year-old who has
just gotten over a good cry. But that relief was quickly replaced with disbelief. They told me that they were sorry, but in the end they patted me on the back as if to say I was overreacting. To me it communicated that they thought I was crazy. Satan tormented me with that possibility for the next three weeks.

I knew that Jesus would help me; I just wanted him to help me in the way I thought he should. Justin and I were no longer fighting as enemies. It was worse: we fought as strangers. We became so blinded by our own sin and personal struggles that it seemed impossible to repair the damage we inflicted on each other. Just weeks after the cruise, it became more and more evident that Justin didn’t want to spend time with me, and in the process, I completely shut down. Our relationship had taken a dangerous turn when I realized that Justin no longer cared about how I thought or felt about him. He was tired of pretending, and I just went numb.

If our leaders’ retreat in 2004 was a huge achievement, going to Catalyst should have been even bigger. Catalyst is a next-generation leaders’ conference that Justin had been going to since it first began in 1999. In 2005, we were not only bringing volunteers with us to Catalyst, we were bringing staff! The richness God had blessed both Justin and me with should have left us smiling from ear to ear. But instead this conference marked my life in a way I could have never imagined.

The focus of the conference was on character and integrity. Bill Hybels, whom Justin had looked up to for years, gave a powerful message that was prophetic for the dark turn our marriage was about to take. Halfway through another speaker’s message, Justin and our good friend Pete (who was also there with his staff) disappeared. When they returned, I could tell by the look on Pete’s face that things were not right.

I’ve watched shows like
48 Hours Mystery
and find myself talking to the screen as if the people can hear me. I say things like, “How could he
not
have known . . . ?” or “Why on earth didn’t she run?” It’s easy to forget that TV gives us a panoramic view of the story
rather than placing us in the middle of it. Still, I
knew
something was wrong at Catalyst. I knew there was a storm on the horizon. I had no clue what made up that storm; I just knew I needed to prepare for it.

So when we returned from the conference, I prepared in the only way I knew how: I dropped a hundred dollars we didn’t have on a new outfit. I painted my nails. I woke up really early to make myself look the best I could. I was praying I was beautiful enough that Justin would notice me in hopes that he would want to rescue me from the storm that was about to hit. Never did I anticipate that Jesus would have to be the one to rescue us both.

JUSTIN & TRISHA:

If you read through the Old Testament, you will see a pattern emerge in the nation of Israel. God blessed them, and Israel would worship him. Then their attention would become divided, and the Bible says in a number of different places that the Israelites did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord. This usually refers to the propensity the Israelites had to worship other gods. They would give to idols and false gods the affection of their hearts. God would allow other nations and kingdoms to conquer his people, and as they experienced heartache, hardship, and defeat, they would cry out to God, and he would rescue them.

In 2 Kings 17, the northern kingdom of Israel is conquered by the Assyrians. Israel is exiled out of the Promised Land, and the Assyrians move other exiles to Samaria—the northern kingdom’s capital—to take their place. These transplanted exiles start worshiping other gods. God doesn’t like their worship of idols, so he sends lions to attack and maul people. Parenthetically, that is just cool! He could have chosen lightning, fire, or flood, but he specifically chooses lions. Epic!

The king of Assyria realizes that something isn’t right and figures out that his people are being attacked by God because of their idol worship. So he sends some exiled priests of Israel back
to Samaria to teach the newly resettled foreigners how to worship God. Think of it—he wants the Israelite priests to evangelize these subjects of Assyria! Here’s what happens:

“They also worshiped their idols.” It’s not that they didn’t say the prayers or sing the songs or go to the services. They were cool with God. They were happy to worship him—they didn’t want to get mauled by lions anymore. But they also worshiped their idols.

“THEY ALSO . . .”

Ordinary marriages live in the world of “they also.”

Idol worship isn’t something that comes at us all of a sudden. It’s something that drifts slowly into our lives. What makes it so dangerous is that it’s not like God doesn’t have a role in our lives. He does. But he isn’t where we find our value. He isn’t where we find our contentment. He isn’t where we find our self-esteem. He isn’t where we find our identity. And often without even realizing it, we look to something else—our jobs, our possessions, our
homes, even our marriages—to give us what only God can give. With that subtle shift, we put a lid on our ability to go beyond ordinary in our relationships with God or with our spouses.

What is very interesting is this pattern continued throughout the Old Testament with the nation of Israel. They would find success and initially worship God. Then they would take their eyes off of God and start to worship idols, build Asherah poles, and make pagan shrines. God would allow them to be conquered, captured, or exiled, and the people would cry out to God to deliver them. This pattern continued until the time of Nehemiah.

Initially, this scenario looked similar, but in the events of the book of Nehemiah, everything changed:

They said to me, “Things are not going well for those who returned to the province of Judah. They are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem has been torn down, and the gates have been destroyed by fire.”

When I heard this, I sat down and wept. In fact, for days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven. Then I said,

“Please remember what you told your servant Moses: ‘If you are unfaithful to me, I will scatter you among the nations. But if you return to me and obey my commands and live by them, then even if you are exiled to the ends of the earth, I will bring you back to the place I have chosen for my name to be honored.’

“The people you rescued by your great power and strong hand are your servants. O Lord, please hear my prayer! Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring you. Please grant me success today by making the king favorable to me. Put it into his heart to be kind to me.”

The capital city was in ruins. The wall of Jerusalem was torn down. The city gates were destroyed by fire. The people of Israel had been stripped of everything that represented God’s provision, blessing, and presence. So often in our own lives, God will strip us of everything we use to find security, identity, and value so he can reattach us to himself. His greatest desire is that we depend on him.

In this passage, Nehemiah doesn’t just rescue the people of Israel like the Old Testament heroes did in the past; he repents on behalf of the people. He asks God to forgive them. He begs God to realign their hearts with his.

Remarkably, after this point in the Old Testament, God’s people struggled much less with idol worship. Once the wall was rebuilt, so was their faith and dependence on God.

Have you been to that place in your life or in your marriage? If you haven’t yet, the odds are you will arrive there at some point. You didn’t know how you were going to make it. You
had no clue how that bill was going to be paid. You had no idea whether you would recover from that illness. You didn’t know if you would be able to buy that house. You had no sense of how you and your spouse would get through such a difficult time or recover from such a painful mistake. When our circumstances grow beyond our ability to control them, we turn to God to do what only he can do.

God will use circumstances, heartache, stress, or failure to grow our dependence on him. If we don’t allow him that space in our life, if we live with a “they also” faith, then often we find ourselves in a place of hurt, destruction, devastation, and ruin. It’s in those moments when we realize that we are not as much in control as we thought. Our reliance on God increases as our ability to control things decreases.