The grieving within infidelity

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It is very common for couples dealing with marital infidelity to both be in a place of grieving. The unfaithful partner suffers a grief born of guilt and regret, if they’re penitent, whilst the other partner suffers a grief born of the plain hurt of betrayal, and ultimately of rejection.

A chasm has been created within the core of trust that was once enjoyed, but now trust is a distant concept that is grieved in the both of them. This is the core of the grief both partners are impinged with.

The transgressed partner
has a trust issue with their partner.
The transgressing partner
has a trust issue with themselves.

This sounds bad, but,
both must grieve that loss of trust.

There is intense sadness in both even if the sadness is caused for completely different reasons. But this doesn’t mean there can’t be a viable sense of hope in both as they negotiate their way through such a tumultuous season in reconciling the brokenness inflicted on the marriage. Both will, however, feel broken.

But it is grief we are dealing with — a grief that involves all the stages, denial for shock and of flip-flopping, anger in the innocent spouse toward their partner and the anger of the guilty spouse toward themselves, bargaining for both in their second-guessing themselves and their relationship, and depression for what seems like an unbelievably unforeseen set of events (how on earth did I/we arrive here, and what can I/we do?).

It is incredibly normal
that all stages occur
randomly and repetitively.

Grief is exhausting.

As each partner bears their individual grief, each partner is benefited in the ministry of God as the Lord endeavours to restore them. Boundaries will need to be dealt with. The hurt and guilt will be felt for some time. This is normal. And even some patterns known to trauma can very well manifest themselves.

A strategy for the road forward,
to negotiate the way out
of a comparative marital hell,
is both wise and necessary.

Essentially what has occurred changes the direction of the marriage, which is not to say all that is good cannot be redeemed; usually couples recovering from infidelity go on to an even stronger intimacy if they insist together that they will get through this and do everything they can to achieve that objective.

Nobody should ever underestimate
the power of two people
combined as a force of one.

But the transgressed partner should not be rushed to accept their partner. Nor should the transgressing partner be encouraged to make swift peace with themselves.

As one repents — literally changes their mind and behaviour under the surrender that the fear of the Lord compels — and the other forgives in response to the fruit of repentance, both forge, a day at a time, a new direction of marital strength from their innate and collective weakness.

This doesn’t mean that the process is smooth.
It will be rough for some time yet.

Trust isn’t rebuilt overnight.
But it can be rebuilt when
both partners put their marriage first.

The freedom in being blissfully wrong

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Losers are deeply unpopular in the present age. You only need to spend 15 minutes in a schoolyard to find out that children hate being called a loser. That is the power of the world, and a compelling social psychology, which bears heavily on every single person.

Nobody likes to lose. Everyone wants to succeed, and, even though we are told that most successful people failed thousands of times, nobody really wants to fail even once.

And if winning and losing are two polarisations of life,
so are right and wrong.

Nobody wants to be wrong. Everyone pretends that they are right. And everyone is trying to convince everyone else that they themselves are right, and the other person is wrong. It is social chaos.

But the Kingdom of God operates differently.

Few people go near this power
because they see power
through the world’s eyes.

The Kingdom of God operates
as an Upside-Down Kingdom.

The Kingdom’s power is wisdom;
a wisdom that is foolishness to the world.

The statements that follow decree that there is a power in the Kingdom that most Christians don’t even understand, let alone apply. There are few that practice them with rigorous consistency. Here is a list of personalised statements that describe the maturest of faith believer in Christ:

·        I don’t have to be right to be free.

·        I don’t need to be right to feel safe.

·        I can feel safe and feel wrong at the same time.

·        I don’t have to convince you that I’m right.

·        I don’t want you to think I’m unreasonable, but if you do that’s okay.

·        You are free to think anything of me that you want.

·        You don’t have to like me or what I say or do.

·        I will still believe, that in time, I can make a friend of you, if I continue to treat you with grace.

·        I will understand it if you can’t see from my point of view. I hope you never feel I’m manipulating you.

·        Even when I think you’re wrong, I want to treat you with the same respect as if you were right, even as I respectfully disagree with you. I will not war with you.

·        I cannot be threatened, and I threaten nobody.

·        I will not fight with you, and you can’t fight with me. Believe me, there’s power in that.

All these statements speak to humility enough that subjugates the pride that would ordinarily insist on feeling the injustice that causes us to rail against anyone who would call us wrong.

With all the postulating around churches about doctrine and hermeneutics and one side versus another, we quickly lose sight of the fact that most of this is unimportant. What Christ called us to is to live a different life; a life of service to humanity for the glorification of God.

Once we reconcile the fact that glorifying God is really the only purpose of our lives, we stop insisting on being right all the time, and start loving people even when they’re obnoxious.

When we see life this way,
the transforming of our hearts
via the renewing of our minds
is apparent, with no effort added.

We do not need to prosper in this world
to know that we are prospering in eternal life.

We do not need to be right in order to feel justified. Knowing that God knows our hearts are right is more than enough. It really doesn’t matter what other people think. We are freed to simply love them.

Our hearts are right when we can accept being wrong.
In this is the essence of being teachable.

What safety we offer people with this Kingdom-perspective that seeks no gain for ourselves.

And, of course, we will get being wrong right some of the time, but not all the time.

This article could also have been called ‘the only true fruit of Christian maturity — losing to win.’

Grief, that very first true prayer you ever prayed

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Hearts ache when hearts break

And nothing seems to bring relief

But to suffer for God’s name sake

(My experience suggests)

Brings a deeper relief because of one’s grief.

Losses suffered castigate hope

So hope to hold on becomes a fight

When we cannot cope

We go to God in our darkest night.

Minutes that seem like hours

Hours that seem like days

When life’s harsh it sours

Leaving a fog so thick it stays.

Those forlorn moments of paralysis

Can’t move, eyes lost in a gaze

Darkest deep beyond analysis

Desperate is the one who prays.

Loss is a dream defunct. It takes us deep into a journey to another world we hardly recognised existed. Of course, we knew was there all along, but we really didn’t expect to arrive in Holland when Italy promised so much. Loss is the death of a hope, yet it is only when hope dies that we determine that we cannot leave it that way.

Very soon we commence a fight to reclaim hope.
It, as a conquest, is the spiritual fight of our lives.

Grief teaches acceptance of the unacceptable. How true this is! Loss, as it occurs, and for so many millions of minutes, is unacceptable. We cannot accept what has forced us to change.

What is beyond us, that which is absolutely beyond our control, leaves us feeling useless, helpless, and hopeless. And yet it is only in a street called Unacceptable that we learn to inhabit a home called Hope that is beyond every hope that can be taken away.

That hope is God. That hope is found in God. And God opens the way to a life that can never be defeated, even though we need to be defeated in order to embark on the journey to the distant Promised Land of the soul.

***

It’s not unusual in my life to experience tragedy, and some days there are more than one. One thing I guess grief has taught me is to expect it. I wouldn’t call it pessimism, because in pessimism there is no hope, just resignation. I see a hope beyond loss, and I see hope transcend loss; and, that grief is the enigmatic vehicle that transports us from spiritual death to eternal life in the name of Jesus.

I often wonder of the person who never prayed until they lost every ounce of fortitude they had. With nothing left, and with nothing left to lose, they go to God, first perhaps in the fury of fire, telling him how nasty He is to allow this. Then there are subsequent prayers, perhaps when they are too weak to shake their fist at God. Then there’s the time when God showed up somehow. Sound familiar? The longer we spend time with God’s people, the more we hear variations of this ancient narrative born afresh.

Many people’s prayer lives
had their genesis in grief.
What was designed against them as defeat
they turned, through God, into victory.

The prayer God loves most is that first prayer, prayed in desperation. That life situation that brought us to our knees, also brought us to God, and can be seen as the moment that life could begin, again. Such a paradox is applied to the reality that seems like an end but is simply a crucial beginning.

The hope we cling to in loss
is that it really isn’t the end. And it isn’t!

With God through our grief,
hope abides for the sweetest relief.
Bear with God through the fire,
He will get you through the pyre.
Bear well as you can your heartache of pain,
ultimately, this time you’ll see as one of gain.

When I’m not enough

There are times

when I feel discouraged

times when I feel my stuff

isn’t nearly good enough.

It doesn’t take me too long, ordinarily, to arrive at a very vulnerable place, where I doubt a great many things, not least about my use of time, my worth in life, what others think of my motives, and my role in others’ lives. Even, if people could do without me. Of course, I know that to those who love me most I am most indispensable. But then there is the insecurity in me that wants to be more to more people.

What I find most interesting about life, as much as it is perplexing, is that we never arrive. None of us is completely grounded in that safe space and place, and those that think they are, or present that as their image, are least to be trusted.

No matter how good our self-image is there are always cracks beneath the surface, and again, the person without any cracks is the most narcissistic of all; their cracks are denied.

I want to be more even though God says I am enough.

I want more from life even though God gives enough.

I want more of others even though God tells me they are enough.

I have come to recognise that my craving for more speaks more to my inner pain than anything else.

I am not proud of the fact that at times security drives me more than it ever should. Even though I laud vulnerability, I truly hate being vulnerable when I don’t have a choice about it, like just about everyone. Such vulnerability is ever a very lonely place to find ourselves.

Even though I know I’m not supposed to compare myself with anybody else, I still do it from time to time, especially when life has gone quiet on me. And I never compare with those who have less. It is only those who have what I want that I compare with.

The fact about this matter is this: whether I believe it or not in my moment of weakness, I am always enough, even if I’m not satisfied with my enoughness.

The same goes for you. You are enough.

God says in Jesus we are enough.

Only those who can die may live

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“And we always bear in our bodies
the dying of the Lord Jesus
so that the life of Jesus
may appear in our bodies.”
(2 Corinthians 4:10 NMB)

The greatest gift I ever received was to have my everything taken away. In losing my everything, God was able to show me the one thing that could never be taken away; the one thing that can only be added when we have died to everything else.

It happened to me, as it happens to just about everybody who goes through it, that there needed to be a thousand deaths, daily and hourly, in myriad form, as my flesh struggled against and resisted each death. I never died easily.

Dying to self is never something
anyone can master
through submitting to God
just once or three times.

The prize for dying to self is that, in going from death to life, a life that was always there to be had emerges. But never beforehand.

Why is it that we resist so much
the only thing that can set any of us free?

It’s because surrender is deathly hard.

It’s not until we have nothing left
that we can willingly die to self,
because we have to abandon the life
that no longer works.

It takes faith to believe what the Bible plainly says. It takes faith to believe that death is required in order that true life would be experienced, and the only way we can experience such a reality is through the action of dying to ourselves. Nobody does this of their own volition. This is why loss, as an opportunity, is so important. In loss and in hardship or persecution that we have no control over we have the stimulus with which to respond through dying to ourselves. Dying to self is easier when there are a thousand reminders of death around us.

But most often, like Jesus said to Saul, recounted for us in Acts 26:14, we kick against the goads. We don’t appreciate what God is trying to do for us.

In the withdrawal of our comfort,
even to the feeling of abandonment,
there is stimulus for resurrection.

In my experience of marital implosion, whereby my life changed overnight and irrevocably, and where there was no hope of reconciliation (which thankfully I couldn’t see back then), there was only grief, the whole grief, and nothing but the grief; and it was, ‘so help me, God.’ There was no escape. And yet, because God was all I had left, to follow Him and submit to Him, I had to recognise that I was still responsible for a life I was incapable living on my own.

When I merged those facts,
that God held me accountable for my life,
yet I felt incapable of doing it on my own,
I was brought to my knees.

It became and still is the greatest gift.

God takes away in order to give.

God truly seeks to bring us to our knees; not because he is a harsh God, but because when we hold anything back from the fullest surrender we don’t die. And God can’t get any glory out of us when we are walking corpses.

God only gets glory out of someone deadly radiant.

We give up our lives
so we might live through God,
in God, and for God.

If this article confuses you, or even angers or annoys you, I still hope it will stimulate you, and make you curious.

Is there even a distinct possibility that you haven’t lived all the life God has ordained and designed for you to live? Are you in the season, now, where there is loss and grief and suffering? If so, can you see the opportunity that God has placed before you for such a time that this — an opportunity that prevails only now?

The bottom line about life is this:
do we understand what God’s purpose is for our life?

All of life throbs with this purpose. The life that is for God prevails, whilst the life that is against God remains perplexed. And only the life that dies to self, that lives for God, can even see the eternal sense in the purpose of life.

When we die to selfishness,
the selfishness we die to is life for others,
so they might die to their selfishness,
so others might see and do it too, and so on.

This is the redeeming life of God in the world.

The opportunity to suffer well

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I can tell you, right now, this moment, I suffer nothing. But it hasn’t always been that way. And it won’t always be that way. The nature of life is that my circumstances, and yours, can change in a matter of hours; seconds, actually.

The thing about time is this:
it never stands still.

You may, right now, be in a different situation to me. You may have chronic ill-health, a mental health problem, a chaotic family structure, be close to burnout, or be nursing an elderly parent or a disabled child, or — heaven help you — have some flurry of a combination of circumstances that conspire against you. You may be a billionaire, a sports star, or someone with global influence, and therefore I may not suffer the pressure that you do.

I have, however, suffered such a range of things over my lifetime, just as you have, or are.

One thing is for sure,
suffering in life is inevitable;
none of us can avoid it.

But this is where the gospel comes into its own. This is where the power of Jesus helps. Truly, nothing else helps and nothing else matters when we’re suffering than Jesus, because in our suffering we can share in His suffering.

Let’s handle this first: the phenomenon of time.

The Phenomenon of Time

Unlike anything else in the myriad knowledge of existence, time is fundamentally dynamic. And yet time is an agent acting on just about everything, whether it is growth or recedence or enhancement or decay.

Time is also something we are fundamentally unable to get used to. We are very much at the whim of time. This is because time, within the constraints of circumstance, wraps us up in experience, and all experience has meaning, and though some experience is wondrous, many experiences we have are lamentable and loathsome.

The dynamics of change in time are nothing we can change, and all we can do is accept what we have no power over. But how we perceive our experience of time is very much within our control.

Philippians 3:10

One way to write the key verse of Philippians 3:10 is this:

‘I know Jesus
and have His resurrection power,
when I join with Him
by having fellowship with Him
in His sufferings,
because in this
I become like Him,
in His suffering’s way.’

I know the writing of this verse this way won’t satisfy everyone, but I think it captures some of the essence of what the apostle Paul was referring to in what I’m writing about.

Paul outlines in the above verse that there is an opportunity to suffer well. This is not about glorying in our suffering, but to take our suffering as Jesus did, learning to bear it patiently, and finding contentment in life beyond it.

As soon as we believe this is possible,
God makes it possible for us to experience it.

Yet, we must know this:

Life makes no sense unless we can
make meaning of our experience.

Given that a large portion of our experience will involve handling situations we do not enjoy, can we see God’s invitation as an opportunity to overcome through the testimony of Jesus?

The gospel way of overcoming amid suffering is nothing about healing it in the ultimate sense, though, of course, God can do that, and does do that on some occasions. The gospel way of overcoming amid suffering is simply a mindset that both accepts it and looks past it; that the suffering cannot overcome us, even though along the way we can and do feel overwhelmed in learning this gospel craft; a learning we never truly master — and ultimately, never truly want to.

One of the amazing things about God is that His gospel shows us that reality can match our unconscious desire for true oneness and unity. Through the power of the gospel we can negate our selfish desire, but first we must learn to conquer the momentary demand of the selfish desire, which is to suffer well its demise, knowing that there is no comparison, and that any envying is a distraction from blessing, whereas the fullest gospel focus will redeem the fullest result of blessing.

Life teaches us the opportunity to suffer well.

Once we have learned this, or at least accepted this — life’s key curriculum — there truly is nothing in life that can defeat our hope.

This is the living power
of the gospel for life.

I cannot finish an article on suffering without saying that suffering is not only never fun, but it leaves us questioning the very meaning of life, especially when our circumstances are such that we will continue to suffer. But there is a hope beyond suffering. That’s what this article hopes to communicate.

We cannot hope to see the opportunity to suffer well
without becoming sick and tired
of experiencing the pain of suffering poorly.

The peace of trust amid the pain of grief

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Best moments of life occur when trust abides in pain.

It’s the ability to hold in one’s mind two disparate realities — the suffering moment with the hope we simply must hold to. We believe that soon God will show us a way to hold these disparate realities together, beautifully in tension.

This is summed up in Psalm 13 — a psalm of David. The beautiful thing about this psalm is that it becomes personal when suffering lasts and lasts, enfolding itself over itself, when grief compounds over time.

Grief lasts longer than we ever believe it should or could.
But grief if a goad; it prompts us to press deeper.

Grief comes cloaked as a ninja instructor. Life cannot teach us what we need to learn, so grief steps into the breach. Grief takes us to deeper places than life, as it routinely is, can. Life is a handicap; it propounds a disability. Without grief’s equipping we cannot teach far. We cannot go far. And we cannot take others far. We certainly can’t take others where we haven’t been, unless we go together and learn from each other.

The ability that grief teaches us is not only rebound-ability, which would be enough, but it plumbs us deeper into the very soul-terrain of why it is important. Without knowing ‘why’ we have very little motive to want to engage.

The prayer of Psalm 13 gives the impression that David was able in his mindset to turn from despair to trust in a very short time. That can seem our nemesis. When we are perplexed we can’t quite seem to rebound mentally and emotionally with nimbleness because of our spiritual anguish. But this psalm offers us the possibility that rebounding within a short time is not only possible but that it has been done.

Our task is to believe grief
is the catalyst for a miracle;
that the miraculous can be done
amid even our very own life.

And without suffering we would not have the opportunity. See how suffering delivers us the opportunity? See how through our suffering we have the opportunity to learn something transformational, and we thereby stand to attest to God’s power to deliver us from the evil of being bonded to despair.

The beauty of Psalm 13 is that it asks pressing questions of God, and even demands that He answer.

It’s a full range Psalm, holding nothing back. Surely, we must know that God expects us to wrestle with Him in such a way that we demand progress of our situations. God needs to know that we will search and leave nothing back in our pursuit of all we are to know and experience about the meaning in the despair we face.

In the end, despair is there to teach us something. God. Not that God rescues us from despair in a way we no longer experience it, for we will continue to experience it. Rescue is not the point. No, God hopes that we will hope upon Him in our despair; that our choice is to trust Him even when the circumstances in our lives continue to keep us down, for we have this assurance:

The despair we experience
as a fundamental component of grief
brings us to a knowledge
of the unfailingness of God’s love,
as it connects us to Him
in a way we otherwise could not.