Probably the biggest splinter of this year was the damage to my spiritual life. I went from having a very clear sense of God’s presence and His love for me to absolutely nothing at all.
Even as Mark and I went through the healing process, in my quiet moments, there was a deep sense of not being okay. Sometimes on high volume and sometimes on low, but it was always there.
For the past two days, the “not okay” feeling was on high, and I cried bitterly off and on. Then, at some point this morning, I had a realization.
When I learned of the affair…when I read Mark’s e-mails…I felt tricked. The man I believed loved me…didn’t. In fact, one of his e-mails said she was the one true love of his life. He had just married me because she had married someone else.
I can’t explain to you how that invalidates your life and everything in it.
And though Mark has explained over and over that he was just caught up in some ego-driven fantasy of feeling 20 again and none of what he wrote was real, my heart has been slow to believe it.
What I didn’t realize until this morning was how when my marriage was invalidated, my faith was too. After all, if Mark didn’t really love me when it felt like he did, then maybe God didn’t either, and none of that sense of Him was even real.
And that doubt, has ricocheted around like a bullet in my heart tearing it up for over a year.
It occurs to me that faith is the “secret ingredient” to sensing God’s presense and that doubt is its enemy.
These are new thoughts for me. I don’t know what happens from here. The story keeps unfolding…
