My story
The story so far...
I’m writing this on 2 November 2024. And as of today, I’ve got no idea how this story will end.
I’ve been thinking about writing all this down for about a year, around the time that my life began to fall apart. Actually, that’s not entirely true – it’s not that I’ve been thinking about writing, but rather that God has been prompting me to write and that I’ve been batting him away and ignoring him! Not because I don’t want to, but because I want the story to be all wrapped up with a nice happy ending before I start.
Basically, I want the reader to be assured that everything will be OK. I want to be able to provide a step by step guide to what I did to fix my life with a guarantee that if you’re going through something similar, all you have to do is to follow my guide and your situation will get fixed too. That would be nice. That would be a blog that I’d want to read.
Or so I thought. You see, when this all started there were two big problems in my life: my relationships with people and my relationship with God. And I’d been praying about both for quite a while. But neither was a priority. More of a priority were the things I was doing – my career, sport, socialising – those were the things I focussed on; but relationships, particularly difficult relationships, were a bolt-on, a kind-of “nice to have”, something that I could afford to neglect. Because, after all, I wasn’t responsible for difficult relationships, was I?!
And so, that’s where I was on 22 August 2023 – our 15th wedding anniversary, when my husband said “I’m sorry, I don’t love you”. And everything changed.
At this stage, this isn’t a story of marriage restoration. At this stage, I’m not sure whether it ever will be. But it is a story of hope, and faith; it’s a story of grace, of gentle discipline and a radical approach. It’s a story of unconditional love.
It was about a week ago when I finally stopped fighting God’s promptings and actually committed to begin writing. Whilst I knew that the part of the story about my relationship with God would be a good-news story, I spent the week worrying that if it didn’t also end with the news that my marriage had been restored, it might feel incomplete – a “good news, bad news”. Because at the time, the problem with my marriage felt as important as the problem with my relationship with God. But just before sitting down to begin to write for the first time this morning, I finally got it – I realised that it doesn’t actually matter whether God restores my marriage. I’m saved, my life is in God’s hands, He’s faithful, He’s loving, His ways are perfect – this has all been, and continues to be, about my relationship with Him.
Of course, I would love it if God were to restore my marriage, but not because my marriage defines me or because I derive my security from it. I would love to be reunited with my husband because God made us one flesh, and I believe that my role as his wife is to enhance my husband’s life and to glorify God through my service to him. But more than that, I yearn for my husband to develop a personal relationship with God for himself. My great desire is that one day we will both be in a position to provide support and hope to others going through similar struggles to those we’ve been through, but for now, I hope that this website will offer some help and comfort to those who are also standing alone for their marriages.