Fair Warning

When the girls were little, we spent two years in Ohio – two years that seem like a blur from where I stand now, to be honest. We made some friends while we were there, but the one couple we have stayed in touch with and absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE their family, we weren’t always close with. In fact, it wasn’t until we drove back through Ohio about five years after we moved that we reconnected. I cannot be more grateful that we did.

In our years living in the Chicago suburbs, everyone in this family (except for their oldest) came to stay with us, either with one of their parents or by themselves. Sometimes it was for vacation, sometimes it was to audition for The Voice *yes their kids are that crazy talented*. Those weekends were some of the best, because we got to catch up amidst raising our families in two different states and two different worlds.

Why do I mention them? Well, because I have come to love one of the things that my friend says whenever she has to have difficult conversations with people. I probably am quoting this slightly wrong, but with great love, she always looks them in the eye and says:

“I know you might not want to hear this, but we have to talk about some hard stuff”

I admire her for that, because she is not afraid to have the hard conversations – and she does it with great love and a heart for restoring relationships between both God and people.

So that is what I need to say to you all now:

I know you might not want to hear this (or read this), but we have to talk about some hard stuff.

For some of you, this may make you stop following my blog. Please know that if you choose to do that, its ok. Be free to go – no judgement here. For some of you, this is going to be hard to read because you know me. All I can say is that I understand, and I’m sorry for the sadness it might bring, but I hope you can hang with me. Because I can promise it gets better. I can promise that with what I am going to be sharing in the coming weeks, you will see the goodness of God in the midst of everything.

I have been hesitant to write about this for a while, mainly because I was very much still in process and it was just too raw. Not that I’m through it all, but I do feel like at this point, the Lord has brought me to a new place, a place where I can write with honesty and hope.

Where do I start? To be honest, I am not quite sure. I’m not sure there ever is a good place to start a conversation like this, because you see, I do not like conflict. I do not like to rock the boat or unsettle the waters, or do anything that will cause people to think less of me. Yet here goes, for the sake of living in honestly and truth, for the sake of showing how God is in the hard places, and hopefully for the eventual healing of someone else who is going through similar things.

You see….. last October, just a few months after moving to Colorado, Jon and I started having some very honest and tearful conversations that essentially unsettled just about every piece of me that could be unsettled. My marriage of nearly 25 years was suddenly shifting in a way that I NEVER saw coming. Nothing was right, tension and internal conflict began to rule my life, and fear took hold in a way that it never had before. Jon had reached a point in dealing with some things in his past that brought him to truth he could not admit to in the previous 25 years: he was gay, and he wanted to live as a gay man, which meant he wasn’t sure he could stay married.

[Bomb dropped].

Those are words no one ever wants to hear: I love you, but I have to leave. It didn’t make sense. All of a sudden, my world came crashing down. Everything I had looked forward to at this stage in our lives suddenly slipped away in that moment, and I was left with questions like I’m sure some of you, or some one you know, has asked at one time or another, whether due to divorce or loss of someone close:

Why, God?

Isn’t there any other way?

Nothing about this seems right.

What am I supposed to do?

How am I ever going to recover from this?

What am I supposed to give my life to now, if the love of my life is gone?

I had prayed over, fought for, and delighted in our marriage for nearly 25 years. So had Jon. We loved each other, we were best friends, and we thoroughly enjoyed the family we had built together.

I was faced with two choices:

Fight. Refuse to give in, hold him to the vow he made. This is what I wanted to do so badly, yet I knew to do that would be controlling, and he would resent me for it. On top of that, I would most likely add to the damage he had already experienced (that is a whole other part of the story).

Or, I could willingly let him go to be who he needed to be, living openly and honestly as a gay man.

I can still remember the exact place in our neighborhood where, on a run, I realized the only choice I could make was to let him go, and agree to dissolve our marriage. I cannot tell you how much that decision hurt. There are no words to describe the pain. I think I spent another half hour crying, having a panic attack for the first time in my life, and calming down before returning home.

Needless to say, we had many tearful conversations in the months between October and December, about what this meant and how we would tell family and friends. Some of those things I will be sharing, some I will not be. It was difficult for both of us, really. Jon was painfully aware of how his request, his decision, was hurting his best friend in the entire world. I felt lost and numb. Jon was hurting too, in his own way, over past abuse and shame, and having to hide this part of himself all these years. The hardest part was probably that we had always been there for each other, and I desperately wanted to be there for him in his pain, but how could I, when it only brought more to my own life? So we started the dance of finding the boundaries. We found our own support groups to talk about what we were processing. Hard doesn’t even touch it.

This is where, as a person of faith, I knew had a choice. I could turn inward and not let people around me know what was going on, or I could risk telling people close to me, and face the fear and shame that was growing in my head every day. This is where I knew, even with all our family had already gone through due to mental health issues, I had to choose whether or not I could still believe that God was still good, that His promise to sustain me and never leave me was still true when life hurt like hell. That hope still had a place, when all the hopes I had moved out to Colorado with seemed to just have come up empty.

If you have ever known loss, you know what I’m talking about.

And you also know, there are really no words.

Let me just say… if you have been there before, if you are there right now, or you know someone else who is – my heart goes out to you in ways it never could before. I get it now. I’m sorry I never did before.

I’m sorry for being overly cheery, for what might have seemed to you like a shallow sense of hope. I am sorry for not knowing what to say, or saying too much and not just sitting with you in your pain. Believe me, I thought I had gone through the fire a few times already, but compared to this? yeah… compared to this, everything before was a walk in the park.

As I continued to cry out to the Lord, he began to put people around me to support me in ways that I never expected. It was more than humbling to go from the one that always helped others, to being the one who needed to ask for others to pray for me. I had to let them be “my people” – because I desperately needed the support.

But that’s what we are to be for each other, isn’t it? That’s where we have to walk knowing that sometimes God may seems silent to our cries, but He always shows up. Sometimes, it is in the face of a dinner invite from a new friend, or in the rustling of trees on a walk in the neighborhood. Sometimes it is a song that reminds you that joy may not be present for you now, but that the promise of joy is still there.

Times like these are where trust in the Lord, and who He is to you, are forged in the fire.

And what I can tell you, what I can promise you, is that you are NEVER, EVER alone.

Tama