Genuine Christian Recovery

A woman recently learned her husband had been engaging in affairs with many partners over a number of years. The woman was blindsided by this revelation. She was understandably traumatized, shaken and grasping for help. There is more to this story, of course, but you get the idea.

As the couple have been long active in their church, the woman went to the pastoral leadership of the congregation. Their response was to immediately engage the couple in counseling with the announced agenda of ‘God saving the marriage’.

Let’s be clear there is a distinct positive in the pastoral leadership’s response. They are not banishing the man who has engaged in hurtful, destructive behavior or turning their backs on the  victimized spouse. Nor are they doing both, as too often happens. This is really good. Why?

Many of those in church leadership aren’t trained to deal with the varieties of compulsive or repetitive sexual behaviors that befall marriages. The consequences are often relationally messy. We don’t really know what a couple in this situation needs.

And church leadership often has a tendency to avoid prolonged messes. It’s easier to find ways to send people way rather than get down in the mess with them to help.

So it’s good that the church leadership are trying to help this couple.

However.

As well-intentioned as their agenda (God save this marriage) might be, it is decidedly not the path of wisdom.

When a couple is experiencing this level of hurt, betrayal and devastating consequences, a lot of change is needed.

Change is possible. But change of this required magnitude is not easy and not quick.

Change cannot really happen if the goal is restore this marriage rather than change these patterns.

Healing is always the goal of recovery. And healing is one of the primary benefits of the Gospel.

But assigning ‘save this marriage’ as the primary goal of healing gives this couple’s recovery a focused agenda that almost always causes absolutely essential work to be bypassed.

The pressure then is to behave as if restoration is possible without doing the work required. And that means genuine healing won’t happen.

Before reconciliation is even an option, a great deal of work needs to be done, and a significant portion of that work is the husband’s responsibility.

He must face all of his behaviors and the accrued consequences. He must give an account of and own his choices and the havoc they have caused. This isn’t to be punitive. This is the path required for genuine healing.

He must also do the hard work of discovering just how he came to live a life of repeated deception and abuse of others. Most likely this work includes a thorough confrontation of his upbringing and the dynamics in his family of origin. This is not to shift the blame of his behaviors, but to understand how it is he got here.

He has to learn who he really is, how he sees himself in the world and in relationships, how his personality works. What has he ignored in his own needs? In what ways has he misused others--or allowed others to misuse him--to meet those needs?

Finally--remember this is a Christian couple--he must confront how he compartmentalized his faith from his behavior. What does he need to change in his view of God? How does he  understand his actual identity as a child of God? He has to rediscover a workable faith that will help him live a genuinely integrated life.

This is all hard work. It will take effort and guidance and time. Making the goal ‘save the marriage’ is a short cut. There are no short cuts.

The wife must do her own work. It too is hard work. And it is not fair to her, but if she wants to live a relatively healthy life, again there are no short cuts.

She must learn the depth of what has been done without her awareness or permission and what all the ramifications are. She must assess and address all the myriad effects of this psychological, sexual, emotional and possibly physical trauma.

Eventually she will need to forgive him, a necessity for her own healing. But forgiveness is not easy and it is not quick. And forgiveness does not automatically that mean reconciliation.

This is the path of her own healing. Again, it’s not fair. But there is no short cut. It’s the work required for her own healing.

Then, and only then, will she be able to recognize and consider what the Spirit of Truth is actually leading her to do next. And the same is actually true of the husband: only after he’s done his work can he pursue a path of spiritual health and appropriate choices.

Again, this is messy, and we don’t like mess. It takes time and we like things resolved quickly, not slowly.

But it’s the path of wisdom. It is the path of Grace and Incarnation. It is exactly what our loving God has done.

God does not decree our healing from a distance. The Spirit of our God comes and does life with us in the middle of our messes.

In the twenty-first chapter of John’s Apocalypse, the Eternal, Risen Christ says, “Behold, I am making all things new.” A wonderful, true assertion. One that inspires and sustains.

He is and he does. And students of the Risen One note that he takes his time, and he does it his way. tr