Retrospection… part 2

part 1 is here

Where was God in all this? This was His Church, right? This isn’t supposed to happen in church! Then I thought why the heck were we so open in the first place with our problems. If we had just kept everything to ourselves and not told a soul we’d be better off, I thought. But that went against the grain of the route we had taken to restore our marriage. Complete openness and honesty was a key in our restoration. Why would being open and honest with God’s people cause such a backlash against us?

It has taken quite a bit of time and analysis to try to figure out the answer to this question and others. To date this is what I figure. My husband and I have a relationship. We love each other. We loved each other before all our problems surfaced. We turned towards each other and grabbed hold of our life again and were able to build a stronger relationship than ever before.

These elements were not present in our relationship with the church. Quite frankly, I don’t even think it is possible to have a relationship with a church. Think about it. A church… what is it? A building? A group of people that know each other simply by what day of the week the calendar says it is? Or by what kind of doctrine the church ascribes to? We were amiable with many people but we didn’t have deep loving relationships. The deepest we ever went with anyone was when we started telling our story to some of the couples.

We were told early on that others did not need to know our struggles, but it didn’t take long before we found ourselves feeling isolated. I thought we needed to talk to someone. Resources that I had read indicated that openness and honesty was the best policy for recovery. After being encouraged on several fronts to talk, we did. It seemed like the right thing to do. Our thinking was that by being open and honest it would help others to do the same. If we could have problems of this sort, certainly others were having similar issues. We might be able to help avert other disasters. “If this can happen to us, it can happen to anyone.”

It was not clear in my mind who was to be trusted and who was not. I know now that we put ourselves in an extremely vulnerable position. I was never certain that our openness was the right approach. I knew it was a risk. I also knew that forgiving was risky but it was paying off in my marriage. Helping others would be worth it I thought.

Because of the gossip and the feelings of isolation and shunning (whether this was intended or not, it was real to us), we slowly became disillusioned with the whole process. Without resolution we left the church that we had attended for 12 years.