The Peace That Wasn’t Peace
When I first learned of my husband’s affair, I was not able to fully process the enormity of the consequences of his betrayal. Only after a few years of living through the fallout did I realize how nearly every facet of my life had been impacted. My challenge was not only to survive it, but to come out the other side without descending into bitterness and anger. It was not easy.
In the first few months of betrayal, I longed to return to the past, the days when we were happy and harmonious. I lied to myself, believing that counseling and ceaseless striving on my part could repair the damage to my self-image, my family, and the peace that had been stolen from me and my children.
Even before the divorce, I found that my ex was still adamant about being a part of my life. He would call and text and come over unannounced even after we had argued and officially separated. Sometimes it was difficult to get him to leave. He tried to maintain the same banter with me, almost like he too wished we could turn back the dials of the clock and return to that simpler time. I had tried to set up boundaries, but wavered. I wanted to make everything all right again too, more than anything.
But it felt dishonest. A grenade had detonated our lives; we couldn’t pretend it never happened. As a Christian who had been taught to seek forgiveness when wronged and to see mercy as ultimate righteousness before God, I saw his attempts at emotional closeness as a sign of repentance. I wanted him to be sorry for what he had done, to believe that he wanted to make what he destroyed whole again, but I had mistaken repentance for normalization.
The reality did not change. He never apologized. He didn’t stop his relationship with the other woman. What he did was actively seek closeness and intimacy with me. It was confusing. I desperately wanted to believe that he was sorry that his heart had chosen me. As months passed, and I slowly tried to rebuild my life, I began to see that the pattern of his behavior remained the same despite the pretty words. If he didn’t really want to restore what was broken, what did he want from me? Why couldn’t he leave me alone?
The prophet Jeremiah phrased the behavior this way: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”
Those who stray from what they know is right often want to soften the reality of their destructive choices. This is a softening of sin, and it is both dangerous and deadly. They want peace for themselves. But do they seek peace for you?
Real change in a person’s life is centered in repentance, the ability to admit we are wrong and to desire change even at the cost of our reputation and self-image. Real repentance does not happen to please others, but from the realization that we can’t live at peace with ourselves in our current state. The repentant sinner lives in acute awareness of the hurt and destruction they cause to themselves and the ones they love. They desire to change that.
For women who value their marriage, the temptation to hold the door open even to an unrepentant spouse can feel overwhelming. We desperately want to fix what’s broken. But it is not our job to do the work for another person. We are not opening the door to peace, but to chaos. We are allowing our spouse to normalize the pain and suffering they caused just to keep a veneer of peace.
What I realized at the end of that difficult season leading to my divorce was that my ex didn’t love me in the way a wife, a partner should be loved. He had made some sort of allowance for himself where he could continue his affair and still keep his family and wife. It worked for him, but not for me. The pain of his choice to sleep with someone else was almost beyond what I could tolerate. The pain was even sharper because his mixed messages wouldn’t allow me to fully close the door and move forward with my life. If he loved me with godly love, how could he do that?
I would never argue that we should hold back forgiveness from anyone, even those who are actively sinful in their behavior, but we should remove ourselves from the path of their destruction. This was the lesson I learned from that difficult twilight between marriage collapse and divorce. How could I forgive a man if I allowed him to freshly wound me every day? This was the challenge of not removing myself from the source of injury and destruction. I was not able to forgive while it kept me in the fire.
Forgiveness comes from a place of reflection, a place of perspective, and clear-headedness, not from chaos and confusion. I have explored this theme for the past few years in my novels. The quest for true forgiveness has been at the heart of my own spiritual journey.
Many Christian women stay in the fire of destructive relationships even as they burn and hurt themselves. They want to believe that when a man seeks closer relationship and intimacy it is the same as being sorry, even when the hurtful behavior continues. The same hurt women yet again absorb the cost of that one way intimacy. God wants our discernment, not blind sacrifice. He does not require martyrdom, but faithfulness. Jeremiah tells us that God’s intent is to prosper us, and He desires what is good for us. Realizing that I was worthy of this kind of love helped me not just to survive, but to thrive.
