Abuse is not the end of the story… God is still writing

My story does not end there…

Many of you have been reading my saga of surviving an abusive marriage (part 1, part 2, and part 3).

Some of you might be in the middle of your own saga.

If you are…  I want to encourage you that wherever you are in your story, I promise you, it does not end there.

Many of us thought that my first marriage would be redeemed and resurrected.

It was not.

But I was.

God resurrected my heart from the grave and put it back together. It took a long time. So long, in fact, that if God had told me it was going to take that long, I probably would have abandoned my search for healing in the middle of the journey.

God made my life complete
when I placed all the pieces before him.
When I got my act together,
he gave me a fresh start.
Now I’m alert to God’s ways;
I don’t take God for granted.
Every day I review the ways he works;
I try not to miss a trick.
I feel put back together,
and I’m watching my step.
God rewrote the text of my life
when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes. Ps 18.20-24 MSG

I had a lot of support in this healing journey.

A church community. Solid friends who were also seeking healing and healthy relationships and who were chasing hard after the heart of God.

A nine-week intervention called Time to Fly that catapulted me into a three year healing process and surrounded me with a network of Godly women that undergird my life to this day with prayer and community.

Trauma healing. Specifically – EMDR, creative imaging, and ego-state therapy in the form of DNMS (huh? Go to the links friends 🙂 )

God was the ultimate Healer of my heart. I had to meet him where He wanted me to be, however, in order to BE healed.

An insane amount of prayer, fasting, obedience, falling on my face and getting up again, and more prayer. I devoured the Word of God. Literally. I pressed into God. I cried. I laughed. I learned to trust again.

I discovered myself. I figured out what I liked, what I did not like.

I learned to trust MYSELF again and discovered that I was a pretty good read on people when I took the time to listen to my heart.

I made a list of things I wanted to see in a husband and gave the list to God to fulfill on His time.

I did not die to my desire to be married again, to find love again, but I left that desire in God’s hands and trusted Him for the timing.

Almost eight years later, I met the man who is now my sweet husband.

He loves God and is willing to work on our marriage. He is forgiving and kind and has a heart for peace and reconciliation. He likes to hang out and watch “our shows” together.

He is a man of integrity who has a heart to love others as he has been loved.

John was worth the wait.

But even if God had not given me John, God gave me Himself and has allowed me to understand some of the fullness of Divine Love. And in that receiving from God, I have learned how to allow myself to be loved by John.

By learning how God loves me, I can see John’s attempts to love me too.

By learning how to love God, I am learning how to love my husband.

And in knowing the magnificence of God’s love, even if I had never married again, God’s love would hold me.

So, this is the end of my story… for now.

Or maybe it is just the start of a new beginning.

Thank you for letting me share my heart and my journey… may God bless you wherever you are. May you know that if you have chosen to give your heart and life to God, you serve a redemptive God who wants a redeemed future for you. He is with you wherever you are and will restore the years you have lost…

I will restore the years the locusts have eaten… Joel 2.25