In the healing for our marriage that followed the 18 days, a confronting thought came to me.  “What’s it like to be married to me?”

I realized I’d spent all this time prior to the break concerned about Jana’s heart, her character and how she wasn’t meeting my needs, expectations, or frankly, my demands.  I thought, wouldn’t we have a great marriage if she’d just change a little?

Jerk.  I know.  I really operated from that mindset.

Then, I flipped it around.  The question rattled around my head and I started considering my own level of selfishness, the attitudes of my heart, my own issues and what I was bringing to the relationship.  I realized I could only control my own thoughts and actions.  I couldn’t control her.  I realized I needed to work on my own heart and character, and spend more time considering how I could love her well and meet her needs, best I could.

Tim Keller sums this thought up well, in his book, The Meaning of Marriage:

The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s.  Why?  Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it.  So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to “give yourself up.”  You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it’s revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing.  If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.

 

I read a fair amount of recovery literature both before and after the 18 days, met with counselors, went to a bunch of groups, worked through the 12 steps, the steps to freedom in Christ, and more, all helpful.  While there’s value in all the different books, theories and practices designed to set guys free from porn, there was one thing that stood out from the rest.

In the early 2000s, I was in a weekly class led by John Dee.  One night John was teaching about how God changes people’s names in scripture, and talked about the promise of a name given in Revelation 2:17 – “I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.”  John challenged, “Ask God for your name.  Let’s do it right now.”

I was beyond skeptical about this.
I decided to do what John asked anyway, even if he was crazy.
And, immediately, I heard – Faithful.

I was still in the thick of acting out.  Something was stirring in me spiritually for sure, but I was so far from being what I would call Faithful.  I was weak and half-hearted, with little desire to actually be free, hanging on to the addiction.  I was still lying and manipulating and coping to make my world work with Jana.  The word that God used, this new name, was not what I would have called me.

And yet.  As I argued with God about how wrong he was about this name Faithful, he began to argue back that this is the way he saw me, and that he knew he would get me there.  Yes, actualization of this promise took another decade, but that was my problem and not his.  I had to see myself differently, I needed a different identity that would drive new belief and thus new behavior.  Shame and condemnation weren’t getting me there.  God’s confidence in me and the hope and grace he extended, were what I needed.

Take a risk.  Ask God for your name.  It may be your greatest fuel for change.

The first weekend of the 18 days I decided to fast, to hear from God.  I really knew nothing of hearing his voice at that point, but I was desperate.  After moving out based on consequences around porn, my world was turned upside down.  I had nothing.  I needed him and didn’t really know how to get to him.

I had heard my friend Kate LeBoeuf teach about fasting, and it was different than anything I’d run into up to that point.  She challenged that rather than asking God for a specific outcome in a fast, we might rather ask for our heart to be a “yes” to whatever God had to say or wanted to do.

The weekend dragged on, I journaled, cried, begged, pleaded, got pissed about not eating, and essentially did everything but hear his voice.  I was super frustrated.  Then Sunday night, I heard “never will I leave you, never will I forsake you”.  (from Hebrews 13:5b)  It felt like my thinking, the sub-vocalization much like my own thoughts.  But the quality of it was different, and I knew it wasn’t my thought, but his.

The next time I saw our counselor, I was a little disappointed about the whole thing, “yeah, I fasted all weekend and all I got was this crummy verse.”  He re-directed my thinking.  “The God of the universe spoke to you and you’re whining?”  He helped me see that this thought from God, his promise to never abandon me, was just the thing I needed to keep going.  I was not sure at that point if I could actually change, or if I could save my marriage, or what would happen next.  But one thing I did know.  God was there, God was here, and he wasn’t going away.

Lesson 4?  We have a conversational God, who’s speaking all the time, and it’s worth taking the time to hear his voice.  He says in Psalm 139:18 “how many are my thoughts concerning you, like the grains of sand on the sea.”  He’s thinking about you all the time.  He also says, in John 10:27, “my sheep hear my voice and they follow.”  He wants to talk to you, for you to hear from him.  It might take a little practice, some false start beginnings like mine, but it will be worth it.  Start by crediting every thought you have that takes you to him, as being from him.  Every time you sing the lines of a worship song, it’s him pulling you back to him and speaking to you.  Every time a scripture fires in your thoughts, or you’re struck by simple beauty in nature.  Start with “yes”, say thank you, and then ask for more.

The second weekend of the 18 days, Jana headed out of town with the girls.  I decided to do a little work at the house.  A friend challenged me, “Don’t do a bunch of work around the house to impress her, if your heart is not in it.”  He nailed me.  My heart wasn’t in it.  I just wanted to serve her to win points for myself.

One of the jobs I picked was to clean the grout on our kitchen floor.  I took a pass at it, with high powered chemical and a broom, no change on the first go.  Cleaned it a second time, it looked slightly better.  “Well, I tried,” and throwing in the towel, decided to clean up the tools in the sink.  I dropped a brush, and as I bent down to pick it up, I slipped on the still wet floor.  The brush wiped one section of the grout clean.  Now there was one clean line of grout in a sea of grey.  “Crap,” I said out loud (actually, probably a different word, starting with an “f”) as I realized I would now have to get down on my hands and knees and clean the whole thing to have it match this new clean line.

Lesson Three is something like this – I had an opportunity to break free, to abandon the porn addiction, and do something about myself and my relationship, to save my marriage.  But I didn’t really want to do the work.  Laziness and procrastination had plagued my marriage. Porn offered quick and easy answers. I was one of the guys looking to get well who was also looking for it to be easy.  I had all the tools, just like when I was cleaning the floor, but I had to actually do the work. Getting down on my hands and knees, humbling myself, was a big part of me getting well. This is where God could really speak.  This is where he could begin to sing over me and I could actually hear it.  That night as I was working, I heard John Mayer’s In Repair and I realized I was ready to get started.

 

In Repair

Too many shadows in my room
Too many hours in this midnight
Too many corners in my mind
So much to do to set my heart right

Oh, it’s taken so long
I could be wrong, I could be ready
Oh, but if I take my heart’s advice
I should assume it’s still unsteady
I am in repair
I am in repair

Stood on the corner for a while
To wait for the wind to blow down on me
Hoping it takes with it my old ways
And brings some brand new luck upon me

And now I’m walking in the park
And all of the birds, they dance below me
Maybe when things turn green again
It will be good to say you know me

I’m never really ready, yeah
I’m in repair
I’m not together, but I’m getting there

Songwriters: John Clayton Mayer / Sidney Charlie Hunter
In Repair lyrics © Reach Music Publishing

 

 

Jesus asks this question, “Do you want to get well?” in John 5:6.  I admit that my answer to that question was “no” for a lot of years.  I got pretty good at walking in hypocrisy.

Across the first 18 years of my marriage, the porn addiction would blow up about every 2 years, and I’d act all sincere about getting help, but all I wanted to do was get Jana and others off my back.  I learned enough about recovery to sound like I was doing the work, introspective and vulnerable, really ready this time to do something different.  But I liked my sin, and wasn’t ready for a break up.

In 2007-2008, I spent a year walking through 12 step material from Doug Weiss.  A friend led a group and shepherded me in this process, and part of the work was to establish consequences that would fire at the next round of acting out.  Reviewing this with Jana, we decided at that time that if I acted out again, I would move out.  That’s exactly what happened in 2009, the start of the 18 days.

Lesson 2 would be, I was not ready to actually do the work to get well until my consequences were significant enough.  Up to that point, I knew I could hang on to the life I wanted and hang onto the addiction.  When I faced losing my family, I got serious about change.

Ten years ago Jana and I went through the toughest season of our marriage – we call it the 18 days.  Over the last three weeks, she and I have been remembering the milestones: what was happening then, where we are now, and how breakthrough happened.

I heard someone say recently, “Your best chance for success in marriage is to stay in the one you’re in.”  I did my best to blow mine up repeatedly in the first 18 years, primarily by hanging onto a porn addiction.

I can’t tell this whole story in a single post.  For today, I just want to open the conversation and say for if you’re ready to quit on your marriage, there’s hope.  If God could work a redemption story for us, I know he can do it for anyone.

One of the most important things we had going for us was that we were in community.  We had a few people, a few couples, that believed in us when we didn’t believe in ourselves, who kept pointing us back to the truth of God’s love and grace, who offered listening ears as well as the solid guidance that we needed.

Lesson 1 would be, am I willing to invite other people into my mess?  Am I willing to get honest about what is really going on?