WONDER WOMAN

“You can let it go, you know.” Her eyes gazing into my soul.

“Whatever you’re carrying around in there, you can let go of it. Just get it out”

She kept looking at me, waiting for me to unburden myself of whatever it was she was sensing I was carrying around.

My mind was spinning, calculating the risk of having this conversation. She knew I had something hidden in the dark and she was inviting me to come out into the light.

Would she leave me? My kids are old enough to hate me. Would they reject me?

My shoulders slumped and I looked at her with concern. "Don't we need, I don't know, like a third party here for this? A pastor or a counselor or something?" I asked.

"I feel strong tonight” she replied. “Like I'm wearing a Wonder Woman suit. Let's do this"

And so it began.

The longest night of my life. The one I had lived in abject terror of for 17 years.

Babe, Meet me for lunch

Over the past year, MJ and I had grown closer than ever. Our relationship was better than it had ever been during our 17 years of marriage. Just 13 months prior, I’d had a profound spiritual encounter with Jesus Christ that flooded my soul with love and cut me free from the chains of sin and addiction. 

My spiritual awakening started me on a road of setting things right. For the first time in my life, I had hope that I could live a life free from the powers that had gripped me for so long. 

The dynamics of our marriage started to shift. As I began to live in the light, my relationship with my MJ and our children started flourishing.

I began to tell her about a dark season in my life 10 years ago, where I had fallen and broken my vows to her. God’s Spirit pulled me forward into truth in a way that felt inevitable, and I faced my fears by revealing one small part of my story.

Again, my confession was met with grace and mercy. And strength. An unbelievable, supernatural strength.

That night after we got home we kept talking. So much pain and so much beauty swirled around us as I revealed some of the shameful and painful details of my past. MJ gently encouraged me to just come clean about everything. Just get it out there.

She knew there were still things I hadn't told her, but I couldn't find the way forward that night. I told her "honey, I have more I need to tell you, but I can't see my way forward tonight. I promise you that I will tell you everything as soon as I can see the path. I think it will be soon. Are you willing to walk down that road with me?"

We held each other tight and looked into each other’s eyes. I could see the pain and fear in her eyes and I could feel it in my soul. But there was something else there too.

Hope.

A hope that perhaps whatever was on the other side of this hell was something more like heaven. That perhaps, as I walked the path of truth and love that I would become the trustworthy lover that her heart had always longed for.

She promised me that she would wait for me and walk down that path when I'm ready, and I gave her my word that the moment that I had the courage and clarity to speak all of the truth, I would do so. It wouldn't take long.

The next day was Friday. We watched a movie with the kids after dinner, put them to bed, and sat down to relax and catch up. I'd had a busy day at the office, so I hadn't thought a lot about our conversation the night before, or where to go from here. As we sat down to talk that night though, the reality of what we were facing started to weigh on me.

She gently opened the door to the conversation the night before and assured me that when I was ready to go on, she was ready. She was supernaturally strong. She was filled with the Spirit and she perceived this as a 'Wonder Woman' suit that gave her the strength to walk right up to the door of my own private hell, knock on the door, and invite me to come out and play in the bright sunshine of the Kingdom.

My whole life I had hidden my sin. All the way back to pre-adolescence I had perceived myself as uniquely messed up, and I was ashamed. Here I was, staring down the barrel of a wholesale revelation of who I was to the person who had the power to destroy everything I held dear, and I felt strangely at peace about it.

THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE

Six months before, when I was wrestling with God over this issue of confession, I had come to the hard-won realization that He was sufficient for me. He had rescued me, pulled me out of the quicksand and put me on solid ground, and now He was beckoning me to speak the truth about who I had been. To speak the truth in love. To trust him with my story and fully align my life in His Love. I couldn't imagine a world that I would want to live in where the truth was known about my shame. But He wouldn't let me go.

"The truth will set you free," He said.

"I'm speaking the truth now. Isn't that enough?" I countered.

"Everything you need is on the other side of what you're most afraid of" He assured me.

"Take this cup from me" I agonized, my face buried in the rug as I lay in the middle of the living room at 3 am one morning. I couldn't bear the thought of being exposed, of facing my family. "What if I lose them, God? What if she leaves and the kids hate me?"

"If you lose everything, you still have me. I'm enough for you. I will sustain you through anything" He replied.

Early one morning I accepted him at His word and pledged to Him "Ok God, I can't see the path, but when I do, I'll walk down it. I trust you. Show me the way" Then I went to bed and slept like a baby.

FINDING THE PATH

By this point on Friday night, five months later, I knew He was showing me the path. The glimpses of glory and the intimacy that we had already experienced the past 48 hours gave me hope that we might survive this. It gave me just enough faith to take the next step.

After we tucked the kids into bed, we sat down together and picked up the conversation from the night before. She prodded me gently, assuring me that she felt strong and surrounded by God's love. I did too. 

I figured I’d start at 'the beginning' wherever that might be when you're trying to unravel 15 years of lies and nearly three decades of disordered behavior. She already knew about the porn, as we talked about that the night before. I decided to go back to 2004 to the first time that I really felt like things were slipping out of control.

The next six hours were surreal. It was the longest night of our lives. Together we walked up to the abyss. 

Together we took the plunge.

NOTHING BETWEEN US

I was determined to speak the truth as accurately as I could about my sin. It took me some time to figure out exactly what the truth was. 2004 was a long time ago and I had spent the intervening years trying to hide all this shit, so it was buried pretty deep.

So we talked. And wept. And prayed. At times we just clung to each other in silence too wrecked to speak. We would stare deeply into each other's eyes, praying that we could keep seeing each other's heart as we faltered through the valley of the shadow of death.

She saw my contrition. I don't think I had a defensive bone in my body. I was all in. No point in going halfway. I didn't know how I was going to get through all of it, but I knew I was going all the way through.

Over the past year, I'd grappled with the cost I had paid and would pay for my sin. I was learning just how destructive it had been for me to live a lie for all those years. Like the foolish man in Matthew 7:26, I'd built my house on sand. And just like in verse 27, it was falling with a crash.

What had I been thinking? In my blinded and lost state, I had convinced myself that I could bend the fabric of reality to suit me. That I could somehow avoid the pain of transformation by numbing out and creating an alternate reality. A reality where temporary pleasure-seeking short-circuited my very sense for meaning. One thing I learned: nobody gets away with anything. Be sure your sin will find you out and all that.

Now that I had staked my life on the Ground of Being itself, I was starting to see that the only way to set things right was to go all-in on the truth. learned that if I was careful, I could at least not lie and it had become clear to me that when I lived this way, things got radically better in ways I hadn't predicted across a number of dimensions.

For the next six hours, from the least shameful revelation to the most, I unpacked 15 years of hell in high definition. Finally at 4:00 am, exhausted but feeling more alive than ever, I looked at MJ and said "that's it. There's nothing more. There's nothing between us."

I had wandered through the years as we talked as each new revelation brought fresh questions. For MJ, it was like missing puzzle pieces were dropping into place, completing a picture she that she didn't know had been incomplete, but now seemed so clear.

We talked about the strip clubs, massage parlors, and the illicit sex. All of it, in as much detail as I could recall.

FRODO AND SAM

I worked my way through the years haltingly, as the sheer horror of it all gripped me, shaking me to my core. At times it felt like I physically couldn't go on. We were both so shattered.

At each interval when it felt like I had hit some emotional wall and couldn't go on we prayed together. Simple, earnest prayers. Nothing fancy. Just show us the way. Give us strength. We're all in.

A spark of hope would light the way and I'd soldier on.

Like Frodo, in Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, I was carrying the ring across Middle Earth to destroy it in the fires of Mordor. It was like Frodo said, "I will take the Ring to Mordor, though I do not know the way."

MJ was my Samwise Gamgee. Sam was Frodo's loyal sidekick who faced danger and death to travel by Frodo's side and make sure he reached his quest. As Frodo suffered under the burden of the ring he bore, he came to a point where he couldn't physically go on. He was just done. The burden was too heavy. His steadfast friend Samwise Gamgee picked him up and carried him and his burden, saying "I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you".

Between the prayers, the sobs, the questions, and answers, MJ's love, strength, and mercy carried me. At one point as I sat with my head bent low in grief, she grabbed me and pulled me close, wrapping her arms around me and held me as my shoulders shook with sobs. When I looked up into her eyes, she held my face and drew me close. Looking deep into my eyes she said "Patrick I'm so sorry you had to carry this burden for so long. I'm so sorry." And then we embraced and wept together.

I mean… who says that under these conditions?

What kind of love is this?

What kind of God is this?

SITTING IN THE ASHES

Finally, at 4 am that Saturday morning, we sat in the middle of a pile of ashes. The people we had been a mere 48 hours earlier had been immolated in a roaring, cleansing fire. What was going to rise out of these ashes? Who would we be when we rose out of that destruction? 

As I gazed into MJ's eyes I knew that she might ask me to leave. Even if just for a while, I had steeled myself for that eventuality. 

As she looked deeply into my eyes, I could see that she had made a decision. She was all in on love and all in on the truth. She was all in on God. We were looking at each other with the clear, bright, guileless eyes of children. We knew we had a long road ahead of us, but we knew we would make it.

Love would prevail.

Aftermath

We spent the following day in Nashville, just the two of us, deep in conversation. It was as if the heat of the fire had burned away so much of the ego and false self that we built over the years and we were finding out in a new way why we had fallen so madly in love 18 years ago.

The next day, Sunday, we agreed that we wanted and needed close friends to walk with us through the next few weeks and months. We needed someone that knew everything and could support us as we healed. 

Paul and Nikki. Paul had been a huge influence in my life in the few short years of our friendship. He had invited me to come to Journey Church with him, where I had my encounter with Christ the prior year. We asked if we could come over and of course, they invited us over. We sat with them and recounted the events of the last few days in detail. We cried and prayed together and committed to walking together on this journey.

FEAR AND HOPE

The following months were some of the most intense of my life. As we began to rebuild our marriage, MJ and I leaned into healing in a way we never had before.

Our commitment to each other was simple. We would walk in a confessional relationship with each other where we spoke the truth about our greatest fears and our greatest hopes. What we most wanted and what we most feared. The truth about our affections, lusts, and desires. We'd hold space for each other, without shame, seeking only to listen and understand and respond in love. We believed that if we spoke the truth in love, that something good would have to come from that. 

We spent so much time talking that the kids started missing us. A quick trip to the grocery store would end with us sitting in the driveway in conversation for two hours. 

The grief would come in waves over the next few weeks. We didn’t try to avoid it. Our commitment held firm as we created the space for healing. When MJ lashed out in pain, hurling insults as she peeled back another layer of pain, I received it without shame and without talking back. 

One thing became clear. God’s promise of new life after death was becoming evident in our lives. The pain of transformation was great, but I was learning to trust and walk forward into that pain rather than try to avoid it. In the depths of that pain I found that God’s promise was true. Christ was sufficient.

WHY THIS STORY?

Why do we share this story? Our hope is that our story can provide hope and encouragement to couples who are hurting or struggling. We want to point people to the everlasting hope, Jesus Christ. His love so radically changed our lives and set me free from the sin that enslaved me. Christ’s presence was so evident living in MJ as she walked through her deep pain that I caused with my betrayal.

As we awaken to Christ’s love for us we are delivered from fear, and shame. Jesus lifted me from a place of shame to a place of honor in the Kingdom. He continues to transform MJ and I and the kids as well as we seek to live like Jesus. We have so much peace in our life.

We’re telling our story because it’s a story that reminds us that there is life after death and that love is more powerful than fear and shame.

MORE TO COME

There's so much more we want to share with you. Things we’re learning about God as MJ and I pursue Him with our whole hearts. It's been anything but easy. And anything but boring. But there are some really sweet spots too.

We want to tell you the story of the night we shared our story with our kids and what we learned about God that night. We want to share with your some of the practices and resources that have sustained us and helped us heal. There’s so much we’re looking forward to sharing here!

MJ is going to join me in writing here as well, so you’ll get her perspective on our journey and what she’s learning. In fact, the next post here will be her side of the story, and why she chose forgiveness in the midst of realizing her worst fears were coming true.

Three things we’d love for you to do:

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Below are some pictures capturing some of the emotions we processed as we shared the day together in Nashville the morning after the confession.

Thank You

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. We appreciate you and would love to hear from you.

Are there things in your life that you’ve always feared looking at?

Our prayer is that you allow the light of God’s love to flood your soul, all the way in to the darkest parts and that it would give you courage to face the dragons in your own life.

In the Genesis account of creation, we see that Creator God faced the chaos of potential, the dark nothingness, and He spoke creation into being with truthful and loving speech. Each time that He did, he said “It is good”.

God says we (man and woman alike) are made in His image. Perhaps that’s how we’re to live our lives, like Him. Confronting the potential and chaos of our days with truthful and loving speech, in faith believing that if we do so, that the outcome of that will be ‘good’.