Thank you for sharing this Rick; praying for a return to good health as we need your voice and experience!

I answered Christ’s call when I was 32, 32 years ago! It’s been a journey. Coming to Christ later in life and having been redeemed from the crazy choices I made in my 20s has really helped me to process my husband’s unfaithfulness. I made a lot of really bad choices in my younger years and they never brought me peace or happiness, in fact just the opposite. Choosing to marry my husband was the best decision of my life, and for 22 of our 26 years of marriage he was faithful and loyal.
About 3 weeks before D-day I felt like I was in a spiritual desert of my own making. I was living life distant from God and felt unprepared for any future battles, my armor had grown rusty. So I started a daily year long bible study and podcast called the Bible Recap - so good! For about 3 weeks I did this every morning, in fact the morning my husband confessed I was in the middle of Job. Coincidence? I think not. So many moments after that terrible day I thought about Job’s suffering. I’m sure like me he said to God, “I’m your servant and I’ve been following you faithfully, how could you allow this in my life?” I spent about 5 minutes angry at God, but I knew He never promised me an easy life, He just promised He wouldn’t forsake me. I’m so thankful that He’s been close, not distant from me in the last few months. I’m so glad I answered the call of the Holy Spirit to seek after God again and know Him better through His word. I believe it was the Holy Spirit at work that brought about the discovery of the infidelity. The Holy Spirit dwelling in me is the same Holy Spirit dwelling inside of my husband; He wasn’t going to allow the life-killing actions of my husband to continue. I didn’t know it, but my husband had come to a place of hopelessness and was praying he’d die on the job (he’s a firefighter/EMT).
Fast forward 4.5 months. My husband and I are in a good place. We’ve been seeing a great counselor 1-2 times a week, we’re on week 4 of EMSO, my trust in him is returning, every morning without fail we do the Bible study together, and we pray together multiple times throughout our day. My husband has taken full ownership of his actions and is grieving over his stupid decisions. I’ve forgiven him and we are reconciling. More importantly, I have changed. As I’ve become more intimate with God, I’m more intimate with my husband. I realize now how much I had pushed them both away in my woundedness. For years I isolated my heart from truly loving as I should have loved, I was deceiving myself. My part in the infidelity was in pushing my husband away, and he chose a destructive way to deal with the rejection. Even though I’m hurt to my core, I’m also experiencing a new found freedom in my relationship with both God and my husband.
I’ll end this lengthy reply with my favorite Oswald Chambers quote:
“The Spirit of God is always the spirit of liberty; the spirit that is not of God is the spirit of bondage, the spirit of oppression and depression.
The Spirit of God convicts vividly and tensely, but He is always the Spirit of liberty.
God who made the birds never made birdcages; it is men who make birdcages, and after a while we become cramped and can do nothing but chirp and stand on one leg.
When we get out into God’s great free life, we discover that that is the way God meant us to live ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’.”