Rescue: to free from confinement, danger, or evil. 

I’m convinced, as is Samantha, my meltdown and the complete disintegration of our lives was a rescue. If you subscribe to Christ and a Christian worldview, it’s easy to believe it was God rescuing us. Should you subscribe to a different approach to life and an alternative worldview, you too would see the hand of fate reaching out to rescue us from where we were heading. Looking back, with each year that went by, we were picking up speed in the wrong direction and I had my foot on the gas.

Just yesterday I was taken by the fact that it really was our lives, and our marriage and our future being apprehended from where we could have ended up. More than likely another divorce and another broken family in the string of shattered marriages I grew up watching and suffering the effects of.

The dysfunction Samantha and I were a part of and the lifestyle we were living wasn’t built to last at any level, and I think she’d agree she was dying inside. She was dying slowly, and more and more hatred was brewing inside of her for our lifestyle, for our marriage and for me.

The timing of my affair becoming public could not have been timelier for all things considered. Sure my kids were young, my youngest just a few weeks old. Honestly, at the time it was hard to imagine it being any worse than it was. There were several nights I wallowed in my tears and suicidal thoughts about how painful it was and how the timing of it was ripping our lives apart at the very core.

But it could have been far worse.

To say the affair becoming public and being exposed was God rescuing us is hard for some to swallow. But make no mistake, my affair was not anyone’s fault but mine. Sure Samantha had some weaknesses and struggles and this and that. But it was my fault indeed that the affair even happened and lasted as long as it did. God allowed it, but never designed it.

I wished I could have ended it on my own time and time again so that it never had to come out. But it did. Had things gone the way I was planning them in my head, for no one to ever know it had happened, to go on living the exact same lie, would not have rescued our marriage or me. I’d have remained the self-absorbed, narcissistic person I was several years ago.

I’d like to ask you all to consider the possibility that although things are probably more agonizing than you can put into words, perhaps in its own way, it’s a rescue.

Perhaps this is a freeing you from where you would have been headed?

I could be dead wrong and I get that.

For me, and for others that have experienced the same phenomenon, my breakdown was a rescue from where we were headed.

I hope you allow yourself to be rescued today, both betrayed and unfaithful.