After five years of marriage, my husband confessed he had committed adultery with countless other men since our wedding day.
Paul and I met not too long after I finished college. I had gone to a Bible Study, and the moment I saw him I knew he would be my husband. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but a calm sense of certainty and commitment that I have never doubted came from God. On our second date, however, a bombshell shattered my image of romance in Eden. At the bottom of the hiking trail he pointed out some people and said, “You see those people? They’re gay. And so am I.” Those were the last words spoken for the next two hours. There were millions of questions fighting for attention in those first few moments and decisions to make that would cement or destroy our relationship. The most important question was “What do I really believe?”
I was raised as a Christian, and knew what Christians believed, but what I believed seldom impacted what I felt and did. I was always the straight kid in our family – looking good and doing everything I should. But what no one saw was the dirty side of my life, the anger, fear, self-pity, and selfishness that drove a great performance. For all my outward appearance of innocence, my first experience with sexual contact began with my girlfriend in fifth grade while spending the night at her house. At the time I didn’t know what homosexual sex was, or even what sex was, but I knew what felt good. As I grew older and shifted my attention to boys, some form of physical contact measured all my dating relationships. But physical stimulation could never satisfy the desire for love and intimacy. I was constantly seeking reassurance that I was loved, and the more I sought to be loved the less I was able to love someone else. After jumping from one boyfriend to another, year after year, I finally reached the conclusion that I could never love anyone enough – I was selfish, unfaithful, and driven to find anyone who would make me feel loved and satisfied. I was so lonely I had to ask myself “What do I really believe?”
Sure I knew that Jesus died for the sins of the world, but that was not the same as understanding he died for the things I was so ashamed of. He died because of the sexual exploration I had done with my girlfriend. He died because of the promiscuity with my boyfriends. He died because of my selfish desire to be loved; the desire that motivated an endless search for the ultimate romance. He died for the times I did things I shouldn’t have done, and he died for the times I should have acted and didn’t. In other words, He died for all the things that were wrong in my life. That understanding brought my beliefs together with my personal experience – and I discovered Jesus died for me, a sinner.
I didn’t know if homosexuality was something that you were born with or grew into, but I did know that the Bible called it sin (Lev 18:22, Rom 1:24-27, 1 Cor 6:9-11) – the very thing Jesus had died for and the very thing I was guilty of. Scriptures tell us that all wrongdoing is sin, and that all sin has the same penalty and solution. When Paul told me about his struggle with homosexuality, I had to admit his struggle with sin was not so very different from my own. I had no question that Paul was seeking God with all his heart (Jer 29:13), and that God would not give up on His child (Deut 31:8). If I really believed Jesus died to conquer sin, then this sin was no different. Sooner or later the sin would have to go because sin cannot continue in the presence of a Holy God. We were married ten months later.
After five years of marriage, when I was pregnant with our second child, Paul announced he wanted a divorce and moved in with another man. He told me the longest he had remained faithful was eight months, and the number of partners he had was beyond count. At that time AIDS was dominating the media, and the news of his promiscuity was devastating. The Bible says, “Love bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things”, but could that really be what God wanted me to do in this situation? Sure God is supposed to love us that way, but for me to love someone that much when he had done this to me was crazy! How could I bear the rejection of his choosing a man over me? How could I believe anything he said after all the lies and deception? How could I hope our marriage could be restored after so much unfaithfulness? And most of all, how could I endure the risk of my children being infected with a disease like AIDS? If love never fails, was love enough to give me hope? Did I really believe God’s love for me was enough for me to love even through this?
Paul returned home shortly after he moved in with the other man. He had decided that the needs of his children were more important than serving his own selfish desires for sex, identity, freedom and pleasure. As noble as that motive was, it was not much of a reason on which to build a marriage. When he came home, it was like living with a complete stranger. The man I had known and loved no longer existed – someone who lied, cheated, and stole the sexual intimacy that should have been mine had replaced the man I married. Not only had the foundations of trust been violated, but he had put our children and me at physical risk as well. No matter how hard I tried to forgive and put the past behind me, forgiveness alone was not enough to restore our relationship. Although he claimed he no longer physically acted out in the homosexual lifestyle, he continued the pattern of emotional isolation, masturbation, and self-sufficiency whenever there was stress or conflict. As a result, Paul treated me more like an object than a person - an object that was the enemy of his desires, and the reminder of his failings. The emotional distancing, deception, and manipulative control continued.
I was confused by the fact that Paul wanted a man sexually. Was I not enough of a woman? Was I too masculine because I had short hair and didn’t like wearing dresses? How could he claim to love me when he was so cold and distant regarding my hurts and needs? If my competition were a woman, I would know how to measure myself, how I compared, and how I could fight back. But how could I compete against a man for my husband’s affection and intimacy? Fortunately, I learned that I couldn’t. If I had concentrated on comparing myself to the competition, I would have never understood my own identity in Christ (Gal 6:4, Eph 1). I needed to understand that identity – what made me valuable in God’s sight, to know who I was in Christ and what He wanted me to become. Whether my husband valued me or not, I needed to be a woman approved and accepted by my Lord. I needed to live the reality of my relationship with God in my own life, dealing with sin in my own life, walking in obedience, and living in hope personally, before I would have anything to offer Paul.
In order to re-establish trust in our relationship, I had to realize that all of us are utterly sinful. Ultimately, the one thing I could trust about Paul was that his sin would undoubtedly hurt me again – if not sexually, then financially, or with his time, or his priorities. While homosexuality was a huge issue, it was not the only manifestation of sin in our marriage. Nor did it take away the things that were good about our marriage; he was a wonderful father, good provider, and a great help around the home. Even though he often seemed jealous of my relationship with God, he was also my greatest supporter in becoming the woman God wanted me to be. Ultimately, my trust for security and hope had to be built on God and God alone, not Paul’s ability to live a righteous life (Micah 7:5-7). Likewise, trusting God meant that I would trust God’s ability (not mine!) to bring about a new creation in Paul, whether it was readily visible or not (2 Cor 5:17).
Over the next ten years God slowly began to make emotional and spiritual changes in Paul as he tried to assume the masculine identity he thought he lacked. Meanwhile God enrolled me in a special school where daily class work included forgiveness, submission, blessing those who persecute you, and pulling log after log out of my own eyes. I became intimately familiar with 1 Cor. 13, verse by verse, as I learned to daily choose hope over history, focusing on faith instead of failure, and trusting in the truth of God’s character more than the frailty of man’s success or failure. I learned to actively not keep a record of wrongs by not allowing my mind to dwell on the events of the past. I learned to rejoice in the truth of Paul’s good qualities rather than rejoice in the evil of anger, self-pity, or fear. Through it all I knew my own relationship with God had to come first – no matter what Paul did. I began to view the Bible as the source of my decisions and values, a practical tool for changing my thoughts and feelings, rather than a book of nice stories and deep abstract theological ideas. My prayer life changed to a two-way communication in which I listened more than I spoke. God began to breath life into His Word as my time with Him became intimate, and God’s heart became more important than my needs or desires. Meanwhile, Paul’s search for self-sufficiency, independence, and a “manly image” took us to raw land where we built a log house and lived for four and a half years without electricity, three of them without running water. By now we had five children, and were home schooling them by kerosene lantern. Our lives were a mixture of good and bad, freedom and control, manipulation, deception and truth. Like the threads of a woven fabric, it was often difficult to tell what was the result of his background, and what was the result of everyday life choices.
Then another bomb hit the fabric of our lives. Over the course of a year, three of our family members were diagnosed with Hepatitis B, a disease commonly found in the homosexual community. Because my husband was on a mood altering medication to treat his own disease, as he tried to break the news regarding our child the conversation became violent, and I ended up with multiple bruises. In the case of my husband and one of our children, the disease was in the chronic state – according to our doctor, a condition that in children was untreatable, incurable, and would eventually be terminal. The feeling of betrayal and abandonment by God was beyond my ability to bear.
I had trusted God to protect my children when I allowed Paul to come home. Was I therefore responsible for this disease because I allowed him to return, exposing us to such risk, all because I wanted my marriage to survive? For ten years I had trusted God that my husband was telling me the truth, that he was a new creation in Christ, and that he had conquered sin in Jesus name. Even if our marriage could survive, we would never be free from the effects of sin. Even if I could forgive, even if I could trust my husbands claim to innocence, even if I could love him with a sacrificial, unconditional love, the disease would forever mock the freedom we desired to have from the past. The calm assurance from God when I first saw Paul that he would to be my husband seemed to stand in stark contrast with the pain, rejection, loneliness, and utter desolation our marriage had brought. I was “a wife deserted and distressed in spirit – a wife who married young, only to be rejected” over and over again (Isa 53:6). Every ounce of faith, hope, and love was shredded and mocked out of every cell of my being.
I cried out “God! You don’t understand! My child is innocent!” And He answered, “I understand.”
“But my child will die because of his father’s sin!” And He answered, “My child died for your’s.”
I cried “But he doesn’t deserve to die!” And He answered, “Neither did my son.”
For over seven years it had been my habit to spend the first hour of my day with the Lord, reading, praying, studying, and memorizing. I had worked hard to be a doer of the Word, and to put into practice what I read. But this was more than I could bear. I had no faith to face what looked to be the rest of my life. In anger and despair I told God “I’m through. I can’t go on. Even if you’re real, I don’t want to follow you any more. I can’t and won’t believe in you when it hurts like this.” And He answered by taking me in my mind, story by story, from Genesis to Revelation asking, ”What part is not true? What will you do when you get up tomorrow morning? Where else will you go? I will always be with you.” When I didn’t have enough faith to keep going, God gave me His faithfulness through the centuries to lean on. When the pain was so great that I wanted to destroy my relationship with God, He spoke life into that relationship and kept it going.
For the next four months, I grieved over the impact of sin in our lives. I wept, and fasted, and prayed to the point my husband, our children, our pastor, and many friends thought I had lost touch with reality. One night after my husband returned from a Promise Keepers weekend, we had a spiritual confrontation in which my husband renounced his spiritual commitment to sexual gratification, his resentment and bitterness over his parents divorce and emotional abandonment, his pride in trying to control his life and his vulnerability, and his rebellion in thinking he was above the law and immune from judgment. It was an intense time of prayer and cleansing that lasted four hours the first night, then extended over the next two weeks. Certainly there had been repentance and prayer at various times throughout our marriage, but in God’s sovereignty the power and depth of prayer this time was far greater. There was an immediate change in his behavior that showed itself in some of the most surprising areas – without even thinking about it he started wearing his seatbelt, he drove differently, his resentment toward my parents evaporated, he stopped controlling where I went, he no longer felt compelled to visit places where he was tempted sexually, it was harder for him to recognize people who were in the homosexual lifestyle and easier for me to recognize them, the Scriptures became real and alive to him, he quit hiding where he spent his money, even his eating habits changed. Sometimes the changes took a humorous twist – like the time I called our Pastor full of excitement because my husband was looking twice at a pretty woman for the very first time. Most women would be jealous, but I was thrilled. Or the time my daredevil husband couldn’t get the car turned around on a dirt road because he was too nervous being so close to the edge. He literally looked and acted like a new person.
The fabric of what had been our lives unraveled and became individual threads. Some of the threads were remnants of Paul’s old way of thinking. But as those threads came to the surface, the breath of God’s Word easily blew them away, where before they had never seemed to bend. Other threads of character, integrity, honesty, humility, and patience - threads that had been barely visible before - became vibrant and strong, and began to weave a new fabric for our family.
Two years ago we were asked to participate in an experimental study of a new Hepatitis treatment for children. The most they could offer was a remission in our child’s disease, but at least it would delay the effects of the disease and prolong the life expectancy. It was a double blind study, and not even the doctor would know if we were actually getting the medicine or just a placebo. After a full year in the program, not only had the medicine worked, the results indicated the disease was virtually cured – the virus was undetectable, it was no longer able to reproduce, and the antibodies were active to destroy any new virus cells. It was the first case in that clinic to achieve such results.
Apart from a miraculous intervention by the Holy Spirit, I don’t know how any parent can faithfully accept God’s sovereignty in the pending death of a child. I have often struggled with the question of why God sometimes heals, and other times He doesn’t. Our child’s healing was truly a gift of God’s grace – not something earned by enough faith, deserved by greater righteousness, or accomplished by better, more effective prayer. What prayer did accomplish was the communication necessary for relationship between God and I, and the process of relinquishing my rights as a mother into the sovereignty of a powerful God who loved my child more than I did. Prayer was the vehicle through which I released my child into God’s care, where His will was accomplished, not mine. It was the act of sacrifice where I laid that child on the alter, raised the knife, and allowed God himself to “provide a lamb” (Gen 22:8). Likewise, faith was the process by which I chose to believe that God was good, even though every ounce of experience told me otherwise. It is faith that allows us to look beyond the seen world, and choose to act based on the unseen world. (2 Cor 4:17-18) Faith allows us to hope that God’s character is true, that He is who He says He is, regardless of our circumstance. Faith is being absolutely certain that, regardless of the outcome, God has acted and will act on our behalf, as He sees fit, when we earnestly seek Him (Heb 11:1 and 6). Ultimately, our momentary experience or trial is not the sum and total of our lives. We won’t know the final results of our lives until we stand before His throne of grace. Between now and then the rest is just guesswork, and we really don’t know what will happen – how God will use this event or any other event to bring glory to His name.
We have often been asked how we have handled telling our kids about their father’s past. At first, they were far too young to understand. Because our children are home schooled and they seldom watch broadcast TV, they had little awareness of homosexuality; we’ve never kept it a secret, they just never asked. When the disease struck our family, we talked about the fall of man, the consequences of sin, and the long term ramifications of our choices even as children. We tried to teach them the Biblical principles of wisdom, grace, forgiveness, and hope, believing that it was more important to teach them how to handle life in a godly manner than to shelter them from reality, or expose them unnecessarily to knowledge they were too young to handle. We believed that truth and experience would prepare them for what they needed to know in God’s timing. A few years ago, an activist seeking signatures on a pro-gay anti-discrimination initiative approached my husband. Without realizing our oldest daughter was beside him, Paul proceeded to share his entire testimony. After hearing the whole story, our daughter’s only question was “What’s discrimination?” It was as if God had placed His hands over her ears as the rest of what Paul said floated right over her head. On the other hand, a year ago when that same daughter at age sixteen finally asked about what kind of ministry we were doing and why, we answered her honestly. When I told her that the reason we help people involved in homosexuality was because we had experienced that in our marriage, her only question was “Was it you or Pop who was homosexual?” After discussing the events of the past and the impact homosexuality had on our family, her response was “I know enough about your relationship with God to know that the sin in the past has been dealt with. Now how can I best support you as you share Jesus with others?”
On my own I could never have done what God asked of me – my earlier years proved that. I can’t save myself, let alone my husband or anyone else. But when we make the decision to accept Jesus as Lord, we give up the right to do what serves our own selfish desires. We set aside serving our own needs and wants. In return, Jesus lives His life in us. We become the flesh in which He carries out His will. In February of 2001 Paul and I will celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary. He is a new man - completely free from homosexuality. I am a new person, too, because I have learned to allow God’s love to live in me.
Additional Information:
A condensed version of this story appeared in the February 2001 Exodus Update newsletter. Kathy Gilmore is co-coordinator, with her husband, of Metanoia Ministries of Spokane, PO Box 1045, Veradale, WA 99037.
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