Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [56]
She returned home, and he continued to travel extensively. On one occasion she fell ill, and John received word she was near death. He arrived at her bedside at 1:00 a.m., and when her fever lifted within the hour, he immediately left to return to preaching.
In an effort to sabotage his ministry, Molly broke into her husband’s office to open his personal mail. She sent damaging letters to his critics and the press, and even sent letters from her own hand undermining her husband and seeking to destroy his ministry. This included accusing him of adultery with his housekeeper, a charge he continually denied. Their bitter conflict seems to have escalated to violence. A visiting minister reported that he witnessed Molly ripping John’s hair out (though John denied it ever happened). And in one of his own letters to his wife, John seemingly admits to assaulting her, saying, “I took you first by ye Arm, & afterward by ye Shoulder, & shook you twice or thrice” admitting it “might have made you black & blue. I bless God, that I did not do this fifty times & that I did nothing worse. I might have given you an unlucky Blow.”6
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Her bitterness, made worse by John’s extensive ongoing letter writing to multiple women, caused Molly to become insanely jealous, which led to erratic and volatile behavior. Their final years were spent apart, as she never once set foot in his personal residence. What is believed to be his final correspondence to her reveals their profound bitterness. Dated October 2, 1778, his letter says he is not bitter, but it seems untrue: “As it is doubtful, considering your age and mine, whether we may meet anymore in this world, I think it right to tell you my mind once for all without either anger or bitterness . . . If you were to live a thousand years, you could not undo the mischief that you have done. And till you have done all you can towards it, I bid you farewell.”7
Molly died on October 8, 1781. She was dead and buried a few days before her husband was even notified. Today she is buried under a road in London, far away from her husband. The painful story of the Wesleys reminds us that there are no loving marriages apart from repentance and forgiveness. Marriage either gets bitter or gets better.
The gospel is the only helpful answer to the bitterness and anger that victims feel. Paul said, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.”a Admittedly, when people are bitter and angry, words like this can sound like the kind of hyper-spiritual platitudes that come from annoying religious types and only push victims to defend their angry bitterness by recalling to mind and sometimes even aloud all the valid reasons for their hurt. By doing so, they are defending their angry bitterness by appealing to a sense of justice—that to simply forgive a spouse who has not apologized, changed, or made amends is tantamount to condoning evil.
In those moments we are able to recall intricate details of exact circumstances surrounding the sin(s) that contributed to our hurt and anger. We can remember where we were when sinned against, exactly what was said, and other similar details, such as what the perpetrators were wearing, the tone of their voices, and their expressions. Our memory is keen in these moments because we have recounted the event(s) over and over in our minds, digging up the past to emotionally relive it over and over in the present, which is what Paul told the Corinthians is an unloving record keeping of wrongs.a If not repented of, our bitterness begins to so cloud our entire view of the past that history gets revised with war words