Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [9]
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Grace: Mark had righteous anger and felt totally betrayed. He wondered who I really was and felt trapped, confused, and at a loss to know what in the world he would do now. A bomb had just dropped, and shrapnel was everywhere! Dear Lord, how could I have done this to You and my husband? How could I have acted like such a good person with such darkness in my heart? How can I ever make up for what I have done? Mark wished he hadn’t married me; I wished I hadn’t ever lied. I was pregnant and he felt trapped. I begged forgiveness but told him he had every right to leave. He felt completely stuck; I felt total shame. How could we ever get through this? Mark tried to get counsel from other men, but they didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t think we should tell anyone since we were just planting the church, but that decision only made the pain go on longer for both of us. We should have sought counsel from someone, but we just both felt alone.
Where was the freedom I was supposed to feel after finally telling the truth? Why didn’t we get closer in our marriage after exposing what seemed to be the deepest sin? God still needed to reveal more. He revealed the sin but wanted the heart and underlying motive to be exposed and repented of. He faithfully and miraculously kept us together so we could get to the next layers of pain and repentance, which wasn’t for another seven years. All we knew was that we had made a covenant before God in 1992 to stay married for better and for worse (we thought nothing could be worse than this), no back door, and God had told Mark very clearly to marry me—it was all we had to hold on to.
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Some people will use this story against Mark and me, but we want to share it to help those of you who also are hurting and want to work through deep areas of sin in your marriage (or future marriage). I want God to be able to use all my story to help others, including the difficult, more “secret” sins. Every time I sat down to write for this book, I prayed what the Lord told Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.”
Mark: I knew Grace loved me, but to hear her admit that she chose in our premarital counseling not to confess the entirety of her past sins because she knew I would not marry her made me feel like a furiously trapped animal. I had idolized Grace as a functional savior, and marriage and family as a functional heaven. When I discovered her sin against me and that she had punished me with resulting years of sexual and emotional denial, I felt like a total fool, and my world crashed around me. It seemed everything I had been striving for since I was a little boy was in vain. In idolizing marriage, I ended up demonizing Grace and doubting God.
Grace: Most people who know me now wouldn’t believe I would commit such an act of sin, let alone hide it from my husband for years. Yes, I was instructed to “tell all” in premarital counseling, and the Holy Spirit nudged me to tell the truth, but I blindly believed the lie that it would hurt Mark too much to tell him, and it was just a one-time mistake anyway. I also chose to believe the lie that it wouldn’t affect me, Mark, our marriage, ministry, or other lives in any way. This set up our life on a foundation of dishonesty, and it began to feed my fears that I didn’t deserve Mark as a husband—he was too good for me. I did things to sabotage our relationship, like neglecting him sexually, staying emotionally distant, and serving others’ needs obsessively— thinking