By Linda Settles

OUR MARRIAGE is the story of two broken people who found each other.

Mike and I dared to join our lives in holy matrimony long before either of us had been healed of our wounds. We weren’t even aware, at that point, that we were in so much need of healing.

After all, Mike had conquered his 13 year addiction to alcohol and heroin, and I had escaped from more than 20 years of sexual abuse in my father’s house.

Ignorance is bliss, and our bliss lasted about as long as the icing on the wedding cake. Our conflicting negative coping mechanisms, boundary issues, and insecurities began to surface before the honeymoon was over.

There were those at the recovery program – where we were staff members – who took bets on how long our marriage would last. No one put much money on it lasting very long.

Except for the grace of God, they would have been right.

What they didn’t know was that God had placed a fierce love in each of our hearts, and a determination to serve him and each other. We loved and served imperfectly, and the result was a lot of conflict.

Yet, even the conflict had its place. It brought our issues to the surface, and forced us to deal with them.

Now, 22  years later, we are deeply in love with each other – and with our Lord. We have done the dance practiced by most survivors – shuffling between our respective issues.

We have learned by the grace of God, and the help of some excellent counsellors, the art of loving beyond ourselves.

One of the most dramatic healing moments for me was when God whispered this to my heart, in the midst of an agonizing conflict: “Confess your sins to each other, and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”

Did you get that? I had read that scripture (James 5:16) many times, but hadn’t gotten it until that moment. God was giving me a prescription for healing my heart and my marriage at the same moment. Let’s break it down.

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Confess your sins . . .

Most of the time, I had focused on his faults, and he had focused on mine. Think about it. How often do you proactively seek out whatever measure of fault you may have in the conflict at hand – especially in the heat of the battle?

. . . to each other . . .

I was good at confessing his faults to sympathetic ears. He was good at numbing out about the whole thing, dissociating. He didn’t talk about the conflict to anyone – because he really wasn’t even there.

He needed to stay present, and I needed to talk to him – not at him or about him.

. . . and pray for each other . . .

Oh, I did a lot of that. But most of my prayers were selfish. I said, “Lord, show us the source of this conflict. Help us see the truth about what is wrong.” But I meant, “Lord, show him where he is wrong.”

Lest you feel too sorry for him, his prayers were pretty much the same: “What is this woman thinking?”

The prayers of our hearts focused around changing the other to meet our needs, when God wanted to change each of us to become more like himself – the author of unconditional love.

. . . so that you may be healed.

We knew what we wanted, but God knew what we needed.

We needed to be healed – healed from the woundings of our past and healed from our present sinful attitudes. Sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death (James 1:15).

Past sins committed against us, and present sins committed by us, would have killed the spirit of our marriage – if we hadn’t listened to the word of the Lord, and begun doing what he told us to do.

Excerpted from Redeeming Our Treasures: Finding Joy in the Shadows of an Abusive Past. RedeemingOurTreasures.com.

May 2010