The Day My Husband Didn’t Die [Mth 3-Day 30-Post 30]

I had been waiting for him to die. Since I was 17, I had been waiting. I didn’t even meet Alex until I was 24, but something in me just knew—it wouldn’t be long.

This gut-level expectation made more sense when I first heard that my husband’s father and grandfathers had already passed away before we met. Alex recently made a passing comment about how the men in his family don’t live long. So I must be right. Any day now, while he’s anywhere out of sight, I could get that phone call or hear a knock at the door with the news. And since I had been expecting it, it should be easier. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. I’m ready. Just waiting. Waiting.

~

A transformed Tally Atwater (Michelle Pfeiffer) stands beside the timeless Warren Justice (Robert Redford) at the edge of an escalator, their polite smiles hiding tired, taut knots—hers, of letting go, and his, of longing to leap without looking. Just before Warren steps on, Tally reluctantly places his tied adventure boots around his neck and sends him on his way. Days later she and her colleagues are celebrating her newest promotion; suddenly, a newsbreak flashes video broadcasting from adventure-land. While bullets fire in the video’s background, Tally’s eyes are drawn to those boots motionless on the ground. She knows who they belong to. And her life is forever changed by the story now untold.

~

I first saw “Up Close and Personal” in March 1996. The past-tense, sentimental saga of Celine Dion’s song, “Because You Loved Me,” echoed in my ears as I left the theater. I couldn’t stop crying. Not just because of the movie’s tragic ending. But because I was convinced it was going to happen to me.

What a completely senseless notion for a 17-year-old, just about to dart out of my parents’ home to begin my own dash and dance, plus the search for the junior Robert Redford. Why believe this eerie internal whisper that my future husband’s fate would arrive sooner and sadder than most? But I did. And I never told anyone.

Just months later, three separate summer events convicted my heart with an irrefutable faith in Jesus Christ. As I began college, I also began a journey of knowing and being known by Christ, a process of transformation in mind, body and spirit. This journey also began with this earlier unspoken lie, breathed into my spirit by a sober, deliberate Enemy who simply desired to plant a seed.

Just as long as God has been walking beside me, seen every tear, heard every spoken prayer—so has the Enemy, also constantly at work, “going to and fro on the earth…walking up and down on it” (Job 1:7), scheming to “steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10). It was the Enemy that struck first, soiling my open spirit with premature grief, imbedding roots of distrust and bitterness towards a Savior I did not yet know. As I learned and lived a life of faith, the Enemy all but forced me into a corner: If I were to truly believe that this God was in control and that He would take away my husband as fast as He would give him to me, then how could I fully trust Him with all that I hold dear? Seeds of distrust slowly grew into massive cynicism. All I could do…was live in fear. Fear, that everything would be taken away.

This past weekend, Alex drove off to Savannah for a Boys’ Weekend. I was so unconsciously angry that he chose to leave me and our two daughters that the stealthy self-sabotage sprite set in, tagging along its faithful twins of procrastination and the munchies. Eating chocolate-covered almonds, I sat weeping while watching a Hallmark-channel second-chance romance about a young widower and his two children.

Weeping. Like that night, half my life ago. And suddenly a whisper. “It’s going to happen to me.”

Then a louder whisper: “It’s a lie.”

Finally, the truth. The Truth, now filling my heart, reminded me that He has set me free from the chains of the Enemy, that Jesus shines light into the darkness of all of Satan’s lies—and I no longer have to live in fear or believe in a vindictive, terrifying God who wants only to bring me pain and despair. I can know and be known by a loving Father, who may give and take away, but in His sovereignty, works it all together for good because He has called me to walk in His purposes, His practices, His possibilities.

This God of relentless tenderness knows, too, that the Enemy’s scheming lies run deep within me. Only His mercy can uproot it all and replant His Word of Truth and Life—His mountain-moving, richly reviving grace that will allow me to leave behind the fatalist, naïve little girl and become the woman of faith I am meant to be.