Chapter 6 - Agony? nah...

Hmmm... so what next? Well, I immediately began spending some time learning to live my life more honestly and my wife and I spent a good year or so working with a concentrated effort on our marriage. It was a good (and hard) time in our life. She would struggle with wanting to trust me, and I would occasionally get upset that she was having such a hard time. (yes, I admit that I'm an idiot sometimes.) Late in 2001, my wife became pregnant with our first child, a little boy.

Read about the Marriage Class

I want to say that it was the summer of 2002 that my we began co-leading a group of five young married couples in the same class that we took part in ourselves, the "Agonia." To avoid a thiry plus page entry to my blog here, I will just summarize our experience leading the class by a couple of descriptive statements:

* The students in our group had enormous challenges in their lives individually and as married couples. Some were victims of childhood abuses of all types, some had a history with drugs, some couples were physically abusive with one another, some were suicidal, and others had multiple affairs in their history.

* We, the leaders of the group (my wife and I and another couple), were not professionally trained or certified to deal with any of these topics. Aside from our own experience in taking the marraige class, and an occasional (quasi-monthly) training session, ... we tackled all of these issues with the Bible and our Faith.

* In the end, four out of five couples completed the nearly two year class (one couple quit about twenty percent in...). Of the four that finished, three are currently enjoying successful, intact marriages. The other is seperated at the time of this writing.

What a handsome group of young people, no?

I am tempted to outline all of the challenges we faced in this class together, for we did face some scary things. Issues that seemed unresolvable, were able to be worked out. Couples seemingly destined for marital collapse (and possibly WORSE), were able to learn to love one another. At the time, it was 100% a god-thing in my eyes. I went to God for help, direction, inspiration, and encouragement. It was to Him I gave the glory for all the victories achieved. But... as is with most everything else in life, my current perspective is quite different. I most certainly do NOT claim to have all the answers, but I sure have lots of questions. The more that my questions increase... the more I seem to find answers of, "I don't know..." For instance, why is it that God gets the glory for the couples that are experiencing success in marriage... but we humans are left with the burden when it comes to "failures"?

For now, I will end this chapter quite short with the intention of protecting the privacy of all of the couples in our class. I love them all... every single one... in a special way because my wife and I were honored to be so intimately involved in their lives. It brings me great happiness to know that in some way, we were a part of the restoration that took place in some of these troubled marriages. It was just one of those types of experiences that draws people's hearts together like ... well, almost like war, I suppose.

Unfortunately, all did not end well in this season of life. It really had nothing at all to do with our marriage class... but trouble was certainly brewing. Towards the end of this class we were leading, behind the scenes of what appeared to me to be a wonderfully loving church, ... a fuse had been lit on a bomb that would destroy virtually everything I knew... all that made sense ... all that I had taken for granted in my life.

I remember well the night that I was met by my father on the steps of my house. "My boy," he said..., "I think the time has come for me to leave New Hope."