Love does not keep a record of wrongs, but I sure did. On 4×6 notecards. Every marriage counseling session started with the notecard(s) in my hand, ready to “tell on” Paul like a vengeful sibling. Our pastor would say, “Let’s talk about the list, then we’ll get down to what’s really going on”. He understood that both Paul’s “transgressions” and the list itself were reflections of the sad state of our marriage. Symptoms of something insidious that created both the need to lie and to keep score.

Those were dark days for us. I wish I could blame it on the addiction that had taken over our lives at that point, but that would be neither fair nor honest. The truth is that, as our pastor put it then, “You two have been married for 11 years but have yet to live one life.” Separate bank accounts, different hobbies, different friends. We came together for meals, intimacy, budgeting and parenting but still lived separate, independent lives. We thought we were progressive – giving each other the freedom to be ourselves. In reality we were keeping our distance from each other, protecting our own hearts.

I guess it came from marrying a little later in life. Paul was 30; I was 26 when we married. Neither of us were particularly clingy people – we had outgrown the insecurities that often come with young love. Paul admired my independence. I was a never married single mom. I had a good job, a little money in savings and had fought my way back to faith, finally finding a way to forgive myself and accept the grace of God in my life again.

I respected similar things in him. Paul had survived a divorce he didn’t want and had overcome addiction issues in his late twenties. He had come back home – to Lubbock, to his parents house and the faith of his childhood. Ours was an attraction based on faith and respect. Determined that this relationship would be different than all the ones before, we kept ourselves physically pure during our dating/engagement, something that brought an incredible level of trust to our marriage long-term.

So how then, did we end up here in our Pastors office week after week with these damnable lists? We had done things right this time!

Pastor Jay gave us tools and someone to be accountable to.  He prayed over us often praying 1 Cor 4:5 over us,  something we lovingly call the Jay Fuglaar prayer – “God, where the light shines there can be no more darkness. Please shine the light on everything Paul does so nothing can be hidden and instead, be exposed to the light of truth”.

Time went by. We separated for a few months. Counseling helped, as did that time apart. Paul would be clean for 6 weeks and then not. Four weeks and then not. Nine weeks…you get the picture. It was a roller coaster we couldn’t seem to get off of. Finally, emotionally exhausted, I took the children and left him alone on Thanksgiving day. That night, I told my sweet Mom June the events of the past 2 years in painstaking detail. As I sat on the floor with my head in her lap, I remember telling her that the worst thing was that I just didn’t love Paul anymore. My precious Mom smoothed my hair and said, “oh honey, you have problems for sure, but that’s not one of them. God’s the Creator – He can recreate”.

We went back home the next day. Paul & I sat down with our 10 year old twins and 16 year old daughter and talked with them about what was going on in our family, both Paul’s addiction and my craziness in trying to control his behavior. I will never forget my son’s eyes brimming with tears as he said, “Daddy, are you going to die?”. It stopped Paul in his tracks. His own tear-filled eyes met Tory’s as he slowly said “No buddy. I’m not. I’m going to stop.” In that moment I saw in my husbands eyes a determination I had seen only once before; on our wedding day. We got off the rollover coaster that day – there were other struggles, life is just like that – but Paul never used again.

That moment was the beginning of our family’s healing. Mom June was right. God created the love between Paul and I when we married and He recreated it that year. A few months later, I took the stack of notecards (you know I kept them all, right?) and tossed them into the fireplace. Not one by one, naming Paul’s sins like before but all at once, naming my own. Love it turns out, does NOT keep a record of wrongs.