“If You Let Me, I Will Take Care Of This For You”

As I walked across the field, my head was throbbing, my heart was breaking, and the words kept playing over and over in my mind, “I don’t want to be married to you anymore.”

Fianna, my wife of only six months, was ready to call it quits, end our marriage.

That was the beginning of 6 very long and very difficult years. But as I walked through that field, thinking about what she had just said, I was reminded of another sound track. Another phrase. This one had come to me when I was 10 years old.

As I watched my dad and two older brothers, drunk out of their mind, fighting and beating each other until blood poured out of them, I prayed to a God I wasn’t even sure existed.

“Please get me out of this mess,” I pleaded.

The words he had given me back then, when I was ten, replayed as I walked through that field:

“Mike, if you will let me, I will take care of this for you.”

You see, when I turned 16 I moved away from home and in with the family whose dairy farm I was working on. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was moving in with a Christian family. One year after I moved in with them I became a Christian, and suddenly realized that the prayer I had prayed when I was ten, that God would get me out of that mess, had been answered. He had taken care of it for me.

So when my wife said, “I don’t want to be married to you anymore,” that old promise of God’s came to me again. He would be faithful. He would help me through the pain I was feeling at the time.

For the next 6 years of our marriage, I would hear statements like:

“I wouldn’t blame you if you went and found another woman.”

“You should prepare yourself – one day you’ll come home and I’ll be gone.”

“Why do you stay?”

My answer to my wife was always the same: “I said my vows before God and man and I’m staying true to them.”

After a series of questions to my wife, and then also to the guy with whom I thought she was having an affair, I came to the conclusion that it was true. They were involved with each other. I remember sitting in my car, thinking about what I had just heard, and saying to God, “Now I know for sure. So what do I do?”

And God said, “Just let it go Mike, and remember, if you will let me, I will take care of this for you.”

Looking back, I know it wasn’t just her fault – I was an extremely negative person, and I did virtually nothing to fill her love tank. These days I wonder what I was thinking: how could she ever have been happy with me? An affair is rarely the problem in a marriage. Sure, it illustrates that there are problems, but those usually come before the affair ever happens. Of the many problems our relationship was facing, two huge ones were my negativity and the lack of effort I put into making sure my wife felt loved and appreciated.

But all of that melted away as I tried to do one thing: focus on the word God had given me. I had to let it go. I had to let him take care of it for me.

(to be continued next week)