Marriages Restored

Yo Time Ain’t Her Time

{Ben}

After the revelation, with pretenses stripped away, we had to look at our own sin. I continued my first semester of seminary - barely hanging on. I could do classes like geography that only required memorizing facts and parroting them back. I couldn’t manage other classes like New Testament because they required research and bringing together a multitude of ideas into one coherent stream of thought.

I could barely tie my shoes.

Since part of staying together and working on our marriage meant Ann giving up her sweet medical sales job, I took a job with FedEx at the airport to make up for lost income. The physical exercise of stacking boxes and loading the large cans on trucks and planes was an excellent steam valve for my anxiety and pain. While working there, I got to know a co-worker named Phyllis.

Phyllis was a tender soul who had been through and was living in hard times. She'd been married to a man whose middle name was Philanderer. On top of that pain her daughter died in an icy car wreck with her other daughter behind the wheel. I hurt just typing this. 

Phyllis and I were on the line one night loading a can. I told her my story and told her I dealt with sincere alcoholic suicidal thoughts just before I called to God. With His grace, I slogged through pain and confusion out of the darkness to sobriety and into a newer more reflective life. With regards to the lying and Ann’s affair, I said to Phyllis, "I thought we were past all that." I was totally ignoring my own emotional affair, of course.

She looked at me and shared wisdom that only a streetwise person broken on the wheels of living can share.

“Ben, yo time ain't her time.”

Yo time ain't her time means I have a journey. Ann has a journey. We have a journey together. Phyllis sounded like Aslan in A Horse and His Boy: "Child, I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own."

I began to grieve how I wounded Ann. I started getting drunk at 13. Ann and I started dating when I was 19. I was well into being an alcoholic by then. I had been with three other women while we dated. We never talked it through. Even if we had talked it through, if my lips were moving I was lying (to quote an AA line about addicts). 

I began to see how my emotional affair set Ann up. My eyes opened to the damage I did to my wife's soul by giving my heart to another woman. I left Ann lonely with a sense of rejection. I left her vulnerable to the pursuit of another man.

Prior to the affair, what have been the most significant wounds in your relationship?