Love Isn't Supposed to Hurt

by Paul, Christi

  I’m not perfect, but God doesn’t expect me to be. I just have to be real. My challenge now was to keep hold of that realness, despite that battle on the horizon.

  Chapter 7

  Refuse to Play Small

  I walked in the door of our apartment and collapsed into a chair. My head hurt, my eyes burned, and I was exhausted. I looked around at this place I called home. It was peaceful . . . when I was there alone.

  I hadn’t realized how mind numbing it had become to walk around on a minefield whenever Justin was around, knowing it could explode with any wrong step I made. I had absorbed this as a lifestyle—it was just how I made it through each day.

  But now, having lived four days free of these emotional confines, I knew I couldn’t simply go back to living a myopic life. Things didn’t look the same to me anymore.

  I called my mom, telling her how rejuvenating Chicago was, and I spilled everything. My suspicions that Justin was drinking and lying to me again. How I felt like I’d found myself again, and how I wasn’t sure I could go on like this. How I knew something had to change if we were going to work this out.

  God bless my mom. I’ve always said she has a private phone line straight to Him. She’s a prayer warrior, and I knew she would start praying for me the moment we hung up the phone. She told me she knew Justin loved me very much but if he wasn’t willing to face his alcohol issues, then yes, I might have to leave. In the four years we’d been married, that was the first time she’d ever said anything like that to me.

  I got off the phone and wrapped my fingers together, praying for guidance and wisdom and strength. And the strangest thing happened—I could feel myself letting go of “control.” My angst about what to do next was lifting. I sensed that God was telling me that my job right now was to wait. And that’s what I did.

  What happened next only convinced me that God had His hands all over this situation. He’d heard my prayer.

  The next day I ran into a friend of ours who was somewhat aware of our struggles. She told me that while I was gone, she had seen Justin drinking. I could tell she was treading lightly because she knew this was a delicate situation, but I was grateful for her honesty and compassion. She wasn’t trying to bust him—she simply could see that something wasn’t lining up, and she wanted to help me.

  I asked Justin about it later that night. Sure enough, I got the same old spiel.

  “Come on, Christi! Did she look at the bottle? Did she notice it was nonalcoholic? Did you ever stop to think what it’s like for me to be out there and not drink when everyone else is? And to have them wonder why I’m not drinking? Have you ever thought about how that makes me feel?”

  I couldn’t help but think, Really? What are we, in junior high? You’re going to blame this on peer pressure? But I didn’t say it out loud. He was already getting riled up. That old fear had come back to me in full force. But things felt different this time. I felt stronger, and I knew for certain that something in this big picture just wasn’t right.

  But once again, I couldn’t prove anything. Justin knew how to twist the story enough to bring a shadow of doubt to the situation. I hadn’t been there. Was it O’Doul’s? I couldn’t prove it wasn’t.

  A few days later I found myself faced with another cause for suspicion. I opened the credit card bill and saw a charge I didn’t know about. It was for two hundred dollars—from a bar. I asked Justin about it, and the way he responded was just as disturbing as the charge itself.

  When I first confronted him, he told me it was an error on the part of the bar—that it should have been twenty dollars, and they’d obviously made a mistake. The next day I brought it up again, and his argument evolved into, “Oh, it was just a lot of food.” And finally, when I wouldn’t let it go, he said, “I bought the food and drinks for everyone else . . . but I didn’t drink at all!”

  Three times I gave him a chance to come clean with me. And three times he came up with a faux story. With each lie, I felt my footing slipping away. He grew more volatile every time we talked about it, until I finally just shut down.

  With each passing day, the freedom I’d felt in Chicago started disintegrating. And brick by brick, that wall I’d been building around myself was cementing itself in place. Pretty soon the wall wouldn’t let anything in at all. No lies. No hope. No joy. No love.

  My only outlet was waking up at five every morning and running. It was September in Phoenix, which meant triple-digit temperatures, so I had to run before the sun came up. A far cry from the crisp autumn air I’d left in Chicago. As I ran, I listened to a tape my friend Colleen had sent me with music and insights from several authors. I clung to one song in particular by Pam Thum: “Life Is Hard (God Is Good).” It was a powerful reminder that even when I felt battered and close to defeat, I could still cling to the hope that regardless of my circumstances, God had my back.

  There was also a quote on the tape that God used to get my attention. When I heard these words by Marianne Williamson, the rhythmic pounding of my feet came to an abrupt halt.

  “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.”

  I stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, trying to catch my breath and process these words.

  It had been a lifetime since I viewed myself as anything close to brilliant, talented, or fabulous. Now, inadequate, on the other hand—that was something I could relate to. After four years of listening to someone belittle, accuse, and abuse me, I couldn’t imagine seeing myself as anything other than small. Somehow Justin’s words had overtaken my own.

  Here’s what I’ve learned to be true: no one can take a part of you unless you let them. They can try. They can even physically take something from you. But your self-worth, your self-esteem, your soul—no one can swipe those from you unless you allow them to. Yes, I’d been hiding God’s light in me out of fear that Justin would attack it if I let it loose. And at this point, I wasn’t even sure if I had any light left.

  The dry desert air seeped into my nose as I breathed in and out, in and out. I stood there wondering, Who am I? What do I want? Who do I want to be?

  I hadn’t explored such thoughts in a long time. As I walked home, pondering those questions, what blared in my mind was how short I’d fallen in the last few years. But more than that, I forced myself to explore what was causing these shortcomings.

  One thing that became clear was that I wasn’t concentrating on work like I wanted to. I didn’t read as much as I used to, and I was no longer jumping full force into my job. Suddenly it dawned on me that I’d been sabotaging myself. I was afraid to excel at work because I knew Justin would just have something to say about it. I never knew when he’d lay into me again with demeaning comments about my never making it this far without him. But regardless of Justin’s role in this, I had to take ownership of the fact that I was choosing to live a small life. Maybe I was choosing out of fear, but it was still my choice—and I couldn’t blame that on Justin.

  My second revelation was that I’d lost the tight connection to my family that had always been so important to me. I didn’t go home to Ohio as often as I would have liked because Justin wasn’t a fan of my father, which baffled everyone I knew. My father is dearly loved and respected—and for good reason. He’s a man of incredible compassion, integrity, and strength. My folks were adoptive parents of sorts to some of my friends, and even when I was away at college, they would sometimes pop in just to see my mom and dad. But in the four years we’d been married, Justin and I had only gone to my parents’ house twice—once when we stopped through on our way to Justin’s brother’s wedding, and once for Christmas. Justin didn’t like going there—he said there was nothing to do. I guess it just didn’t seem worth the battle to me to convince J
ustin to go home with me. Looking back, I saw now that although Justin certainly made it difficult, I was still responsible for caving on that front.

  The third thing I admitted to myself was that I didn’t volunteer as much as I wanted to. Why? Again, it just didn’t feel like it was worth the battle. For some time I’d wanted to find a place to volunteer my time, but whenever I brought it up with Justin, he shot down the idea. Just a few months earlier I’d told Justin I wanted to start volunteering with a children’s charity. He shot back, “Are you kidding? Why would you do that? It’ll only cut into our time together!”

  In that moment of honesty as I walked home, I realized I had been so consumed with the turmoil at home and making sure Justin was okay that I’d let my dreams for myself disintegrate. I’d compromised so much of my life just to try to make Justin happy. And as long as I’m being honest, let’s just lay it out there: this wasn’t done strictly out of the goodness of my heart. The truth is, I knew that if Justin was happy, then life was pretty peaceful. And most days I was just shooting for peace.

  You know you’re in a sad state when you’ve given someone that kind of power over your life. And for me it was all so gradual that by the time I realized what was happening, it felt like things were too far gone to be fixed.

  I stood in the parking lot of our apartment building as the sun began to rise. Instead of going inside, I sat on the step watching the brilliant golden hues paint the desert sky. Even as I soaked in the beauty, I couldn’t ignore the realization that in my attempt to keep the peace, I had indeed been playing small.

  The churning in my gut told me how dangerous this tactic would be over the long haul. I was learning that when you play small—when you bury your true feelings and aspirations—you start to morph into a zombie. And that’s not the life God intended for us. But it was certainly what I’d become. Walking comatose.

  We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that being numb is a show of strength. But in reality it’s a defense mechanism. We figure if we don’t allow anything or anyone in, then we can’t be hurt, right? But as I watched the warm yellow beams of light streaking into the sky, I realized that if we shut ourselves off, we also can’t know joy. Or peace. Or purpose.

  Suddenly, as the new day was breaking, I started to feel something. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it felt like a little glimmer of hope. No bigger than a grain of sand, maybe, but it was there nonetheless. Hope that God had put me on this earth for something more than this. Hope that I was born to live an abundant life—a life of authenticity.

  For the next few days I ruminated over this idea of who I really was and what God might want me to do with my life. At home alone one night, sitting on the floor after a tough workout, I breathed deeply and lay on my back, relaxing my muscles and my mind. My thoughts wandered to all that I’d been exploring about myself and God the last few days. I thought back to when I was a teenager and all the things I’d dreamed for my life.

  I wanted to sing. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to make enough money to support myself. I wanted to be a mom and a wife who was passionately in love with her husband.

  Sure, as a journalist I got to tell people’s stories, and I’d had opportunities to sing on several occasions. I made enough money to take care of myself. But the rest—the emotional connections and family relationships—was nothing more than a fuzzy dream. I still longed to be a mom, but I couldn’t imagine bringing a child into this chaos. I ached at the realization that I was a woman who was no longer in love with my husband. And worst of all, the real me was dying each day I stayed in this marriage. I knew I wasn’t serving my purpose by being here.

  Bam! There it was—a one-liner that smacked my soul awake. It was like a flashing sign proclaiming the words that would start my journey back to myself: You aren’t serving God by being in this marriage.

  Now, serving God doesn’t mean you have to sell all your possessions, leave everyone you love, and proclaim His name in a developing country, so don’t panic. I think there’s a real misconception out there about what it means to serve God. Yes, He might call some people to serve Him in a dramatic way overseas, but for others it’s more about conscious daily choices in the midst of ordinary life.

  I believe serving God means being true to who He made you to be. It means allowing yourself to feel and be cognizant of the God-given desires stirring inside you. He isn’t going to call you to be a doctor if the sight of blood makes you queasy. He isn’t going to ask you to step onto a stage and sing if you’re tone deaf and prone to stage fright. It’s true that God may put us in uncomfortable positions sometimes. But His purpose in those times is for us to grow, not for us to fail.

  I knew unequivocally that I wasn’t being all He wanted me to be, because I wasn’t serving Him. I was serving myself—in a dangerous way. I was serving myself fear on a silver platter. Every day.

  In this marriage I had been feasting on fear—fear of speaking my mind, fear of fighting for what I needed, fear of standing up for what was right. That fear bled into every aspect of my life, and soon I was afraid to aspire. Afraid to let people in. Afraid to believe.

  You know how that feels—being afraid to believe in anything that really matters. In God. In yourself. In other people. Because what if we believe . . . and the dream doesn’t come true? What are we left with, aside from pulverized hope?

  The realization that we’re terrified to believe can come gradually, or it can hit us like the crack of a ball against a bat on a fast pitch—hard and deliberate.

  For me it was kind of a trickle effect: slowly but surely, God was breaking through my lack of faith. I now had at least one solid answer to my questions about who I was and what I was meant to be. I might not have known what God had in store for my future, but I knew that this was not how He wanted me to live. That’s not how He wants any of us to live.

  Hear this loud and clear, my friends: you weren’t put here to be abused. God’s will isn’t for us to wake up each day mired in fear, self-doubt, and condemnation. He wants us to see ourselves the way He sees us—wounded but worthy. To view ourselves and each other with forgiveness and grace. To trust and believe in Him despite where we’ve been, what we’ve done, or what someone told us we are.

  In the past several years, I hadn’t completely abandoned my faith, but I’d certainly given up the crux of it. Faith hadn’t failed me—I’d failed it. My belief in certain core values was still there, but I’d tried to bury all that away somewhere. I suppose I saw truth as something I could wrap up in pretty paper and shove in the back of a closet somewhere. But at some point this animal was going to make itself known, and there would be no running from it. No matter how far I ran each morning or how fast my feet pounded the concrete, the truth was chasing me down. I could feel it catching up with me, and I knew it was getting closer to cornering me. I had no choice but to turn around and face it.

  I passionately believe that no matter who we are or where we come from, there’s a truth we all share: each of us is meant for something wonderful. Sure, God never said it would be easy. He never promised us a cakewalk. He never said the universe would cater to us. But He did promise that we’d never face any of it alone. And if God is for us, who can stop us? If He’s with us through all of it (and He is!), then doesn’t He want us to have joy? Doesn’t He want us to succeed?

  He promises that if we keep searching for Him earnestly and believe in Him, we’ll find peace, regardless of our circumstances. He longs for us to walk through the fire and come out on the other side stronger, more certain of His faithfulness, and more conscious of what we learned from being put through the heat. Maybe that’s His method to this madness. Like sheets of glass, we are molded and shaped by the fire underneath us until we become more and more who we’re meant to be.

  As I lay on my back, thinking, a Bible verse started blinking in my head—one I hadn’t read in a long time but one that was lodged deep in my soul. I ran to the bedroom and opened my Bible, searching for the verse
I knew was highlighted somewhere in the New Testament. Sure enough, the words in yellow were just as poignant as I’d remembered:

  We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

  ROMANS 5:2-5

  I couldn’t stop staring at that sentence: “Hope does not disappoint.”

  It was as though God was telling me, “Hang in there, girl! I’ve got your back. Just hold on a little longer!” I was finally starting to believe it was true: if God is for us—and He is for us—then who could possibly succeed against us?

  As I was taking all this in, another thought occurred to me: this wasn’t just about me. If this marriage wasn’t making me who God wanted me to be, it probably wasn’t what Justin needed either.

  The truth may be painful, but it’s also relentless. I had been praying for change—and perhaps what needed to change was my perspective. Perhaps if the issues weren’t improving after all this time, maybe it was truth’s way of forcing me to face the fact that there was a bigger change that needed to be made.

  Wow. I needed some help to clear this up.

  God said we can’t do it alone—we need other people to come alongside us, especially as we face the fire. He has put people in our lives who can help us—and it was past time for me to employ one of them.

  The next day I mustered enough courage to take step number one. Justin was standing in the bedroom when I walked in.