Earlier this month, September 12th, marked a giant celebration for our family. My husband, Gabe, celebrated four years of sobriety. Four years! Our life now seems so vastly different from where we started and it is amazing what God can do in a short amount of time. Just a little over four years ago, I was at the center of one of the darkest seasons of my life. Our first child, Eli, was about 4 months old when I made one of the most excruciating decisions of my life, to separate from Gabe which required me leaving my home in Chicago, my church, my job, and my friends to move back in with my parents in Mississippi. 

To give some background, about 6 months into our marriage Gabe came to me in the middle of the night and told me he thought he had a problem with alcohol. While I had begun to notice some excessive drinking, I wasn’t familiar with alcoholism and I had no idea what lay ahead. While we should have been enjoying the honeymoon stage, the first few years of our marriage were filled with fights, missed calls, sleepless nights, and out-patient rehab programs. On top of that, I became a Christian several months before we got married so I was new to church and in the process of making new friends. I remember showing up at my first ever women’s Bible study and awkwardly breaking down in tears as I shared with strangers what was going on in my life and how sad and scared I felt. Throughout this time, the enemy kept whispering in my ear that I deserved this. For a while, I believed that all of this was my punishment for blatantly walking away from Christianity as a teenager and for spending years doing all the things that gratified my flesh. I wondered if God had turned his back on me, and as a young 24 year old bride, I wondered if I would be in a loveless marriage for the rest of my life. 

Through the first few years of my marriage, I continued to seek after the Lord and turn to mentors and women at the church who prayed for us and encouraged me. As a new believer, I prayed the Lord would bring Christian friends into my life and he did so in abundance. The truth about that season is while it was hard and lonely, the Lord gave me everything I needed along the way. Our son was born just before our third wedding anniversary and I prayed that the Lord would use this moment to help Gabe get sober. However, I did not know at the time that things would get much worse before they got better. Gabe’s addiction sadly escalated to the point where I could no longer depend on him and I knew that Eli and I needed to leave. During the two months I lived at home with my parents, we had very minimal contact. I kept expecting divorce papers in the mail and I wondered what my life would be like as a single mom. This was the desert season. A season where it really looked like my life was going to absolutely fall apart and yet, this was the very season where I grew the most in my faith and God showed up in unexpected ways.

Right before I moved home, I had done two Priscilla Shirer Bible studies, Discerning the Voice of God and The Armor of God. It was like the Lord was equipping me for battle and telling me how to listen to his voice. This was key because there were A LOT of voices in that season. I had sweet, well-meaning friends who told me ‘you deserve better’ among other things. It would have been so easy for me to take this is as truth and write Gabe off. But here’s the thing, we don’t deserve anything. I was not the perfect wife and while I agree that husbands and wives should treat each other kindly, I was also not entitled to a ‘perfect’ spouse. When we are the offended party, we must be VERY careful about the voices that we are listening to and discerning truth. If we are not careful, we can easily become prideful, arrogant, and angry. 

Instead, God kept repeating Psalm 46:10 over and over, “Be still and know that I am God.” To me in that season, that meant quit trying to fix it, quit responding to angry texts, quit defending yourself. Trust that God is working all things out. Be physically still (don’t fly back before I tell you to) and be still with your mouth. There are many, many wonderful lessons I learned in that season but most of all, I surrendered control. For years I tried to fix, manage, and control Gabe’s drinking and I finally let it go. I surrendered my marriage to the Lord and said that I would do whatever he asked, thy will be done. 

After 2 months of separation, Gabe completed a treatment program and had his last drink on September 11, 2016. While the road to rebuild our marriage was tough and required a lot of humility for both of us, we made it through by the grace of God. If you come to my house, I have a sign by my backdoor of Ephesians 3:20 which we have claimed as the verse for our marriage, “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.” I prayed for Gabe to just get sober. A sweet deacon at my church prayed over me and had a vision for all of the things that Gabe would go on to do. She prayed for the man that Gabe would become. I could only think of sobriety but if you know Gabe now, you know that God did immeasurably more in his life. Today, the man I am married to is truly the man of my dreams. He loves the Lord and leads our family oh so well. He is patient, kind, trustworthy and full of joy because of the radical change the Lord made in his life.

You may be reading this in the midst of one of the most painful seasons of your life. Maybe your marriage is falling apart, a diagnosis just came in, maybe you and your child have a strained relationship, or maybe you’ve just lost a loved one. I am so sorry for your pain. But friend, know that the Lord is working in your life (Romans 8:28) and that even if your situation is not resolved on this side of eternity, we have a living hope. As believers, we are promised an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade (1 Peter 1:4). Our suffering here is temporary and for a season. There will come a day when there will be no more tears, death, or pain (Revelation 21:4). We have a hopeful future to look forward to. But here in the now, I would encourage you to share with someone. There were days when I felt defeated and it was the gracious act of my believing sisters who lifted me out of despair and reminded me of the hope I had. God graciously gives us community here on earth to lift each other up. And finally, when you are out of the desert, I pray you would see how God carried you through and share it with someone else. It is a blessing and encouragement to see God working in other’s lives because we can believe that he will do it for us too.