My physical past includes collegiate tennis, completing a marathon, and an incredible sex life with my husband.  So, it might surprise you that the most physical exercise I have ever experienced in one “sitting” was actually sitting (plus some bawling) front row with center seats for a live production of Les Miserable.  The emotion was simply overwhelming.

You see, I was in my fourth marital separation from my beloved husband and through the previous year I had found only two “friends” I thought might possibly relate to me.  One was Fantine, the other Eponine.  It has now been four years since that day and I remain undecided as to which one fits me better.

As a single mother of three young children I struggle to provide working two jobs and I intimately know what it means to give my all, my last gasp daily, to whatever my family needs.  My eyes sting each time my iPod wearily reminds me how “life has killed the dream.”  I too put all my proverbial eggs into the basket of happy family living, “I dreamed that love would never die…that God would be forgiving…”  I too submitted my life to a faithful God.  Yet, I also mistakenly submitted to a domineering and abusive man who denied his mental illness while blaming me for his insecurities.  That year, my church and community were busily pouring out support for victims of cancer, infidelity, or alcoholism.  Yet, bipolar spouse survival was not on the service menu.  In fact my minister insisted mental illness was not to be spoken of (until a year later when his wife suffered severe depression).  If I had raced to the divorce table and demonized my husband by sharing accounts of his terrifying rages, perhaps a river of support would have flown.  Yet, I knew my husband was ill so I simply sought help and accountability.  My desire to be separated for my family’s safety yet not divorced labeled me “un-Christian”, “not committed”, and even “spoiled.”  Fantine reminded me “they turn your dream to shame.” With each higher note she sings I am pointed to God who is good even when the situation is indeed bad.

Yet, maybe I am Eponine?  I “love him on my own.”  Just the hope of my husband someday facing his reality has fueled my loyalty and been totally fueled by faith in God.  My favorite comforts are my husband’s imaginary arms around me or my too distant memory of his loving, caring voice.  “I love him, I love him, I love him.  But, only on my own.” 

Both Fantine and Eponine die tragic deaths and basically alone.  It is no great gig being either, so why did I care so much to determine which I was?  My heart and mind bounced back and forth across the stage as if I were watching center court at the Wimbledon final.

Then it hit me.  Not the ball, silly, the question.  The question was not, “Am I Fantine or Eponine?”  It is, “Is my husband Jean Valjean or Javert?”  Jim, like Jean Valjean has plenty of reason to be angry.  Decades of blame for his mother’s alcoholism and his parents’ hateful marriage because at age six he had a temper tantrum…How does that compare with 19 years in chains for stealing a loaf of bread?  Jim has been blessed by dozens of “second chances” and God’s grace.  Will he choose to take responsibility for himself and his life, face his reality, let go of bitterness, and prosper?  Or is he compelled to chase the enemy, unable to accept the gift of life, and thus doomed to take his own life in the end?  Right there on the stage before me Javert acted out my greatest fear.  The bridge and Javert were more than I could take.

It is four years since that day.  I still pine for my husband’s affection and love him dearly.  We remain separated and I still ponder the same questions.  Now there is a major motion picture released of the same story.  It was God’s Christmas gift to me. A gift I have yet had the nerve to open.  Will you see it with me?  Will you hold my hand and pray alongside me as the screen begins to blur behind my tears?  I promise to give you my share of the popcorn as my tummy will be in knots.  One specific thing I ask of you is that when you “hear the people sing” please hear my cry to stop judging mental illness.  Please consider being “strong and stand with me” for marriage and biblical separation where needed.  I need you.  “There is a life about to start” and tomorrow will come!

Note: It is worth restating that having a mental illness can be NO problem, denying it can be devastating.

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Dear Kay (Arthur), 

Did you write the David Deeper Still Bible study for thousands of women or just me?

This Bible Study is spoon-feeding me through an excruciating time.   I know you have had the experience where the day would be simply impossible with the exact few words provided at a particular moment from Scripture.  It is an intimate gift from our Lord and I count it amongst my endless blessings.  Today, your lessons are that gift to me.

Kay, I thought your first lesson was a joke.  A bad one.  It was more than I could bear.  My breathing stopped.  My pulse stilled.  You there speaking of bipolar, agony, suicide...I needed you to be my rock, not so....human.  You spoke of my worst fears yet they were your reality.  Hearing your story did not illustrate for me God's strength and ability to live beyond.  In my weakness, your story only served to confirm the real risk of my fears.  The pain from thinking of it now makes the tip of my nose sting and my bottom lip quiver. 

Kay, my husband is bipolar.  One diagnosis was 5 years ago.  Before I knew him, his mania had his expelled from College and he took Lithium.   Although the verbal abuse and physical threats have been extensive over the past 12 years, there was a recent scene with my husband which illustrated how much worse the abuse had been than I ever allowed myself to believe.  (I know God allowed this scene only while I was deep in the Deeper Still Bible Study.  Right between Weeks Three and Four.  Beth, her love, and her wisdom served as my necessary safety net.)  It was like God had turned off the VHS player in my mind.  “Tape is up.”  ---there was no more room for more attacks.  God hit rewind and started playing back scenes for me.  Over time and through prayer he allowed me to “tape” them anew.  For example, the “new tape” recognizes that I was normal to ensure that our babysitter (a Russian in Germany) knew how to phone 911 in case of an emergency as I packed my breast pump and headed for the office that first day I left my new born baby at home.   Similarly, the “new tape”  assured that I am an OK person even though I did not like my 2 year old left unattended at a McDonald’s playground less than 100 yards from Interstate 95.  These were revelations for me.  My husband had been towering over me, filling the shaking house with accusations, “You are too demanding!”  Years of verbal abuse assured me he was right.     

Watching Lesson 5, I thought, “Kay was lucky not to be a Christian at that time (when married to a bipolar man).”    As if divorce or affairs were flavors the non-Christian ice cream parlor offered.   Yet, here I am stretching up to the counter to order, “Endurance, with sprinkles of agony, please.”

Of course with God’s grace in Session 6, you blessed me beyond belief.  You spoke of the pain of your children from your first marriage and the difference it makes to raise a faithful child from infancy.  I am blessed.   I am a Christian, in the midst of my husband's raging bipolar.  And yes unfortunately that means I am in some ways burdened by the church, its lack of understanding or ability to help.  I also have a Christian conscious and knowledge that God alone is enough which battles daily with my intense desire for some human to rescue me from and pluck me out of my situation.  Nevertheless, each of my three children speak of God in heavenly ways, inserting Him in conversation not only with me but with strangers.  It is a miracle for which I give great thanks.   I will endure any amount of pain in order to have the gift of being Christian, especially WHILE my children are young.

You say the culture is at a crossroads.  You are right.  We need to step up.  (hope Beth gets the pun :))  I worry that the problem is even worse than you think or state.   Schedules and commitments acceptable even in Christian circles put us at an alarming crossroads on the cultural highway to a dead end.  One simple example is that over programming three year olds cuts into family dinners.  Facebook’s victory over front porches is another.  But let’s go deeper still.  

Do ministers or churches really believe in the possibility of true Christian community?   1 Peter 3 speaks to the community, not just the woman.  It states that a woman must be submissive even to a non-obedient husband.   God does not waste words.  He wouldn’t put it in the Bible it weren’t necessary.  A church reading 1 Peter 3 is at a crossroads.  Should they, blow off the lesson and discount it with, “This passage is for women and non-obedient husbands, not me?”  Or should we embrace with “God, you gave me these words.  Thus, there must be a submissive woman with a non-obedient husband in my midst.  How can I create an Acts II like support system to help bear her burdens?”

I am separated...again.  I love my husband and I am committed to him.  Yet, separations have been the only refuge for me to keep myself and our children safe and attempt to build a secure life.  The first was 4 years ago.  I am not divorced.  I have not filed for divorce.  The Bible is OK with separation, our society is not.  Cultural values demand quick answers and immediate solutions; then cast lots of blame.  Tell a Christian your mom had outpatient surgery and your freezer will be filled with tuna casserole.  Try explaining to the same person that your marriage is failing and you wake two hours before the kids do just to get the agonizing wailing out of the way so you can face your day.  The reaction will range from judgment, to providing lawyer’s phone numbers, to inquiries about “how bad can it really be?”  My minister sat at our kitchen table with my husband and I.  At one point when my husband screamed, stood up, and banged on the table so hard that the salt and pepper flew, the 6 ft, 200+ pound minister responded, “Jim, now I am scared.”  Even with the acknowledgement from my husband and me that this scene was only a morsel of what myself and the children regularly endure my minister has denied me support and wonders why I insist on seeing a change in my husband’s heart before I would feel safe having him live in our home again.   How bad can it really be?  Our culture has decided that if a woman follows scripture, relies patiently on our Lord, and tries to work through a treacherous marriage that “it can’t be that bad.”  I am here to tell you the culture is wrong.  The observation is not that something is “not that bad,” but that OUR GOD IS THAT GOOD!

Note: It is worth restating that having a mental illness can be NO problem, denying it can be devastating.

If this post is a blessing to you, please share.  Thank you!

“Let’s start in style, let’s dance for awhile…”  I hear the words and recognize them like an old best friend and worst enemy simultaneously.  My throat chokes.  “Heaven can wait..” ”…hoping for the best but expecting the worst…” The tune is different but the lyrics the same. The faint music is in the distance behind the murmur of a busy restaurant.  I am there because my beloved husband Jim won’t speak to me and I miss him.  We are in our fourth separation in 10 years.  I am his problem.  I am the reason he lost his job over five years ago.  I am the cause of his rage and anger…anyway this is what I was told.  Lately however, I am told nothing.  So, I dine with our children.  Jim is no longer a corporate executive or a marketing entrepreneur in a burgeoning industry.  He is a waiter.  After five years of packing his days with verbal grenades at me, I finally separate the finances such that he had to pay some of his own bills.  Thus, he eventually and respectfully found a way to do it.  Now, I want to honor that choice and support him by bringing our sons in for dinner.  More passionately, I want to see him, to smell him, and to admire his tall sturdy frame, glimmering blue eyes, and dimpled smile reserved lately only for strangers.  The boys are happy and proud to be with their father, they are coloring.  They don’t hear the music and if they did, they wouldn’t recognize it.  I am crying.  It is too late in the day and we are too far from the window for me to hide my tears with my sunglasses.  So, I hide momentarily behind the menu and take in the music.  “Youth is like diamonds in the sun…”  I don’t know why I am crying or even what I am feeling.  I simply know this song once taught me to live.  Later it taught me to love.  I know it is not a coincidence that it is playing now at this unique and important first visit to my husband’s work place. 

How did Alphaville’s “Forever Young” teach me to live?  I was 17 years old attending St. Matthew's High School and living at the Bridgeport, Connecticut.   Sounds idyllic I know.  Many of my grammar school friends from Danbury went to the same school but were on different routines, social schedules, etc. as I now bussed in from 30-40 minutes away.  Though I had plenty of friends I was alone, terribly alone.  The pain of sexual abuse, bulimia, and typical teenage hormones had caught up with me and were crushing.  I couldn’t live another day.  So, I learned how to die.  I researched how a New York City commuter had taken his life after a devastating day of trade, consumed by the impossibility of facing his family.  I understood his hurt, his hopelessness. The only thing I felt was pain, my pain not his.  Learning of his fate was like finding a road map.  Where did he stand?  When did he jump?   I made my plans.  I had basketball practice all week from which I would ride the train after practice back to Bridgeport.  That was as good a time as any. No need for a note, my parents would just figure it out.  So, it is settled, Tuesday after practice will be fine.  Tuesday morning came.  I shuffle up the side stairway from the bus to class.  There seem to be hundreds of shoes clomping all around me, going to the same place but yet a different place all together.   As I round the corner in the top hallway Mary steps out and says, “Did you hear?” Did I hear what? The words bounce in my head but I don’t speak.  She continues, “Did you hear about Mark?...he jumped in front of a train last night.”  She sees that I am staring at he in disbelief but thankfully there is no way for her to know my thoughts are more about me than about Mark.  Mary continues, “He is gone.”  The bell rings, we are late for class, I scurry on.  Mark had been dating our good friend Katy.  Katy is in our “circle.”  (I guess I am in the circle too.  But somehow it seems they are all “in” it, and looking in.  I am looking out).  Mark was two years older than Katy and so we still thought of him more as Mike’s older brother, rather than Katy’s boyfriend as we had known Mike all throughout grammar school.  Now, none of that mattered.  And now his family was shattered.  The town mourns.  I don’t go to practice.  I don’t ride the train.  My next memory is from Mark’s wake.  There must have been 400 people at the wake.  All I remember hearing is, Forever Young’s lyrics,  “Do you want to live forever?...Forever Young.”  All I remember seeing is pain, no one’s pain in particular.  800 eyes, none of them dry, none the same but all identical.  That night none of the 400 people had blue, brown, or hazel eyes, just eyes of sorrow.  It is then that I conclude I am not worth dying.  I don’t know these people and they couldn’t possibly care about me.  But they don’t deserve to return to this place to go through these same motions for another teen meeting another train.  I avoid trains for a while.  I never jump.  Slowly, I begin to notice and enjoy ocean breezes, bright butterflies and thousands of other simple blessings.

How did Alphaville’s Forever Young teach me to love?   I am 32 years old, living in Stuttgart Germany and about to have my first child.   “Can you believe how insensitive he is?”  I ask.  My therapist pauses before answering and gives me a chance to rethink the story I have just shared:  Saturday night Jim and I had been invited to dinner.  Klaus picked us up at the S-Bahn station while Anja remained at their country townhome preparing a delicious green curry.  We have an incredible time filled with laughs and plans for the baby soon to arrive.   It is one of those too-good-to-be-true life experiences for me.  (A girl with LaGrange, GA barbershop roots isn’t likely to be communicating in a native language of a foreign land with true friends…).  After delightful and cheerful good-byes Klaus drops us back off at the station early for our train before heading home to finish the dishes with Anja.  Jim and I are alone. This is not a downtown train station, more of an open few platforms in the country.  It is empty.   Yet my heart is full.  I am with my husband holding my baby.  I yearn to be even closer to him and to bring him closer to me so I ask, “Did you hear what song was playing when Klaus picked us up?”  It was three hours earlier, but without hesitation he answers, “Alphaville, Forever Young.”  It is not one we hear but every few years or more and remember it was a German station, so it stands out.  I get encouraged and press on literally dying to bring the love of my life to the deepest recesses of my soul, “You remember what that song means to me?”  Of course I had previously shared with Jim the whole story about Mark, me being suicidal in high school, etc. I want him to hug me, to hold me, to tell me how pleased he is that I am living, I am his wife, and we are growing a family together.  Jim walks away, looks at the timetable posted on the cold cement wall and after about 2 minutes says, “You know if we walk over to platform 3 and catch the S-4 we can get home 8 minutes earlier.”  I walk down the stairs, over, and up stairs as he instructs but I am cold and crushed.  How could he ignore my feelings?  How could he care more about a schedule, a table of facts than about my soul?  Doesn’t he know I don’t care about getting home 8 minutes early when the only person I want to come home to is right next to me?  By Thursday I found myself in my therapist’s office asking, “Can you believe how insensitive he is?”  Finally, she responds,  “I don’t think he was being insensitive. I think he was caring for you.  You, his beloved wife, stood 9 months pregnant with his first child on a train platform.  You made him think of a time when you almost jumped in front of a train.  He did the only thing he knew how to do to keep you safe: get you home earlier.”  Perspective. Ouch.  It was then and there l began to learn how deceiving our feelings can be and how different love can look.  More importantly, I learned how blessed I am to have a God whose unending love and care empowers us to give each other the benefit of the doubt and accept human love in whatever form it is presented.

One song over many decades teaches me to live and then to love.  I hear it again, different yet the same.  I welcome it as the simple sweet reminder that God is in control.  I feel a tug on my shirt.  Is it my son pulling me out from behind the menu so he can show me his artwork?  No, it is a tug on my heart, not on my sleeve.  The tug is the song “Forever Young.”  This time the song is by One Direction and it is unmistakably pointing me to only one place.  The song informs me that to live and to love is not enough.  I must also trust.  Now is the time for me turn my life into only one direction, to totally entrust my life to the God who controls it.



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