With permission, I am sharing a true story of Christ’s redemption.  This marriage seemed irreconcilable from the world’s point of view.  However, this husband and wife chose to operate through God’s point of view.

It’s a great honor to share Mel’s story.  She and her husband live in New Zealand.  I think you’ll see the fingerprints of God all over their journey.

Now, here’s Mel…

My husband and I have been married for 30 years. As with most marriages, we have had our ups and downs. I would like to share our story of restoration from the downs to the ups.

Our troubles started when our three children were small. A combination of; tiredness, not knowing how to communicate well, resenting my husband’s lack of leadership (spiritual and in the home), feeling he didn’t help with the kids in the way I thought he should, etc., led to a breakdown in our intimacy.

Things got so bad I repelled at his intimate touch and acted like a super still iceberg in our bed most of the time.

We were also drifting away from God, slowly, too.

We didn’t know how to ask or who to ask for help from our church so just kept struggling along.

My husband sought comfort from my rejection and disappointment in him through Pornography.  His pornographic habits developed into an addiction to sex chat rooms on the computer. This affected our eldest son who was 13 at the time.  He saw what his dad was doing because the computer was in the family room.  However, he didn’t know how to tell me. I suspected something, but whenever I talked to my husband about my suspicions he convincingly lied his way out of it.

As always, God was in control.  My husband’s addiction was forced into the open early one morning, 17 August 2001, when we got a knock on our door by the police. Unbeknownst to my husband, he had been chatting to an undercover policeman on one of the sites. He was ordered out of the house and our computer seized.

Our world came crashing down, but I knew God was right there with us. I got an overwhelming sense not to leave my husband even though we had a two month separation and faced much pain. The police found nothing incriminating on the computer.  With the help of counseling, I let my husband back home but not back in the bedroom, at first.

We attended counseling together but mainly separately over the next few years.

We learned to communicate better, but there were many slipups for my husband getting the victory over his addiction. I, too, was still struggling with intimacy because the real cause had not been dealt with.

The offence I felt from my husband’s actions was like a mountain in front of me.  I couldn’t see my part in it all. I knew part of our healing involved me being a loving wife.  I just didn’t know how to get there. A breakthrough for me came after I watched the movie, The Railway Man, and a video series by John Bervere.

I realized I had justified unforgiveness toward my husband. Yes, he had made bad/wrong choices and sinned and it had affected our whole family.  But, I too had made wrong choices by rejecting him and subtly disapproving of him as a husband and father. At the same time of my epiphany, my husband had come to a place where he was done hiding things from me.

We also sought prayer from a couple who have become our dearest friends. They ran a marriage course that we went on and were recommended a book, ‘A Celebration of Sex,’ by Douglas E. Rosenau.  We ordered our own copy and bought the online version so we could both read it at the same time. After reading the first few chapters there were times I wanted to throw the book across the room because I still had a lot of anger about sex and my husbands “need” of it. He also felt frustrated.  Although we had come a long way, we still hadn’t got a regular intimate Relationship.  He was afraid nothing was going to change.

With the prayer from our friends, the book by Douglas E Rosenau, websites for Christian couples, and Bonny’s, Unlock Your Libido, booklet, things started to change. That’s when God showed me I had to start taking the initiative and be intentional in loving my husband. Instead of waiting for something to happen I took steps in moving toward him. A lot of these ideas and motivations came from Bonny’s booklet.

I have realized my husband just wants to love me and is not obsessed with sex. He wants me to enjoy our intimacy as much as he does and is willing to walk at my pace. He has been so caring and loving during our whole journey together. And most of all we are learning to involve our God who wants us to enjoy each other intimately because it was all His idea in the  first place.

We have both come a long way and are moving forward in our relationship with God and each other.

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“We are never more Christlike than when we choose to forgive,” David Egner, Our Daily Bread.

When I received Mel’s email with her story, my eyes welled with tears.  I praised God that he restored another marriage from the grips of the evil one!  I was humbled that my words had played any part at all in God’s story for them.

What struck me as the key to Mel’s entire story is forgiveness.

Having never heard of the movie Mel mentions called, The Railway Man, Dave and I found it on Netflix.   I highly recommend it along with Mel, especially if you are struggling with forgiveneness in any way.  It’s based on a true story and is excellent.  The R rating is because of brief violence.  Although God is never mentioned, you can feel the moral compass he has written into the hearts of men (Romans 2:14&15).

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In conjunction with this hope-filled testimonial, I’m happy to announce, “Unlock Your Libido: 52-week Sex Drive Transformation,” is now available on Kindle!

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