Climbing back up

My last post 10 days ago was from a pit of despair. Oh, was I ever angry! Oh, was I heartbroken!

The lie my husband told me was just a little lie, in all honesty. But it cut deeper than I could've ever guessed. It burned within me for days. It was as if all the other millions of lies my husband had told me over the years had piggybacked onto this one, and I felt the weight of all of them.

I wouldn't say I trusted my husband before this incident. Our trust died a long time ago. But I had the hope of trust. I thought that now that we'd embarked on this recovery journey for reals, that he would rise to the occasion when he had something difficult to tell me. When that didn't happen, I was utterly crushed. I guess I forgot how baffling and cunning addiction really is.

That night, I said a tearful prayer begging my Heavenly Father to take these awful feelings from me. Part of the Twelve Steps is learning to turn our lives and our wills over to God, and trusting that the Atonement can heal our hurts. I was trying so hard to do this. To give it to God and trust that the pain would stop burning in my heart.

My pain didn't disappear. I woke up angry and sad the next morning. BUT, I did manage to fall asleep without too much trouble, which was a tender mercy. The husband was very contrite and apologetic the next morning and said he wasn't feeling well the night before, so he had a hard time coping.

Later that day I lamented to him that I didn't know if the Twelve Steps would work for me. How do you turn your negative feelings over to God? How do such awful, piercing emotions go away? Maybe I just didn't have enough faith.

We managed to smooth things over a bit, although I still feel much more guarded and less willing to be vulnerable. A few nights later, I was reading my scriptures. As I was reading, a string of thoughts suddenly came into my mind. I realized that I was feeling better. Yes, the memory of the pain I felt was still there, but I didn't have that burning pain in my heart any more. My mind was calm again. The thought came to me that my awful feelings were taken from me. It wasn't instantaneous, and that is ok. We are here on this earth to have the mortal experience, and sometimes that means feeling pain, sadness, hurt, and frustration. The few nights before when I was in so much pain wasn't because I didn't have enough faith or because God didn't hear my prayer, it was because I am human, and sometimes that happens. Heavenly Father blessed me instead with the ability to fall asleep that night. He knows more than I do, and He knows what I need to learn. Sometimes learning requires discomfort. And a few days later, through the Atonement of Christ and my faith, my pain was taken away.

As I sat and pondered on these thoughts that were brought to my mind, I was filled with humility and gratitude. How silly of me to expect that I should say a prayer and *poof*, I feel happy and as good as new within an instant. Not to say that God couldn't make that happen, but that's not what this life is about. I was grateful to have learned this lesson, and I was grateful that my Heavenly Father saw fit to teach me in a quiet moment through the Spirit a few days later so that I could understand.

As I've worked through things the last couple of weeks, one of the biggest things I am learning is patience. I need to have patience with trials and with my husband and with myself. I need to have patience with God as my life unfolds.

Everything will be ok.