Synergy

There is a group of women who often suffer in silence. We are women whose husbands are caught in the snare of pornography.
This is a place of help, of hope, of strength.
This blog is written with the assumption that you have chosen to fight for your husband, your marriage, and your family.
The things posted here will be in the form of encouragement and help to do just that.


Friday, May 2, 2014

Lose Your Life

"For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; 
but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, 
the same shall save it."
This scripture struck me in a new way recently.

It made me think that few of us are required to actually lay down our mortal life for the Savior or for the Gospel. But what about laying down the life I had imagined or wanted? As little children, we all had visions and hopes for what our lives would be when we were older. Most of us dreamed of perfect marriages and families. If you were raised LDS, that dream was of a temple marriage and living what I have come to call The Mormon Fairy Tale.  A perfect little life, with perfect people and a happily ever after.

Living the addict's life was not what any of us dreamed of. It's not what our husbands wanted for themselves and their lives and it's not what we wanted to be enduring. So it if often tempting to walk away and start over. And for some women, that is the only choice. I had lunch recently with a woman who was given clear spiritual direction to get a divorce. It's been years and she has an amiable relationship with her ex-husband and he gets the kids every other weekend, but he is unchanged and has no desire to change. Heavenly Father sent his Spirit to tell her to get out because He knew that her husband was not ready for recovery at this point in his journey and may not ever be.

But I daily read so many blogs where we are working it out. Where there is teamwork and joint efforts for recovery. It is a tug of war and a roller coaster a lot of the time, but there is momentum moving forward, even if it is slow and includes back tracking at times.

So it occurs to me that I am being asked to lose my life - the life that I would prefer without this trial. I am being asked to let go of the childhood dreams of what marriage and life should be. I am required to lose my image of an ideal husband (and really, what does that mean anyway? Is there any such thing?) - and live the life that Heavenly Father has set before me. He has put me on a path and confirmed my steps along the way. He knew every detail and still set me on this path and I need to have more faith in that path than in my own desires or hopes or wants.

So I offer my life to God, to do with as He pleases. For His purposes. I choose to be about my Father's business. And by being selfless, I can have the selfish knowledge that doing so will bring me my greatest happiness in the end. This is why we are commanded to endure to the end. Maybe we don't even get our happy ending in this life. But which ending is more important? And remember that today is not forever, so we are probably nowhere near our ending at this point in our journey.

“(Christ) thus was willing to forego a happy ending in mortality to ensure a happy ending in eternity.”  
- Andrew Skinner, Golgotha.


Because a happy ending is truly what we want out of our fairy tales, isn't it?


And they lived happily ever after...
The End

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