Hello Healing Heart Family.
As I posted on a thread about good news, my H has been on a spiritual renewal journey lately. He's been spiritual as long as I've known him, and has spent the last few years digging into his faith, his Bible, and his church. But it wasn't until this last fall, after the recent death of his brother and then his attendance at a retreat with our church, that I saw even more of a closeness to his God. This was a real struggle, because I suspected that a part of him was pretty angry with God for taking his brother from this earth and from his young family at such an early age.
Anyway, back up a little bit, when we went through Retrouvaille 9 months after DDay we also went through follow-up sessions, and one of them covered forgiveness in depth. He saw my anguish and remorse, and told me he forgave me, but there were spurts of real anger after that still...I felt pretty sure he wanted to forgive me, but there was a part of him that couldn't let go completely, because it felt like he was "excusing", not "forgiving". He's a pretty black and white guy, so this makes sense.
I had gotten to the point, especially reading here and seeing what others said about forgiveness, that I knew we could have a happy, healthy M and still not have him completely forgive me if he just wasn't capable of it. I had resigned myself to that, because every other part of our M was so good. No reminders of it by him, no nastiness, we were both tuned in to each other and wanting to make each other happy, good stuff.
Well, he blew me out of the water when he came back from a retreat this past Sunday. He is going to be a Team Leader for the local upcoming one in Nov, so he'd gone to the Juneau retreat to learn how to do that. He returned, sat me down when we had a quiet moment, and told me that he'd had an epiphany while he was there. He said that he knew he'd just told me he'd forgiven me before, but that he hadn't completely but was trying. But that while he was down there, he realized that he had totally forgiven me and was willing to let go!! He felt total peace in many areas of his life, and this was one of them!! I hugged him so hard.
I am blest.
If you'd have told me within that first year that it would take 7 years for him to completely forgive me, I'd have said it was too long of a road. But thanks to the advice here of taking it one day at a time, those days turned into weeks and months and now years. BTW, he left for Juneau 1 day after our 7 year DDay Anniversary. God is good. And I'm married to an amazingly strong and awesome husband.
This was such a special moment in our M, and while my mom was happy for me when I told her, I know she doesn't have the full appreciation for the significance of it like you guys do. We hadn't talked about my infidelity in a LONG time. This was totally out of the blue. Thank you for all of your loving support on the healing journey, everyone. I couldn't, truly couldn't, have done it without that.
Love,
Sun
