Be careful what you ask of God. prayer journal 10/25/07: God I'm losing hope and I'm losing my faith in You. Our marriage gets worse...I'm losing my faith. Keep me strong. I don't see any hope in our marriage getting better and we're both so tired. If You're going to do anything, please do it quickly. Within two weeks, I found out just how damaged our marriage was when he confessed to the affair. Up to that point, I thought I was losing my mind with irrational suspicions: longer work hours than normal, being unable to reach him on his cell for long stretches of time, lunch receipts that didn't add up (should it really cost $30 for a single person to eat at Rubio's?), every opportunity to socialize with coworkers just to avoid coming home before midnight. Hours missing, money missing, passion and intimacy missing. Now it all made sense. It was almost a relief. Now I knew the enemy I was facing; win or lose, at least I had a sense of what weapons to pick up. Of course, such a devastating blow leaves your body so rock-numb that you can't lift shield or sword. One of my fallacies of faith I've struggled with: as a devout Christ-follower, I believed that seeking God in the decision of choosing my partner in life protected me from, well, anything less than 50 + years of marital harmony. I knew hard times would come, battles, struggles, dry spells, but at least God would bless me with someone devoted to facing those times together. I never imagined that I would be left standing alone, shin-deep in the smoking nuked rubble of the relationship, my God-given life-partner scrambling for the hills to avoid the fallout.

Zephyr Cove

A good friend who saw me after this weekend's retreat described my countenance as that 'coming down from the mountain' look. Literally, I had come down from the mountains in Tahoe, dropping a few thousand feet in elevation. But instinctively I knew my friend was referring to something else entirely. I had some powerful spiritual experiences this weekend, and the shifts in my soul was manifested on my face. To those new friends from Z.C. who may be reading this, thank you for allowing me to be as exposed and ugly-real as I needed to be this weekend. And thank you for being vulnerable and honest with me, sharing your own ugly-realness (which ironically is some of the most incredible beauty I've seen in women in a long time). I've had on my heart a desire to walk through my journals and look at where I was two years ago, and compare it to where I am now. This is a bit scary; some of my journal entries I'll be sharing verbatim, and they are not always pretty. They are not always spiritually sound. You may question my stability, my sanity, my Christianity, my rationality. But you will see my humanity. If this resonates with even a single person, makes one more person feel a little less 'I thought I was the only one with these thoughts', it'll be more than worth it.