There’s nothing like discovering your ex just got married (while you’re still single) to send you spiralling.
I’d broken the relationship off nearly four years ago because I knew God couldn’t be at the centre of it. It was a step made in obedience and sheer trust that letting go of the person I’d loved most wasn’t going to leave me in pain forever.
Online dating in one’s 30s is not for the faint-hearted. Repeating answers to the same few questions for months on end, labouring to shape an organic conversation out of a vacuum, doing my best not to glance at my watch during tedious first dates . . . required a kind of endurance I hadn’t anticipated.
It can be stressful when someone we love starts to doubt God. We worry that we won’t have the answers to convince them to stay in the faith, and fear what will happen if they were to leave God completely.
But doubts are a perfectly normal part of a Christian’s journey. And God is more than capable of helping us figure out what faith means in the face of life’s difficult realities.
I was crushed when allegations against the late apologist, Ravi Zacharias, emerged, and I read about how RZIM initially refused to believe the women who accused Zacharias of sexually assaulting them. As a victim of sexual assault, I grieved for the helplessness they would have felt.
The assaults left no physical scars. My rage and bitterness felt like the only tangible signs I had to demonstrate that something terrible had happened to me. If I just forgave her, was I telling everyone that the injustice didn’t matter?
Dear Joshua and Marty,
I read your announcements within weeks of each other and can only imagine the circumstances that led you both to write your posts. I know enough to recognize that what you’ve told the public will only be a fraction of an intense and complex story.
I’d never really thought of myself as an anxious person. If anything, I’d always tended to take my fears by the horns and battle with them until I prevailed. But things started to change when I signed up for graduate school while most of my friends went to work full-time.
Some time in my early 20s, I sat across the table from my mentor and pleaded with her to explain how grace worked. Life wasn’t quite going the way I wanted and I’d subconsciously been trying to “live right” in the hope that I could wrangle some blessings out of God. I’d exhausted myself, and still my attempts weren’t working.
I was sexually assaulted by a senior member of my church’s staff for four years. I was 21, and was doing an internship at my local church to explore a calling to full-time ministry. She was 42, and a director of the discipleship department.