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Real Answers™
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Copyright: ©2010 Debbie Thurman
660 words

TED AND GAYLE HAGGARD'S COURAGEOUS JOURNEY

By: Debbie Thurman

When I first learned of evangelical leader Ted Haggard’s fall from grace through homosexual promiscuity, my heart immediately went out to him and his family.

Change the names and reverse the genders and you’d be looking at a situation more resembling the one my husband and I endured quite a few years ago. He was the one whose shock at discovering my same-sex indiscretions nearly drove him to send me packing, separating me from him and our two small daughters. We were teaching Sunday School at the time — a marriage class, no less.

Marital infidelity is tragic and painful, no matter what its nature. A man understands that other men may be his competition. He doesn’t sit around contemplating the possibility of having to compete with other women for his wife’s affections. The very thought is emasculating to the core. It is no less tumultuous for a wife to discover her husband has found pleasure in the arms of other men. For reasons only God knows, that is far more common than the other way around.

Gayle Haggard has written her account of why she chose to honor her marriage vows and stand by her husband, “for better or worse.” Imagine that — a wife who takes her life promises seriously, even when her husband hasn’t. Her recently released book, “Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour,” will offer hope to many struggling couples who feel they have no place to turn when the secret, sinful life of one threatens to destroy a seemingly healthy marriage. My husband and I can offer hope back to the Haggards that their marriage can be restored, by the grace of God.

With so many marriages — Christian couples are no exception — facing outside pressures of every kind, the Church is missing its call to be the restorative lifeline for floundering couples, dashed and breaking apart on the rocks of life.

When activists striving to elevate same-sex unions to the status of traditional, God-ordained marriage accuse us of making a mockery of marriage in the first place, what can we say? We have to acknowledge our guilt. Have we not sawn through the very timbers that undergird this relationship so sacred that Christ equated it to his relationship with his church?

Forgiveness is simple in principle, but most difficult in practice. Christ told his disciples to be prepared to forgive “seventy times seven” if necessary. He forgave his very executioners as they nailed him to the cross. It was because of a similar hardness of heart that Mosaic law had permitted people to divorce, Jesus pointed out. But husband and wife are “one flesh” in God’s divine economy. “What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (Matthew 19:6).

The Haggard’s travails and journey toward restoration ought to speak volumes to other struggling couples, no matter what the cause of their division. Further, it ought to get the attention of young couples contemplating marriage. What will they do when crises come?

If the Church and her many ordinary, easily tempted men and women fail to see that marriage is the foundation-securing cornerstone of our future, we are doomed to see it supplanted by the self-serving ideology de jour. And we won’t be able to point fingers at outsiders for allowing it to happen.

I’m glad Gayle Haggard’s book will now join others that are daring to address something we have been too squeamish to look at for too long in the Church: the silent and destructive sexual sins lurking within our walls.

Communities need vital churches where leaders are accountable to each other and where godly men and women minister to the needs of the walking wounded. If we cannot be trusted to be who we say we are, where will our friends and neighbors go for help? We reflect Christ to them.

It’s time to take a good look in the mirror.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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