Amy’s Story
Amy describes how Church of the Resurrection's teachings on marriage and sexuality led her into a mixed-orientation marriage that was intended to “heal” her husband's homosexuality but instead catalyzed a dysfunctional, deeply harmful, and ultimately abusive marriage.
The following story includes descriptions of domestic violence and emotional abuse that may be triggering for some readers.
I was ten years and three kids into a mixed-orientation marriage before I knew such a term existed. While my grooming and abuse neither began nor ended in my years at Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois (Rez), I met and married my husband there, and we had our first child baptized on the stage at Glenbard West High School during Easter Vigil. Subsequent children were baptized at Rez’s daughter church Light of Christ in Kenosha, Wisconsin (LOC), which I made my church home in the months after my husband’s death. This is my story.
1992
We didn’t have a name for it yet, but it would come to be known as “purity culture.” Our high school Sunday School teacher asked us what topics we’d like to cover that year, joking that if one of the topics was sex, we’d have to wait until after his upcoming wedding so he’d know what he was talking about. The leader of the church youth group said he knew it was better to reserve sex for marriage, because he regretted that he hadn’t. A group of us sat with a married couple from our congregation as they talked about their experiences of dating and marriage. “We didn’t go all the way before our wedding night,” the wife shared, “but we went too far.” I didn’t know what she meant by that, and I was too embarrassed to raise my hand to ask the question.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to have a boyfriend. A few in my circle had started dating, but it wasn’t something they spoke about in detail, at least not to me. I knew what I’d seen on TV and read in books. I pictured myself spending time with a boy I loved—hugging, kissing, sharing hopes and dreams and deep feelings with one another. When I tried to visualize breaking up, to see myself passing him in the hallway at school, being ignored, worrying he’d share something I’d told him in confidence as a joke to his friends or his new sweetheart … I simply couldn’t. After much consideration, I decided that was a sign from God I would only ever date the man I was to marry.
1998
A dozen women sat around the ring of chairs in the dorm lounge. In each of our laps, we held a copy of Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ's Control. While I did not yet have a love life, I knew when the time came, I wanted to do it right. Hosted by a physics professor’s wife, we discussed the story of Jim and Betty’s courtship as if it were a real-life romance novel. The words on those pages, we agreed, represented God’s singular design for relationships: in everything, the man was meant to lead. He had been created to spark romance, to propose marriage, even (though perhaps not specifically noted in the text) to initiate sex, once the couple was legally wed. I was excited for my own opportunity to respond to a godly man’s pursuit of me.
2002
I’d been invited by my brother to an event neither of us realized was anything more than a standard church potluck. After the meal concluded, I stayed politely in my seat for the business meeting I hadn’t known would follow. Raised the daughter of a sometime-pastor/always-leader, I’d attended my share of boring church meetings; none of them had been like the Annual Celebration at Rez. I was dumbfounded by the treasurer's budget report, which he'd written in rhyme, set to music, and sang to us. I needed to know more.
Easter Vigil left me wide-eyed with wonder and exhausted from dancing in the aisles. I was delighted to have found this strange and quirky group of folks who seemed to embody so much of the abundant Christian life I wanted to live—expressing themselves through art, inviting those who wished to be healed, worshiping with communal liturgy, yet including lecture-length sermons full of conservative biblical exposition and practical everyday application. These, I told myself, were my people.
Within six months, I held a volunteer leadership role with Noah’s Ark (the preschool Sunday School ministry) and had signed up to go on Rez’s first-ever short-term mission trip to Brazil. Adam was a fellow children’s ministry volunteer. On the rare Sundays we served together and at occasional gatherings of Ark volunteers, we talked about his growing up as a missionary kid in Papua New Guinea and our shared experience of previous summer mission trips. The more I got to know him, the more attractive I found him, but I couldn’t tell him so. I tried to remain balanced between guarding my heart and silently communicating my openness to the possibility of romance.
2003
Lying in my hammock on the riverboat’s upper deck, I brought to mind the three different men I’d formed crushes on over the previous year. Since leaving grad school, I’d continued to wait—sometimes more patiently than others—for God to provide the man I was meant to marry. I had a flash of recognition. Like the baby bird from the P.D. Eastman book Are You My Mother? I saw myself walking around questioning every man I happened upon, "Are you my husband? Are YOU my husband?"
Our team would be returning home from Brazil the weekend ahead of Ash Wednesday. I’d never before chosen a Lenten fast, but my experience on the river left me certain of the sacrifice I needed to make. The notion of actually saying so out loud left me uncomfortably self-conscious. For the sake of not having to admit I was giving up boys for Lent, I also chose to forgo television and movies for six weeks.
I became a member of Rez at my second Easter Vigil. Because I would be on stage with the rest of the membership group, I had planned my outfit with extra care. At a prayer potluck for Noah’s Ark volunteers the next week, Adam told me he hadn’t had a chance to say so after the Vigil, but I'd looked beautiful, and my dress had been stunning. Every other woman in the room later disclosed to me that they’d noted Adam declaring his interest in me. I hoped he had. During the prayer portion of the evening, when Adam shared a request for “relationship struggles,” I wondered whether he was referring to a potential relationship he might be considering with me.
The following two months, I took every opportunity I could find to be in Adam’s company. Believing I had evidence that my feelings were reciprocated, I felt more confident expressing my interest in return. Adam invited me to see Wynton Marsalis perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia. I laughed at the “bad luck” of planning our first date for Friday the 13th of June. The first people Adam told about our relationship, even before his parents, were Fr. Eirik Olsen (then a Rez clergy member) and his wife Jeanne, along with the community group that met at their home.
One month later, I sat on the living room floor folding clothes I planned to bring on our upcoming trip to Texas for his brother’s wedding. As Adam watched from the couch, he mentioned wanting to tell me something but we could talk about it after we got back. My body tensed and my mind raced. Had he been previously imprisoned? Was he addicted to drugs? Did his family have a history of violent mental illness? I insisted he tell me immediately. When he protested, I assured him anything he had to say would most likely be better than what I could already imagine. After much coaxing, he awkwardly admitted, "I struggle with homosexuality."
“Is that all?” I responded with a smile. “I thought you were going to tell me you were an ax murderer or something!”
The second weekend of August, we drove along the coast of Lake Michigan, wending our way slowly home after attending the wedding of my best childhood friend. During a previous relationship-defining conversation, Adam had stated he was “pretty damn sure” he wanted to marry me. That day I inquired, if he was so sure, what was keeping him from proposing? He again brought up his struggles (as he referred to his attraction to men) and asked whether I had any concerns. None came to mind. I explained that whomever I might be with would find himself attracted to another person, probably many people over the years, should the relationship last that long; I wasn’t much bothered by the gender of those people. As I considered marriage, I continued, what seemed most important was that my husband had chosen me, and repeatedly chose me over any feelings he may have developed for anyone else. I never thought to question if Adam was attracted to me.
I prepared for marriage with stars in my eyes. That’s pretty common, I suppose, but in my case, they blinded me. I wholeheartedly believed my fiancé felt for me the same desire I felt for him. We would vow before God and everybody to be lovers, best friends, parents, comrades in adventure, comforts in illness, and companions in sorrow and joy. We’d be one another’s husband or wife to the full extent of ourselves, “and by the grace of God … remain faithful, until death.” Adam was the one who had first suggested to me that faithfulness was more than a lack of cheating, but an active pursuit of the highest good for one another. I wholeheartedly agreed.
The only major conflict during our engagement was prompted by our discussion of birth control. I believed a couple honored God by taking responsibility for their fertility and planning to conceive children they were prepared to support, both financially and emotionally. Adam argued that childbearing was an integral part of sexuality, and to divorce the possibility of conception from sex would be stepping outside of God’s will, a concept outlined in Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, a resource often recommended from the pulpit by Fr. Stewart Ruch (now Bishop of ACNA's Upper Midwest Diocese). We debated the issue over a few weeks, until I finally recognized we had no realistic options for compromise. In my understanding, as a married woman, I was not meant to have bodily autonomy.
I fully believed that if I did not submit to Adam on this issue, I would be sinning, but not because I disagreed with his theology of sex. Rather, because God had placed my husband-to-be in authority over me, my refusing to submit would be tantamount to defying God.
I would never have claimed I didn't make my own choice, but, looking back now, I did not know I had any other options from which to choose. Reproductive coercion wouldn’t be defined for seven more years and another decade would pass before I heard the term. Believing submission to my husband “as to the Lord” meant Adam had the final say when we couldn’t agree, I told him I was not going to argue anymore. He said interfering in God’s design for sex as inherently procreative was sinful, so we would not be using any contraception. I asked Adam if it felt good to be the leader. He said, “Not good, exactly. It’s kind of scary.”
2004
There was no question who we’d ask to officiate. Fr. Eirik Olsen immediately accepted the job. Since he’d been ordained as a priest at Rez, we were only the second couple he’d married, Eirik told us, missing out on the first position by just a few weeks. Flying out of O’Hare after the wedding, Adam and I shared what we each considered our deepest personal trials. Adam expressed a fear of sinning against God (and me) by giving in to the temptation of his same-sex attractions. In my case, anxiety kept me from fully embracing joy, even on what should have been the happiest day of my life. I suggested a pact: when he felt unduly drawn to the sight or thoughts of other men, he would tell me about it. Similarly, when I was anxious, I would let him know. We agreed to support and pray for one another in this way. I found myself excited that, whatever happened next, I needn’t be afraid; there were the two of us now.
We had not yet returned from our honeymoon when I became pregnant with our first child. Six weeks later, as we walked hand in hand to the pharmacy on the corner, Adam couldn’t stop grinning. I was terrified at the prospect of becoming a mother before I’d even begun figuring out how to be a wife, but Adam was ecstatic. As my pregnancy progressed, complications added layers to my concern. When I repeatedly expressed my anxious thoughts, Adam said I spent too much time worrying about things I couldn’t control.
2005-2007
Childbirth did not follow my unmedicated homebirth plan, and I was not able to produce enough milk to successfully exclusively breastfeed. I had failed to be the natural mother I’d imagined before I’d even begun. I tried desperately to follow the recommendations I read in my attachment parenting books; everything took so much energy. I existed in a constant state of overwhelm. Adam didn’t seem to understand how my loss of unhindered birthing and breastfeeding impelled me to parent as naturally as possible. When I tried to articulate my feelings, he was unreceptive. In the first month of our child’s life, he told me I should just try feeding the baby formula. I explained the expert recommendations on not supplementing before your milk supply is established, and he dropped the subject.
He did, however, voice his disbelief that mothering was as hard as I claimed. Other mothers at Rez were raising four or six or more children. “You only have one,” he told me.
Eighteen months passed before my previously undiagnosed postpartum depression (PPD) eased. I began to have more energy for things outside my immediate family. Following the lead of some writer friends—including Jeanne Olsen—I started blogging. Even as I felt excitement to share some pieces of our lives, I battled the anxiety that I might say too much, shaming myself or embarrassing Adam. Still, I enjoyed the chance to write and have people respond. Following each other's blogs helped me stay in touch with Jeanne, as Eirik moved on from his priestly duties at Rez to become the rector at Light of Christ and their family relocated to Wisconsin.
In the three years since I had initially submitted to Adam regarding his confident assertion that God never intended sex to be separate from procreation, he’d reconsidered his position on birth control. Unfortunately, conceiving again turned out not to be as simple as refraining from its use. As I fully recovered from PPD, I found my interest in sex surfaced at a significantly higher rate than Adam proposed sexual activities. While even the most conservative complementarian marriage guides I read suggested it was okay, even beneficial for wives to initiate sex once in a while, I regularly found myself not just being the only one indicating a desire, but having my advances tactfully rejected. Adam most often refused by expressing his fatigue. I thought perhaps I was being too forward. I tried to hold back, aiming for four weeks between requests. After months of virtually no intimate contact, I lost patience. “No one is this tired all the time,” I protested. “Or if you are, you need to see a doctor, because there is something wrong.”
Something was wrong. His lack of interest in sex with me, Adam explained, stemmed from my persistent demands and habitual criticism. It was because of my obvious disrespect that his eagerness had waned. I was shocked. I’d had no idea he viewed my suggestions as critical and my attempts to increase the frequency of our lovemaking as demanding. I cried. I apologized for not showing him the respect he deserved. I promised aloud to improve and vowed internally to limit myself even further, waiting until he was ready to actively assert his desire for me.
Consequently, we had sex less frequently than ever. I tried to express interest without expectations but continued to be rebuffed. On the rare occasions we did make love, Adam complained I was selfish, describing our usual pattern of activities as “all about you," rather than focused on mutual satisfaction. Again, I was shocked. I cried. I told him how sorry I was. I asked for specific ideas to bring more mutual pleasure to our sex life. Again, I made an internal vow, this time to require less of his attention during sex.
For a while, things seemed to improve. I worked to accept the fact that I wanted sex more often than Adam did and to offer up my unrequited desire as a sacrifice to God. I tried to rest in a sense of Divine grace—I might not be getting what I wanted, but I had an opportunity for growth in submission to my husband, becoming more like the wife I was created to be. Years passed in this stalemate. I conceived twice more, miscarrying both times. I felt completely broken. I hadn’t been able to birth or breastfeed naturally, my body now refused to carry a baby to term, and I wasn’t even very good at being a submissive wife. Though I regularly prayed for guidance and patience and grace, more and more I was coming to resent Adam’s exclusive power over my sexual satisfaction, or the lack thereof.
2011-2012
I left my husband once for a little over an hour. By this time, we’d been living in South Dakota for two-and-a-half years. Our oldest had just turned six and our long-awaited second child was sixteen months old. Adam had taken to sleeping on the futon in our living room rather than sharing a bed with me. He usually settled the baby to sleep before lying down himself. That night as I lay in bed, cries kept echoing down the hallway. Our baby was not settling down, so I couldn’t either. When I walked out to ask if I could help, Adam vehemently insisted he was doing it; he didn’t need my assistance. Exhausted and angry at his response, I yelled at him. I can’t remember everything we said, but all of it was loud and none of it was kind. He eventually thrust the baby toward me roughly, telling me since I seemed to think I was the better parent, I could just take over. I hastily opened my arms, and in the transfer, our child’s head smacked sharply against my cheekbone. I stood in shock as my eyes watered at the pain. The shouting had awoken our oldest, whom I instructed to put on shoes and a jacket. In response to the questions “Why?” and “What’s going on?” I simply said, “We have to leave. Daddy’s being abusive.”
Adam and I owned just one car. I buckled up the baby, made sure the oldest was secured, and drove to the highway entrance. In the back of my mind, I figured my dad would let us stay with him in Arizona until we could get settled. I headed south. I’d driven about thirty miles before the impact of what I was doing hit me. I pulled off at the next exit and burst into tears.
I felt ashamed of myself for calling what surely must have been a mistake “abuse.” I feared my impulsive actions had just destroyed my marriage. I phoned Adam to apologize. I asked him if I could return home. He assented, but warned me he didn’t want to talk about it when I arrived. I agreed; I just wanted to go to sleep.
Weeks earlier, we’d arranged to help some friends move a few hours away. Two days after my midnight venture, as we drove their van to the house they had rented, I asked Adam what had happened to our marriage. He told me the story of an older customer who’d called the Citi disputes line to report several unauthorized charges on her credit card statement. When Adam had processed her refund, she’d thanked him profusely. A few days later, his supervisor had received a letter of praise from the customer, which she’d passed on to him. Reading the card had brought tears to his eyes. He said he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt such appreciation from me. “What does it mean,” he questioned, “when a stranger provides more affirmation than the person who is supposed to love me most in the world?”
I cried. I told him how terrible that was. I apologized, and set a recurring alarm on my phone to send him an affirming text or note each afternoon. He thanked me. Again, for a little while, things felt like they were improving. But as weeks passed, Adam stopped thanking me for the daily words of affirmation. Then he stopped acknowledging them at all. Our relationship had fallen back into this rut we couldn’t seem to escape. I admitted defeat and silenced my alarm.
That year we had sex just one time. Afterward, I turned away from the calendar, intentionally refusing to count the days, weeks, and months between sexual encounters. Every Christian resource I could find on mismatched libido was based on the premise that men wanted sex more frequently than women. I read page after page of encouragement to wives, all variations on a theme: keep the union strong by offering your husband greater access to your body, even (or especially) when your own desire for touch is minimal. I saw no advice for men to do likewise. I felt alone and invisible. I was ashamed by my inability to surrender this disproportionate longing I had for sex and simply be satisfied with God’s all-encompassing love.
The following year, we had the opportunity to attend a Christian conference entitled “Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage.” After the Friday evening session, Adam and I sat up late talking over what we’d heard. I commented on the speaker’s presenting the stereotypical image of husbands wanting more sex than their wives, noting that, in our marriage, it was the opposite. Adam stayed quiet for a moment, then asked me, “Ideally, how often would you like to have sex?” I’d never thought in those terms before, but I pretty readily responded, “I think two or three times a week.” I was astonished to hear that was Adam’s ideal as well. He told me he’d believed I would prefer sex daily. I thought his answer might be about once a month.
Of particular irony in the change of heart Adam had had regarding birth control was our discovery that either one or the other of us—or both—disliked nearly every available method. We’d settled on symptothermal charting as the least invasive, most natural option. Those rare times Adam was inclined toward sexual intimacy with me, he routinely asked, “Are you safe?” In this case, “safe” meant intercourse was unlikely to result in pregnancy.
It was impossible to miss the brief uptick in our sex frequency after the marriage conference. More intercourse, of course, meant more opportunities for pregnancy. Though we’d compromised during our engagement on a plan to have four children (Adam had wanted at least five and I’d wanted three), once we were actually raising two, we felt our family was complete. Keeping good records of my body’s rarely reliable symptoms and attempting to interpret them in real time was increasingly wearing. Nearly every sexual encounter left me shrouded in the worry I may become pregnant. Yet if I told Adam, I feared he’d resolve to initiate sex even less often.
Unwilling to share my anxious thoughts with my husband, and too ashamed to speak freely about our sexual relationship with anyone else, I prayed through my misgivings. I begged for peace and for faith. I asked to know beyond the shadow of my doubts that God’s plans for me, for us, for our family, were wholly good.
I believed God responded to my prayers with a message that I didn’t have to be afraid; everything would be okay. I understood that to mean God knew I wasn’t prepared to have another child, so I could relax and enjoy sex with my husband without anticipating the potential of conceiving again. Within the month, I was staring at two pink lines on a Dollar Tree pregnancy test.
2017
Our kids were twelve, seven, and four. I was increasingly aware that Adam’s treatment of them, especially the oldest, was unhealthy. Adam spoke often about personal responsibility, but his view of the concept seemed somewhat uneven. While he required accountability from the kids and me for our behavior, no matter how justified we’d felt by the words and actions of others, he regularly absolved himself by claiming the true responsibility for his conduct lay outside his control. “I wouldn’t have to yell at you,” he frequently told the children, “if you had obeyed me the first time.” That framework, “If you didn’t … I wouldn't … “ had become a recurring theme.
Sometimes, late in the evening, I would find articles online describing emotional abuse. Even reading accounts I easily might have written from my own day-to-day life, I couldn’t accept that what the kids and I were experiencing was a steady pattern of abusive behavior. Not until five years later did I learn about betrayal blindness.
On something of a whim, I sent an email to Jeanne Olsen, asking if she’d be willing to offer me some informal mentoring. For several months, I shared with her what I was able to put into words about my relationship with Adam, my experiences parenting the kids, and events so unexpected they left me uncertain which end was up.
She responded by telling me she didn’t see anything she would have done differently than I had. She affirmed the messages I believed I was hearing from God—words of love for me and my family and encouragement to sing over Adam, to shower him with love, even while I felt he wasn’t reciprocating—as true.
The weekend after Thanksgiving, I eked out the funds from our limited budget to provide my introverted husband a two-night stay at a local hotel to recharge his batteries away from the demands of home and family. A week later I walked into the bedroom to find Adam lying in our bed, grabbing for a blanket to cover his lower body as he paused the video playing on his laptop. I stood still, unable to interpret what I was seeing and unsure how to respond. Finally, I asked, “What were you watching?” He answered with a single word: porn. I left the room in silence, closed the door, and sat down at the dining room table to write these words in my journal.
I feel all tangled up emotionally. I think I’m more sad ... he was escaping into porn instead of pursuing an actual relationship ... I thought we were doing better than that.
I recently reread a journal I kept while Adam and I were engaged. One of the things I read was the night I was crying and Adam told me when he saw me so sad and hurt, what he wanted to do was make love to me and let me know how much I was loved. That’s kind of how I’m feeling right now. I just want to go upstairs and make love to Adam. It’s weird, because I would think all of this would … make me mad. And, a part of me is mad, I guess. He deserves better from himself. I deserve better. The kids deserve better.
What do I do now? What I WANT to do is go wake Adam up, tell him I love him, and insist he talk to me and we work through this.
I feel like I have this tightly wound spring inside and the longer I wait to deal with this, the tighter it gets. Is that just anxiety?
Over the course of the following days, as I tried to talk to Adam about how he was feeling and what we might do to work together and better support one another, he told me my efforts felt like I was stabbing him repeatedly in the chest, then trying to cover it with a Band-Aid. Two weeks after I discovered him watching porn, everything came to a head. In a marathon conversation one evening, Adam spoke words I’d never imagined hearing. He was craving sex all the time, he said, just not with me—with a man. He described feeling isolated, saying how much he wished he could be one of the guys who liked sports or hunting. Instead, he felt “different and freakish and weird.” He shared a recurring fantasy that one day our furnace would explode while the kids and I were home, but he was at work. In his grief, he would find solace in the arms of a male coworker on whom he had a crush. Together they would have amazing sex and build a new family through adoption. To describe his sense of being stuck, he offered the metaphor of sitting at the bottom of a well, buried in shit. He claimed I didn’t really want him, but instead I wanted a man he could never be: a man who wanted to have sex with me whenever I wanted. He confessed he was not attracted to me and he didn’t think he ever truly had been.
I wrote out page after page in my journal the following morning, simply trying to make sense of what was happening, and how I might respond.
At some point, as he was talking about how separate and alone he felt, I sat there in the dark of our bedroom and felt his pain. It was absolutely crushing. Even remembering now makes me tear up at the immensity and the soul-searing depth of it.
I don’t know where we go from here. Adam believes that his desires are evil and I’m not sure I agree with that … I don’t believe homosexual desire—or even acting on those desires—is necessarily wrong. The complication, of course, is that Adam’s married to me. On the one hand, I want Adam to be able to pursue the goals in life that most satisfy him and I want him to be happy. On the other hand, breaking up our family will hurt all of us. I'm not sure where that leaves us.
On some level, I guess he’s been right. I do want a man who lusts after my body and loves me body, mind, and spirit. I thought that man was him. Maybe it still can be … I just don’t know. I don’t know what is most loving here, other than to continue to remind him that I stand with him, whatever happens next, and I will always, always love him. I fully believe that Love conquers all, but I also know that Love lets us make our own choices—for better or for worse.
God, thank you for Adam’s honesty last night. It hurts—it hurts so much!—but you promise that the truth will set us free. I do feel freer. Confused as hell, but freer. All this time, I’ve been thinking I’ve done something wrong, or have been continuing to do wrong. And while I have no illusions of my own perfection, it’s not me. That is an incredible weight off my shoulders. I don’t have to try to be better for Adam to love me more. What a relief! I don’t know what happens next … and that is terrifying. I’m scared that, whatever comes next, it’s going to hurt.
I realized I’m grieving. I’m grieving the life I thought I had, the husband I thought I’d married, the relationship I thought I was rebuilding. I feel like I have this well of tears inside that needs to flow out. I am so sad. I lost something, but it wasn’t even real. It’s like when [our oldest] was little and I thought maybe I was pregnant, but then it turned out I wasn’t. I hadn’t lost a child, yet I needed to grieve my lost dream.
And, honestly, I don’t even know for sure this is lost yet … I don’t know where we’re going from here, but this is definitely not the path I thought we’d be on fourteen and a half years into our relationship.
I wrote a letter to Adam and I wanted to copy it down here for posterity.
Dear Adam,
First of all, I want to reiterate that I love you. You—the real you—who feels buried under shit at the bottom of the hole. You who doesn’t like sports and doesn’t have any interest in hunting and is hurt and angry and fantasizes about the furnace blowing up and killing his family so he can find a lover to work out his pent-up sexual frustration. I love you.
Secondly, I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know where we go from here. I want what is best for you and for me and for the kids and I haven’t the foggiest idea what that is. That scares the shit out of me. But whatever happens, I am confident that we can make it work (whatever “it” turns out to be), because I love you and you love me—even though you are scared and hurting and angry and you don’t know what’s going to happen next either.
Thirdly (and maybe this ought to have been first, but here we are), God is here … in you … in me … in our marriage and our family. God is not surprised or offended by you or anything that’s going on now or by the “next” that we still have to figure out. God’s love is bigger and stronger and more engulfing and amazing than we can possibly imagine. God has not forgotten your pain, and it is not in vain.
I’m really hoping that doesn't sound all preachy. I’m not trying to get you to just “snap out of it” and be healed already. I’ve known for a while that you felt lost in a deep, dark place—and I have not been very sympathetic to you, so let me apologize for that right now. I am very sorry that I added to your pain and your feelings of isolation. Although I knew you felt caught in a hole without any light, I really didn’t feel the weight of it or understand the depth—and maybe I still don’t now, but I know it’s much deeper and darker and more painful than I’d realized. I keep expecting if you would just look up and see the light, and see the love of Christ, everything would change for you. And maybe that’s true, but it’s not something I can simply shine in your face and force your eyelids open to see. That’s not love—it’s torture. I missed that somehow. I’m sorry.
Love, I’m learning again, is not just the pretty hearts and flowers and butterflies on the greeting cards. It’s the anguish of a spike through the wrist and a thorn scraping the skull. The beauty of love is awful and ugly and broken sometimes.
I don’t understand why it’s this way. Maybe it’s the result of sin. Maybe it’s a misperception on my part. Whatever, it makes it hard sometimes to be loving, or to even recognize what love is.
The road ahead—wherever it leads for us—is rocky and uphill. It makes me tired to even think about taking another step. But here we are. Will you take my hand and walk together? I’ve heard it said that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.
I love you, Adam… That doesn’t stop. Even if we decide our marriage needs to. Even if we don’t live together anymore, we will always be family. Forever.
I love you.
God, I don’t want our marriage to end. I don’t want this dream to die, but I don’t have the power of life and death. You do. I choose to trust in You—in Your life that is stronger than death. Into Your hands I commit my spirit, my husband, and my marriage. Amen.
Adam and I pledged not to consider separation for one year. He started and I continued individual therapy. We determined to read together and discuss a marriage book by John Gottman, though we never made it past chapter two. When I suggested we try marriage counseling, Adam seemed amenable to the idea, but it, too, ended up postponed indefinitely, though we both continued with individual therapy. Adam insisted I not try to initiate sex, as that would confuse him. I reluctantly conceded, with the stipulation that he could not be using porn as a substitute for intimacy with me. He agreed. We instituted what I first referred to as “radical honesty,” then later renamed “shameless honesty,” because honesty shouldn’t be a radical notion. We would be fully honest with each other, without feeling ashamed of ourselves or judging one another.
2018-2019
Our vow of shameless honesty opened the door to stories Adam had never shared before. He described the bullying he’d experienced at the missionary boarding school he’d attended, something neither his parents nor the school staff seemed willing, or perhaps able, to stop. One of the most frequent taunts the other children hurled at Adam was “gay.” Through his experience in Redeemed Lives (RL)—a Rez-supported ministry for the “healing of sexual brokenness” founded by Mario Bergner, whom Adam had volunteered with for years and considered a friend and mentor—he’d come to believe his inability to build meaningful relationships with the other boys at school (the ones he’d admired, but who’d teased him and called him names) left him with an unmet need. This need for healthy bonding instead of harassment, he explained, had somehow twisted itself into sexual desire for his male peers.
He recounted the story to me of how, at eleven years old, he’d pulled a medical text off his parents’ bookshelf. Flipping through, he found the section on human sexuality. He was fascinated by the paragraphs describing same-sex sexual behavior. His earliest sexual fantasies involved a masculine partner. I asked him if he truly considered that a choice he’d made. “I don’t know,” he responded. “Maybe I didn’t realize the choice I was making at the time ...”
I learned that Adam had considered me to be an answer to his prayers. During the first session of RL, he described, Mario always spoke about hope. At the end, he would challenge participants to pray for something very specific, then claim their hope in God’s provision. The specific, hopeful prayer Adam had prayed that first night was asking God to give him a wife and a child by the time he was thirty. He’d been twenty-nine when we’d started dating, and thirty when our oldest was conceived.
Adam finally acknowledged the grudges he’d been holding against me for more than a dozen years, since I’d gone against his formula-feeding advice, asked him to cut back on his community theater involvement so he would be home more evenings to participate in parenting our infant, and other incidents from early in our relationship that he’d not previously mentioned, but had neither forgiven nor forgotten. He also revealed his view that I’d manipulated him into proposing before he was ready by insisting he explain what was keeping him from doing so.
During three of the four long months before we recommitted ourselves to our marriage, Adam later admitted, he'd continued to watch porn. Not knowing this, I believed we had truly turned the corner this time. Finally, I seemed to be experiencing the honest, intimate, unified partnership I thought we’d been building fifteen years earlier. Even our moments of conflict were an opportunity to draw closer, uniting against the problem rather than setting ourselves against one another. We were, for the first time in years, starting to dream for our future together.
Just four short months later, we learned Adam had a brain tumor.
Over the course of nearly a year between Adam’s first symptoms and his death, we revisited his injunction against sex multiple times. There were months I didn’t know whether we weren’t having sex because Adam was ill or because Adam didn’t want me or, very likely, both. He vacillated between his sense of obligation to keep our family together and his desire to live authentically—being open about his attraction to other men—for whatever time he had left. I told him repeatedly that I loved him and, when the topic came up, that I wanted to stay married.
Journaling on the CaringBridge website allowed me to keep in regular communication with friends and family throughout Adam’s illness. While I felt the freedom to share my pain and fears and confusion about his brain cancer, his treatments, and the high probability of his imminent death, I couldn’t write that, even if we defied the odds and his MRIs showed Adam was in full health, our relationship was not. In many ways, I felt surrounded by people, yet still so terribly alone.
In January, five months into Adam’s cancer journey, he told me his therapist had suggested he stop trying to decide what he wanted to do about our marriage and simply focus his attention and energy on physical healing. Adam chose not to take that counsel, but reached out to Mario seeking marital advice. We knew Mario’s own marriage had ended in divorce, but Adam expressed hope that he might have some valuable insight on the peculiar needs of a mixed-orientation relationship (though Adam didn’t use that term). Mario recommended a marriage seminar put on by the Roman Catholic church. Adam looked it up and found a group meeting at the cathedral near our home, but we never attended.
Mayo Clinic in Rochester had scheduled Adam’s April MRI for Maundy Thursday. As we’d be nearly halfway there already, we made plans to continue on to Kenosha Good Friday to visit Eirik and Jeanne. We were also looking forward to the Easter Vigil at LOC, which we hadn’t been able to attend since we’d driven out over Easter Weekend 2016 for Eirik to baptize our youngest. That MRI was the first to show clear evidence of tumor regrowth. Eirik stopped by our Airbnb Saturday afternoon to anoint Adam with holy oil and pray for his healing. After sharing Easter dinner with the Olsens and many others from their church, Adam lay down for a nap while I took the kids to the beach. We stood in the wind watching the waves of Lake Michigan lap against the shore, and I felt at peace and at home for the first time in years.
Adam and I never did separate. In the days after our fifteenth wedding anniversary, he made a proclamation of love and commitment that left me in happy tears. Ten weeks later, I stood beside his bed as he took his final gasping breath.
Needing a soft place to land with the kids, I chose to move from Sioux Falls to Kenosha, knowing we would be embraced as family at LOC. I had already begun working with Eirik on the arrangements for Adam’s funeral. The one concern I felt was the ACNA’s continued commitment to the theology of cisheteronormativity. Even that, however, didn’t seem particularly pressing, as Adam’s sexual orientation was no longer an ongoing issue.
2020-2021
Two months into quarantine restrictions, it seemed time to tell my oldest (then fifteen) that Adam had been gay. I hoped it might help add greater context for his behavior. We headed out for a short drive around town and I began my prepared remarks. Before I got to the heart of my message, my teenager came out to me, first as bi, then, a couple of weeks later, as trans. After Jeanne saw their coming-out post on Instagram, Eirik reached out. When I didn’t answer my phone, he left a voicemail asking how I was doing and if I needed any pastoral care.
I wasn’t sure how to respond. I fully supported my child’s authentic expression of their identity and sexuality—a privilege the majority of us take entirely for granted, but which I knew Adam had been denied most of his life—yet I was certain my stating so would be considered sinful. After avoiding two or three more calls from Eirik, I picked up the phone, took a steadying breath, and told him adolescence seemed a natural time to be questioning one’s identity and my deepest desire was simply to make sure my kids would know I love them no matter what. He told me that sounded wise. We didn’t discuss theology at all and the word “sin” never came up.
Later in the summer, as the LOC youth group began to gather outside for some socially distanced activities, my oldest spoke up freely about their experience. Jeanne gently pointed out to me that the youth group wasn’t the most appropriate venue for them to introduce that as a topic of conversation. I mentioned this advice to my teen, but wasn’t particularly troubled whether or not they chose to follow it.
Although we didn’t leave LOC and the ACNA strictly because of their teachings on gender and sexuality, if we had stayed in Kenosha, we could not have remained at the church. It took me some time to be able to clearly express my thoughts on the subject. I found my words after Adam’s mother requested, “Would you please convince [our grandchild] that we do love [them] a lot and will never stop loving [them] and all of you unconditionally.”
I understand that you care and you are concerned because you believe [my oldest] is rejecting the person God created them to be and thereby rejecting God. You believe I am encouraging and participating in this rejection by affirming their gender identity and referring to them by their chosen name and pronouns. Because we have, in your view, rejected God, God will reject us, allowing us to burn for eternity in hell. In order to save us from ourselves, you felt it was your duty to make sure we understood the precarious position you believed we have been putting ourselves in by accepting [this child’s] gender identity, rather than rejecting it or fighting against it.
I disagree with your theological perspective, but beyond that I feel you simply don't understand the situation at all. I am writing to you because I want to try to present my story in a way you may be able to relate. You may still believe I am wrong; you might be angry with what I have to say. My purpose is not to change your minds about what you believe the Bible says, only to offer some of the ramifications of such interpretation in my real life.
Adam was gay. He was not involved in the LGBTQ+ community, but he was most assuredly attracted solely to men. He had been told his desire was some sort of cannibalistic drive, because he had not had the supportive and loving familial and friendly relationships with boys or men, but instead had experienced distance or abuse. The idea was that homosexual attractions had been "activated" by this lack of nurturing and healthy relationships with men, so developing friendly relationships with men while pursuing romance with women would help to realign his physical attraction with the heterosexuality presented as the God-ordained normative desire of every person.
Adam struggled against his attractions for 35 years. He prayed, he sought counseling (Christian and secular alike), he went through the Redeemed Lives program (which is where he learned the cannibal theory) and continued to participate as a volunteer leader for another half dozen years. He put his hope in Christ and believed he would be healed. He dated women. He found one inexperienced and lovestruck enough to discount any fears she may have had that he would be unfaithful to her—God was healing him after all, right? He married me. After numerous unsuccessful attempts, he was able to engage in physical intimacy with me. I never asked him directly, but based on other conversations we had, years later, I strongly suspect he was only able to perform sexually with me because he closed his eyes and imagined I was a man to whom he was attracted.
We were not married for very long when Adam began to understand his unwanted same-sex attraction hadn't been healed and feelings of physical attraction for me were not developing. I didn't know this at the time. He didn't admit it until a dozen years later, after we had agreed to a pact of shameless honesty. But I was certainly aware of its effect… No matter what I did, it really didn't improve our physical relationship. And Adam continued to let me believe, because he had outright told me, it was my fault. He never mentioned the time he spent in the shower, daily, engaging himself in sexual fantasy. He failed to mention the pornography he accessed online. He didn't bother to explain that his long-hoped-for healing had never come to be, and he was terrified that it was his own fault, that somehow he wasn't good enough or strong enough or loved enough for God to heal.
I refuse to pass that legacy of shame on to our children.
Perhaps, as you believe, I am wrong. I would rather be wrong about attempting to love my kids with wholehearted compassion, validation, and respect than risk leaving skid marks of shame on their hearts. I would rather spend eternity knowing that I did everything I could to let them know just how much they are loved—exactly as they are—in ways they can understand, than leaving them feeling they are somehow less than beloved in any aspect of their identities.
Last week, I posted this quote from [gay Christian author] Justin Lee on my Facebook timeline.
This shame that many of us have struggled with in our lives is, I think, a result of having grown up hearing so many negative messages about who we are from the same people who gave us the positive messages about who Jesus is, and it's very hard to disentangle those two.
That is where I find myself right now. Having discovered through painful experiences that so many of the things I had been taught to believe were wrong, I am questioning whether anything I learned growing up in church was right.
I know you meant your message to be encouraging. Yet, to read, once again, words that echo the lessons I internalized as, "Yes, God loves you, even though you aren't worth it, even though you are bad, even though you could never do anything to please him ..." is beyond what I am willing to accept anymore. I am beautiful. I am worthy. I am adored—exactly as I am. So are my kids. If believing that is rebellion against God, I guess I am a rebel. Truly, though, I believe that is the unconditional love of God in action.
2024
I’ve been working to put together this story for more than two years. In order to share my experiences, I’ve had to sit with many of my most painful memories and simply allow myself to hurt. Some moments required peaceful acceptance, while at others I roared in anguish or shouted down the insidious voice of shame suggesting the abuse I’d suffered was my own fault. I recognized that voice.
Throughout my life, I’d been taught God loved me just as I was, but loved me too much to leave me that way. The authentic Amy was not who I might understand or imagine myself to be, but who God said I was. The only sure way to know what God said, however, was to trust what other people told me—particularly those placed in spiritual authority over me. So, when my husband projected his manipulation onto me, I believed I must somehow be unconsciously manipulative. When he repeatedly beat the drum of personal responsibility, I saw myself as irresponsible. When he told me he wasn’t comfortable being vulnerable with me, I thought I was untrustworthy.
The lessons of obedience to my husband as to God, combined with the insistence that God (through others) knew me better than I knew myself led directly to my accepting emotional abuse as godly submission to authority. My religious indoctrination groomed me to be an unwitting, but willing victim.
Adam similarly learned he couldn't be loved for the boy, then the man, he really was. The deeply rooted sense of himself became buried in shame, leading to depression, self-loathing, and suicide ideation. He believed the only possible way God would ever forgive him for being the shameful, broken, caricature of the “real man” he could never be was to block off those rooms in his heart where the desire for unabashed participation in full and open communion lived. The places where he desired intimacy with another man—not just as friends or coworkers, even brothers in Christ, but as lovers, fully open and engaged with one another emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and physically—those were off limits. But he couldn't stay away.
Though he tried for decades to deny his intimate knowledge of who he really was in those secret spaces deep inside, he kept running aground on the rocky shores of reality. Not knowing what else to do, he hid. He hid from himself. He hid from me. He tried to hide even from God. He was horrified at the thought of letting anyone close enough to see the hideous monster he believed himself to be. And, in keeping with his frame of reference, he behaved monstrously. In his attempts to relieve some small piece of his self-condemnation, he blamed me or he blamed the kids. All the while, however, when he let himself see it, he believed he was the guilty one.
The teachings at Rez and Mario’s RL lectures had all agreed that God wanted to bring him healing, he needed only to surrender his sexuality fully to God. Year after year of unsuccessful attempts left him convinced he must be doing something wrong. Unable to shoulder the weight of such corruption alone, he pushed some away, allowing it to land on those of us closest to him.
Adam seemed to accept, long before I could, that his actions had been abusive. Two months prior to his death, he wrote these words to me.
My first instinct is still to hide, to fear, to run away. When I feel threatened or insecure, I lash out. I would rather run away and pretend I'm fine, than to deal honestly with painful or difficult emotions or conflict.
The worst part is ... for many, many years I have been hurting you and the children. The fact that I wasn't really aware of it doesn't make it any better. And it definitely doesn't excuse it! And, in truth, I was aware of it on some level, I just wasn't able or willing to admit the truth because I couldn't deal with the truth about myself. And in so doing I have done so much harm. I have blamed you for things that were my fault. I have blamed the children for things that were my fault. I have hurt you all so deeply for so long! And there is no way I can change that or take it back and for that I am deeply, deeply sorry!
I am doing what I can now to change, to heal, to grow. Too little, too late, but what I am able to do I will ... the rest of my life ... however long that is.
When I first received this letter, I thought Adam was exaggerating, that he was making a bigger deal out of his own wrongdoing than necessary to highlight the depth of his remorse. Rereading his words now, I truly appreciate the sentiment. And I wonder, had cancer not claimed his life when it did, might his heartfelt resolve have lasted this time?