Even Now: Trusting God in the Even Whens and Even Ifs

By Rebekah Opperman

Have you ever, in desperation, begged the Lord to fix the brokenness of your life? This simple servant of the Most High God saw brokenness in her marriage and begged the Lord to work a miracle. Then she discovered her husband's sexual addiction. In just moments what seemed to be small cracks, shattered into splintered fragments and she was left

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885906838

Rebekah Opperman

Discovery of my husband's sexual addiction was the catalyst for my personal understanding of redemption. This narrative is a dialogue between God and myself as He teaches me who He is, who I am, and how He wants me to respond to the brokenness I find in my life.

Book preview

1

This is what the LORD says:

"Stand at the crossroads and look;

ask for the ancient paths,

ask where the good way is, and walk in it,

and you will find rest for your souls. …

Jeremiah 6:16

··· The Locust ···

W

hen the locust have come. When the devouring locust have eaten and what they have left the swarming locust take. Then the young locust come and eat what remains, followed finally by the destroying locust. When you wake up and weep for it has all been taken. You grieve and mourn for everything is destroyed. Oh, the sorrow and distress because of that day where everything is left in ruin.

Lord, my heart resonates with the prophet Joel. The locust have laid waste to my life and left it ravaged and desolate. I am empty, Lord. There is nothing left. With my eyes full of tears and my heart full of grief, I keep reading Joel. And then you speak Joel 2:12.

Even now, declares the Lord.

"Even now, Lord? There is nothing but ruin left. How can this be restored?"

"Yes, Bekah, even now… ‘Turn to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. Tear your heart and not just your clothes, and turn again to me, the Lord your God. For I am gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love.’ And I repay the years the locust have eaten. The devouring locust and the swarming locust, the young locust and the destroying locust. I pay back all the fruit that was lost in those devastating years."

Oh, how I felt Joel described me, eaten up, destroyed, devoured. Joel 1 is endlessly grim. My life felt endlessly grim. But then, Joel 2 makes promises about God’s compassion and provision. Promises that I doubted had relevance to my life. And yet, even now, God is teaching me what he can do. That he is indeed compassionate. That he provides even that which I did not know I was lacking.

··· A Divided Heart

Cannot Stand ···

I

knew the Lord. I served him and taught about him, but my heart was divided. I loved God and also looked to be satisfied by other things. My devotion was not to him alone, and truthfully, more often than not, my focus was on pleasing others, specifically my husband, Eric. God used the locust of sexual addiction to eat at my life and caused me to rend my heart from Eric and focus it on the Most High God. Lord, I will praise your name, for you have dealt wondrously with me. I grew up a preacher’s kid. We attended a small, family focused church of which I am still a part today. I deeply and desperately love the people at this church. They have helped raise me up. The women who knit the blankets I slept in as a baby have now also knitted the blankets I wrap my girls in. I’ve walked many journeys alongside these sweet women, and yet I have felt a deep need to hide the truth of my own struggles from them. Fear convinced me deep in my heart that my behaviors defined my value and that my value was being judged. Fear convinced me that based on what I did they would judge my family, that they would judge the church, that they would judge God, and that the whole lot of us would be rejected.

I always had the sense I was being watched. That’s often the fate of a preacher’s kid, and a teacher’s kid, and the president of the school board’s kid. I felt people were always watching, and often judging. I knew I might not measure up to the standard they set. It kept me focused, this fear and striving to live above reproach. Living this way is not all bad. It has its pros and cons. It kept me on the straight and narrow, and it left me with a desperate need to prove myself. So I overachieved and accepted nothing less than perfection from myself as I searched for approval and acceptance. At some point, my young heart heard the whisper of a lie and believed it was true. The lie said my worth and value depended on my performance. The love I received had to be earned by doing the next right thing. Only, I often didn’t know what the next right thing was.

··· How Do You Know

What Is Right? ···

I

have discovered right cannot be defined by how I feel. Because my feelings change, a lot. And right cannot be defined by how others feel. Because their feelings change a lot. And my feelings and their feelings and the person across the way’s feelings often conflict. And all these opposing feelings are not all defining right at the same time. I had been seeking to do the right thing but was determining what right was or was not through the expectations of others. Thankfully, I was in a circle that sought to honor God. And therefore, their expectations of me often drove me to do things that aligned with his word. But my reasons for doing things that aligned with his word were not about pleasing him but rather about pleasing them. I had built a habit of deciding right and wrong based on how I felt. And often how I felt was determined by how I was received. Consequences that didn’t feel good, like disappointed looks from my parents, or anger from my friend, or a poor grade from a teacher, drove my decisions and behaviors. To some extent this is beneficial to development and teaches an individual to find success within their culture. However, success within cultures doesn’t determine what’s right and wrong. Various people have various expectations. And a single person has various expectations. So how do you navigate all the expectations? What determines which way to go, which way is right?

I used my feelings as the foundation of truth and then worked to reinforce and defend them with scripture. I have come to understand, however, that this is backward and leads to disastrous lies. This method causes right to be left in flux, open to change, open to interpretation and redefinition. I often lied; it’s better/right to spare her feelings than to confront what is broken. I justified this lie because my feelings told me, Confrontation is hard and uncomfortable and I don’t like it. This lie led me to wear a mask that said, Everything is okay between us even when it wasn’t. This lie left me isolated and lonely. Another lie is that if people are left disappointed then I must have done something wrong. This lie led me to commit to excellent grades to please my mom, to midnight movies to please my friends, to extra work hours to please my boss. It led me to wear the mask that said, I can handle more, it’s not too much, the ability to do it all proves how good I am. This lie left me overwhelmed and emotionally and physically depleted. Nobody could know the truth of who I was or how I really felt because my feelings said that was too dangerous. Over the course of time, I too began to lose the truth of who I was or how I felt. I wasn’t being authentically me in any area. I was the me I thought was needed. What I deemed as right was part moral truth and part emotional truth. Such changing and uncertain truth just led to more confusion and isolation and more lies.

I behaved as if right was defined by me. But right is always defined by God and requires I trust him. It requires I follow him even when my feelings tell me it will be uncomfortable or hard. I thought I did trust him. I would have declared wholeheartedly I believed him and trusted him, but looking back now, my behaviors didn’t confirm my trust. Trust is proved in the furnace of obedience.

Eventually, there came a confrontation too painful to avoid. The realities of my life swelled up, and those realities were too large to ignore. A shift happened in my heart, and in spite of my fear and desire to hide, the pain of ignoring the truth was so much greater than the pain of facing it. So as I turned to face the painful truth, I realized that my emotions were so jumbled I couldn’t determine what was right and what was wrong by any means. Within a single moment, multiple, often opposing, emotions vied for my attention. The resulting confusion sent me seeking outside help: therapy, support groups, every relevant book I could get my hands on. But mostly I desperately and relentlessly searched the scriptures, digging in deep day after day. I poured myself into seeking God’s will, into seeing things through God’s eyes, into lining my life up with God’s way and his word regardless of what things felt like in my heart and mind. This has been my mission for the last six years. And God has used these years and these terribly painful experiences to change how I think and who I am. I now understand that right is to be right with God. It is obedience to his word, regardless of how I feel about it. This is uncomfortable and hard. It takes work. And it means I cannot be in control.

··· Don’t Let the

Feelings Lead ···

F

eelings are great indicators. They are great at showing that something is happening that needs to be looked into and held to the scrutiny of God’s truth. Feelings without God’s truth are terrible tools for decision-making.

I was expecting a friend to come pick me up for an event we were attending together. We had planned she would get me at 2:30 p.m. for the 3:00 start time. It was now 2:45 and there was no way we were going to be on time. I began to feel frustrated. This was not the first time this had happened. And recently she had been late more often than she’d been on time. She also had guaranteed me this time she would not be late. My feelings began to well up: It is selfish for her to make me late. I could have driven myself if she was not going to be responsible with time. It is so rude for her to not have at least called to tell me she was running behind. What a waste of my precious time.

The longer she took and the more I ran through these thoughts, the more my feelings caused me to just want to leave and go without her. Or to yell at her when she did finally arrive. Or to call her right then to tell her how mad I was. Or to never agree to travel to something with her again. Obviously, she couldn’t be trusted. However, this frustration, though warranted, does not take into account the truth of the whole situation. These feelings indicate I may need to have a conversation that leads me to do things differently in the future. I might say to my friend, I really hate being late to things. If you aren’t able to get to me by such and such time, just meet me there. It is no problem; I’ll drive myself. Feelings direct me to take time to understand why I am upset by my friend’s lateness. Is it because I feel disrespected? Is it because I will be embarrassed to come in to the event late? Is it because it reminds me of my parents’ lateness in picking me up from piano lessons thirty years ago? I should understand my feelings, but they should not be the decision maker in my life, causing me to vow to never ride with my friend. Or to send her an angry text. Or to spend the rest of our day angry at her because she has been so rude to me. My feelings are real and valid. And they only take into account the limited view I have in that moment.

Actually, feelings are like trail markers on a hiking trail. They are like bright orange flags indicating various paths I could take, but trail markers are terrible compasses. Oftentimes the various paths available compete with one another for my attention. My feelings of anger at my friend for being late might be competing with my feelings of disappointment at what I am missing, or fear of what her reason might be, or sadness that this is the state of her life even though she has expressed a desire for it to be different. Should I listen to my anger and scold her or to the sadness and try to come up with solutions with her? Which marker should guide me?

As on a hiking trail, markers can be disrupted. Storms, animals, other hikers can move the trail markers. So too in my life, my emotions can jumble together, my anger and sadness fighting for the same space. They can also shift and change. A change in my circumstances or my perspective can change my feelings. A memory or new facts that explain the events differently all can move my markers and send me in another direction.

When she finally arrived at 3:15 p.m., she was in a puddle of tears. She had actually been sitting at the end of the block since 2:15 on the phone with her sister and had just received some devastating family news that left a crushing weight on her soul. She and I decided to skip the event and sit at the kitchen table with warm tea discussing what she had just learned and how it would affect her and her family. My feelings of anger had completely vanished with this new information and had changed to compassion and empathy. I was reminded that my feelings are based solely on me and my limited view of my personal world. These