CHAPTER 3

FINDING BEAUTY IN THE BROKEN PIECES

God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. . . . It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.

VANCE HAVNER

I STOOD IN THE KITCHEN of our little home and stirred soup. By this time, we had moved to our third and final church job in Florida. We were thousands of miles from home with a newborn son and a willful two-year-old. Moving across the country, pregnant with adventure and our second child, had seemed like a great idea a few months before. But reality ended up being a home that was in disrepair, a high cost of living that cost us more than we had, a new life without friends or family in a strange city, and a new job Terrell hated. He worked for a church leader who wasn’t pleased with anything he did. I found a part-time job tutoring to help make ends meet, but it forced me to wean my newborn much sooner than I was planning, which contributed to a horrible case of postpartum depression. I was miserable. My husband was miserable. Our home was miserable. Looking back, I think we were running from discontentment and ingratitude. And we ran right into a situation that made us wish for what we had previously complained about.

After I ladled chowder into the bowls, I carried my beautiful porcelain pitcher full of sweet tea to the table. Without warning, the brightly colored pitcher slipped from my hand. I watched it fall in slow motion and shatter on the floor. Colorful shards bounced and scattered, broken pieces of a once-useful vessel. The floor was covered with bright red and yellow ceramic chunks and jagged turquoise triangles.

I leaned over and carefully scooped up the larger pieces, angry at my carelessness, before I swept up the remaining fragments. As I sopped up sticky tea with paper towels, I was sad at the loss of my pretty pitcher. I wasn’t ready to part with it —even though I knew I couldn’t make it whole again. I decided to wash off the shards and store them in a plastic container, thinking, Maybe I can create something from the pieces later.

As I cleaned up the mess, I pondered the strength of pottery, created for service. Or was it really weakness, fashioned for fracturing? Either way, it was no match for an unsteady hand and an unforgiving tile floor. In the months to come, I would learn about the weakness and strength of our little family. We would falter and fail and taste brokenness like we couldn’t imagine. My solid marriage would be unrecognizable, a lot like the pieces scattered around me.

Our “ground zero” moment occurred just months after we left full-time ministry.

In the months leading up to it, I carried heavy sadness with me, the kind of sorrow that comes when you stop dreaming. Curled up next to Terrell one night, I thought about staying in bed forever.

I’ll never forget what he said to me: “What happened to the girl I married? The one who was going to change the world?”

My words hammered in my chest. “I don’t even dream of changing the world anymore. I just want to survive it.”

His response filled our bedroom. “We used to be dreamers. What happened to us?”

Life happened.

I spent my days wishing for better ones. We had bills piling up from a broken-down house and a growing family on a church income. Terrell was leaving at the crack of dawn every morning for the church, to be back in time so I could make it to my part-time tutoring job. Tag-team parenting our infant son and two-year-old daughter, we were caught up in the hectic rat race of life. It seemed we were constantly running and bogged down in things that didn’t really matter, while time slipped through our fingers. I fantasized about the future and was losing the beauty of every day.

The night Terrell asked the question was a turning point. My quick response terrified him. “What if we quit? Let’s just resign and move back home. We don’t belong here.”

We whispered words long into the night, coupled with tangible fear and tears: “What will we do?” “How will we live?” “Are we really brave enough to do something different?” When we finally were courageous enough to speak of our desperation, we knew we had to make a choice. We were tired of just surviving and being miserable; we wanted to live again. We sought the counsel of our supportive family and were relieved they didn’t think we were crazy.

My husband resigned from the church the very next day, I quit my tutoring job, and we sold our house in a week. It was just the encouragement we needed to take the biggest risk of our lives (so far).

We loaded up our lives and moved back to Texas, closer to family. It was a scary time. With just the (very) small equity from our town house in our pocket, we started over in a small town house my dad owned. We paid him a reduced rent from our equity. It took my husband six long and wonderful months to find a job (amazingly, the same one he still has today, going on ten years). Although those six months were uncertain as we watched our savings account slowly drain, they were also like taking a long, deep breath. For the first time in our marriage, we were on the other side of the pulpit. We could skip church if we wanted to —but we rarely did because we’d found a great church that had a small ministry to former pastors, where we realized we weren’t the only ones hurt by ministry. Terrell did some consulting work for my dad’s business while he looked for a full-time job.

Ironically, I got a part-time job in the children’s ministry of our new church. It was refreshing to be a part of a healthy church body. We had always lived very frugally, and this season was no different. And while it was challenging, we loved being near my family. My sister lived down the street from us, and my parents were only a couple of miles away. For the first time, my kids had cousins and grandparents as part of their everyday lives. We were still desperate. Desperate to start living again and figure out the next steps without letting our lives run us. But we have never once regretted stepping away from what was safe and known.

The first decade of our marriage had been spent under the scrutiny that often comes with full-time ministry. We were constantly watched and questioned by people. It’s tricky territory and a sad commentary on pastoral life. I remember being berated once for getting my ears pierced with a second earring. The mom was angry because “now her daughter would want to do the same thing.” It didn’t seem to occur to her that I was nearly thirty years old and her daughter was twelve. Nevertheless, we have some beautiful memories of our time working in churches. These experiences were preparing us for the God-sized dream He would reveal later, but we both knew this season was ending.

It was during that period of concentrated time together that our glass house shattered. For the first time in our married lives, we felt like we could breathe freely. It was a period where we struggled with our identity and roles and, mostly, our calling. We had always wanted to be in full-time ministry and had never just “attended” church as a family. This change brought everything out in the open, and we talked and prayed and cried a lot. And learned deep things about each other, even though we thought we knew it all.

“I need to tell you something.”

It was my twenty-third birthday, two days after our one-year wedding anniversary in 1996. Terrell and I were on an overnight getaway to hear a popular evangelist we both admired. We were out on a date after the service and had just celebrated my birthday dinner at a restaurant. We got back in the car to head to the hotel, and with the taste of birthday cake still fresh in my mouth, I heard my brand-new husband tell me he had found a tattered Playboy magazine in a trash pile when he was collecting barn wood for a children’s-church puppet stage he was building a couple of weeks before.

I stared at him blankly.

“I stopped working, pulled off my work gloves, and looked through it.”

I’ll never forget the look of guilt and remorse on his face or the bitter taste in my mouth.

“It’s my birthday and you’ve ruined it,” I said like a spoiled little girl. And then I started a horrible, crying tantrum filled with threats and insults and all the wrong things. Of course. We just left church and something the evangelist said tonight must have made Terrell feel guilty, and that’s why he decided to come clean. He just needed to get it off his chest. But why on my birthday? Nice present.

I never thought my young husband was attempting to let me know about a private struggle. I did what he feared most: I made him feel worse because my good-girl mentality was horrified that my good boy had made such a terrible choice. My reaction warned him to never speak of it again.

I was extremely naive and completely clueless about men and the way they think. The two of us had been able to suppress natural sexual desires when we were in Bible school, keeping our commitment to marry as virgins. Not that it was easy. So when Terrell admitted this to me, I was surprised and disappointed and totally bewildered as to why there had been this temporary lapse of character. But I was afraid to process it and didn’t like the way his choice made me feel as a woman, so I pretended everything was okay. Terrell did the same. What’s worse, I didn’t even know we were pretending.

I squelched the one question I knew I should have asked: “Why did you look?” Looking back, I realize it would have opened the door to a problem I didn’t know existed because I had convinced myself it didn’t.

After some pouting and getting assurance from him, I acted like the one-time breach of trust had never occurred. Much to my relief, he never mentioned the word pornography again.

We survived the early poor years, overcame infertility and became parents, encountered difficult ministry positions, rejoiced at the depth that comes from stability, and still maintained a fairly ideal marriage through it all. With every trial and victory, our friendship deepened.

Then we got access to the Internet.

It was 2005, and we were weeks away from celebrating ten years of marriage. Now that Terrell was working full time at his sales job, we decided to take a long-overdue family vacation to Disney World —our first real time away since leaving ministry. We had saved and planned for over six months, getting as much information as we could ahead of time to make this a fairy-tale week for us and our two kids. It turned out to be just that.

We were on the long drive home from Florida to Texas, with the kids asleep in the back of our van, still wearing their mouse ears. I was tired, too, but on an emotional high that came from making their dreams come true.

I was talking to Terrell, trying to help him stay awake on the road. The conversation was light; we laughed and enjoyed each other’s company. We were just talking, and then I remembered I wanted to ask him if we could give an offering from his recent bonus to Ty and his wife, dear friends of ours who were struggling in full-time ministry. As soon as the words came out, my husband’s mood darkened. His tone changed and the atmosphere in the van grew tense.

“What’s wrong?” I asked innocently.

“Ty hasn’t been a very good friend to me. He has really let me down,” he said curtly.

I had no idea what he was referring to, and I pressed for more information. Since we were living in different states, I couldn’t imagine what our good friend had done. That’s when Terrell told me Ty had struggled with pornography. As we talked about his friend’s poor choices, Terrell was being torn apart inside. I still didn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to forgive and bless our friend.

What I didn’t know in that moment was that a couple of years earlier, Terrell had confided his ongoing struggle with pornography to Ty over the phone. His friend promised to walk with him to freedom. Only he never did. My husband didn’t hear from Ty until a couple of weeks before our trip to Disney World. He was calling to confess his own long-term struggle and ask for forgiveness. It turned out pornography was his own secret sin.

“What are you saying?” I asked slowly, methodically, in a fog of denial.

Terrell couldn’t go another second, say another word, without revealing his own secret sin.

“I’m angry because when I needed his help, he let me down. I need help. I have the same problem.”

What did he just say?

My heart splintered into a thousand pieces. It was like an out-of-body experience, surreal. This can’t be real. I must have misunderstood him. He’s telling me about his friend; this isn’t my husband’s secret.

But it was: my husband had just told me he was addicted to pornography. Just like that, the fairy tale ended.

I unbuckled my seat belt and climbed into the back of our van where my children were sleeping. I had to get away from this stranger. I crouched between their two car seats, pulled my knees up to my chin, and cried. I stayed back there for a long time until I could finally make eye contact with the person in the rearview mirror I had thought I knew.

In the shadows, I could see Terrell’s shoulders shaking and the tears streaming down his face. I was watching a man break in two. He sobbed with relief, the kind that comes from unleashing pent-up pain hidden for far too long. I was horrified at his confession, disgusted and confused. At the same time, I longed to wipe his cheeks and cling to him. He kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I had to tell you.” He paused. Then, “Even if it means you can’t stay married to me. I can’t live like this any longer.”

As I huddled in the back of the van, I wanted a distraction. I wanted to wake my sleeping children. I wanted them to need me. I wanted to pretend a little bit longer. But they slept on while the man in the front seat begged me to say something. I racked my brain searching for clues to what had led us to this moment. I couldn’t reconcile the man I loved with the man he had just confessed to be. I loved my best friend and partner, but I didn’t know this side of him, and it scared me to death.

My hands shook and I struggled to breathe. Tears splashed on my babies, and I wanted to die. I hated Terrell for his confession, for the years of lies he must have told, and for being someone I had thought he couldn’t be. He had unloaded the burden of his life on me, and now I carried the damage of it. I didn’t understand the entrapments of his sin, why he couldn’t find freedom, and what role I played in all of it. Even the thought of beginning this journey turned my stomach.

But simultaneously, I loved him for telling me. I ached at his desperation, and I couldn’t comprehend what this confession had cost him, knowing what the consequences might be. I couldn’t imagine my life without this guy. I didn’t want to live without him, I didn’t want him absent from our kids’ lives, but I couldn’t even fathom tomorrow. What do we do now? Will he ever be free? How will I ever forgive him? When will I wake up from this hell?

And so I offered the only words I could think of: “We can live as friends.”

Immediately, I saw momentary relief in his eyes. But the rearview mirror also revealed a depth of sadness in my husband that shook me. He saw raw fear and pain in my eyes. We couldn’t bear it, and we both looked away. With hours of driving left, I climbed back to my seat, and we began the conversation that would break my heart even more when I dared to ask why.

Because no matter how he answered that question, I didn’t know the man I was married to, and I began to wonder if his struggle was my fault.

The escape and perfection I had found at Disney World suddenly seemed so far away and even silly. I thought over our week of memories, of laughter and happiness, and wondered if it was all make-believe just like the pretend world we had visited. This was the beginning of a long and gut-wrenching quest for freedom and forgiveness.

But something miraculous happened in the midst of our devastation. The very night Terrell took a bold step and confessed his struggle to me was the same night I stepped toward him and started the process of forgiveness. Everything in me wanted to run away from this stranger I loved. But at the same time, I was so proud of him for wanting freedom more than he wanted to continue in the safety of his secret. We sobbed our way through intimacy that night, and even though we had never tasted so much brokenness, we knew that somehow God would redeem the ashes. We knew it would be the greatest battle of our lives —this choice to walk in freedom and forgiveness —but we decided in the middle of our devastation that we would fight for wholeness in our marriage.

In the days after, I mourned the loss of my innocence and the marriage I’d thought I had. I was angry and felt like my world was spiraling out of control. Forgiveness is often a hard daily choice, and sometimes the pain of the situation was stronger than my desire to forgive. I couldn’t eat or sleep and thought too much while I was awake. We didn’t confide in anyone in the beginning. It was too hard to say the words out loud, and we were ashamed. Terrell and I knew we needed help. He started reading Every Man’s Battle by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, and I read I Surrender All: Rebuilding a Marriage Broken by Pornography by Clay and Renee Crosse. While these books helped us realize we weren’t alone, we were desperate for more resources and tools, so we began marriage counseling just a week after returning home.

I’ll never forget dropping our two preschool-age children off at my parents’ house unannounced. I knew they could tell something was wrong because I was trying not to cry. “Mom, I just need you to take them for a while. Don’t ask why. Terrell and I need to work on our marriage.” And my amazing parents watched our children without pressing us as we shared our brokenness with a godly counselor for weeks.

My life was fractured, and I tasted brokenness with every passing moment. Even though Terrell and I were taking steps toward healing, I realized my own mind was a battlefield. I wanted all the gory details from my husband —the what, when, and how of his fight with pornography. But it didn’t take long to realize I didn’t need to know them.

During a couple of our first counseling sessions, I was confused as to why Bob, our counselor, kept turning his attention to me. I kept thinking, My husband has the problem. Help him! Please! When I mentioned this to Bob, he explained to me how light Terrell’s addiction was.

“Kristen, your husband has barely scratched the surface of this dark world. He has never given into it completely. He has fought a long and hard battle, and I am proud of him. I have no doubt he will overcome this struggle because he wants to and he’s seeking God for help. I will give him a few tools, but you’re the one I’m concerned about.”

I had fallen into a deep cycle —I was not only blaming myself for Terrell’s struggle, I was also feeling inadequate as a wife and a woman. While my husband was feeling more free with each passing day, I was feeling more burdened with his confession. Bob began to minister to me and remind me of who I was in Jesus. I was enough because Christ in me was enough.

I had another turning point as I read For Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn. In her book, Shaunti describes how men think and who they are at their core. I realized through counseling and by reading this enlightening book how very naive I was concerning men —how they think, how visual they are, how often they physically need sex. I was beginning to understand how God created my husband, and I was learning who I was in the process.

In my grief, I clung to God —not because I was spiritual, but because I saw my desperate need for Him. Terrell and I were praying and reading the Bible together with a fervency we had never known. I trusted God with my broken heart, and He slowly began to put the pieces of my life back together. What Rick Warren said was true: “Your most profound and intimate experiences of worship will likely be in your darkest days —when your heart is broken, when you feel abandoned, when you’re out of options, when the pain is great —and you turn to God.”[1]

It took a long year of counseling and hard, late-into-the-night talks for us to come to the point of being able to look back and actually thank God for this broken place. We armed ourselves with tools to combat our minds, which were our most powerful enemies. We took a thousand small steps to gain trust again. We had setbacks along the way in our progress to restoration. I realized that just as I have weaknesses with wanting control, losing my temper, and speaking before I think sometimes, one of my husband’s weaknesses is lust. It was hard for me to accept that because it feels more damaging than my sins. But God would remind me in those moments of doubt and fear that being tempted isn’t being sinful. God had given my husband self-control over his temptation, and he walked in freedom from the bondage of his weakness. Above all, God brought grace into our home. Grace to be human and love each other when we were weak.

Terrell and I made our marriage a top priority in our busy lives. He even turned down a promotion that would take him away from home more often. After we stopped counseling, we continued to fall deeper in love by making God more a part of our daily marriage —asking hard questions, praying together, encouraging each other, going on romantic dates, and sending one another notes.

Terrell explains what was going on inside of him.

One of the most remarkable things happened in the middle of this mess that I had made. I watched my wife do something beyond comprehension. She loved me. She held me. She offered forgiveness. Every natural reaction of disgust, hatred, and loathing was replaced by an opposite and more powerful action of acceptance, love, and compassion. She put everything she had into my recovery and fought for our marriage like a cornered dog.

As this process unfolded, I came to realize that while I “knew” God loved me and would forgive me, I didn’t really believe it. In spite of my doubts, Kristen continued to model unconditional love and forgiveness. Somewhere in the middle of our disaster, I was overwhelmed with a deep and real sense of God’s love for me. When Kristen asked me later, “What made the difference?” I told her, “You did. You became Jesus with skin on and showed me what His love was really like.”

I’ve never again doubted God’s love for me, because I saw it. I lived it. I felt it. I experienced it.

Kristen asked me one day to sum up what I felt about the journey of forgiveness that we had been on. I recounted the story to her that I had used many times as a youth pastor.

In the 1800s, a young Englishman traveled to California in search of gold. He struck it rich after several months of prospecting. On his way home, he stopped in New Orleans. While there, he came upon a crowd of people [all] looking in the same direction. It didn’t take long to see why the crowd had gathered. The people had gathered for a slave auction. He heard “Sold!” just as he joined the crowd. A middle-aged black man was taken away.

A beautiful young black girl was then pushed onto the platform and made to walk around so everyone could see her. The miner heard vile jokes and comments that spoke of evil intentions from those around him. Men were laughing as their eyes remained fixed on this new item for sale.

The bidding began.

Within a minute, the bids surpassed what most slave owners would pay. . . . As the bidding continued higher and higher, it was apparent that two men wanted her. In between their bids, they laughed about what they were going to do with her, and how the other one would miss out. The miner stood silent as anger welled up inside him. One man finally bid a price that was beyond the reach of the other. The girl looked down. The auctioneer called out, “Going once! Going twice!”

Just before the final call, the miner yelled out a price that was exactly twice the previous bid. This amount exceeded the worth of any man. The crowd laughed, thinking that the miner was only joking. The auctioneer motioned to the miner to come and show his money. The miner opened his bag of gold. The auctioneer shook his head in disbelief as he waved the girl over to him.

The girl walked down the steps of the platform until she was eye-to-eye with the miner. She spat straight in his face and said through clenched teeth, “I hate you!” The miner, without a word, wiped his face, paid the auctioneer, took the girl by the hand, and walked away from the still laughing crowd.

He seemed to be looking for something in particular as they walked up one street and down another. He finally stopped in front of a store, though the slave girl did not know what type of store it was. She waited outside as the dirty-faced miner went inside and started talking to an elderly man. She couldn’t make out what they were talking about. At one point, the voices got louder and she overheard the store clerk say, “But it’s the law! It’s the law!” Peering in she saw the miner pull out his bag of gold and pour what was left on the table.

With what seemed like a look of disgust, the clerk picked up the gold and went into a back room. He came out with a piece of paper that both he and the miner signed.

The young girl looked away as the miner came out the door. Stretching out his hand he said to the girl, “Here are your manumission papers. You are free.” The girl did not look up.

He tried again. “Here. These are papers that say you are free. Take them.”

“I hate you!” the girl said, refusing to look up. “Why do you make fun of me?”

“No, listen,” he pleaded. “These are your freedom papers. You are a free person.”

The girl looked at the papers, then looked at him, and looked at the papers once again. “You just bought me . . . and now, you’re setting me free?”

“That’s why I bought you. I bought you to set you free.”

The beautiful young girl fell to her knees in front of the miner, tears streaming down her face. “You bought me to set me free! You bought me to set me free!” she said over and over. The miner said nothing.

Clutching his muddy boots, the girl looked up at the miner and said, “All I want to do is serve you —because you bought me to set me free.”[2]

“How do I feel about this journey of forgiveness that we’ve been on?” Terrell repeated the question back to me. “I feel like the slave girl at that auction.”

Less than a year after our ground zero awakening, we renewed our vows in our pastor’s office with our two preschoolers as attendants, one holding a bouquet and the other our matching silver bands. The new wedding bands had “He is my beloved and I am his” etched on the outside in Hebrew. On the inside of our rings I chose these words that are meaningful to both of us: “I bought you to set you free.”

I had questioned how this good girl would ever see beyond her own pain. But it was in this barren place that I found Jesus.

The most breathtaking moments often come when we discover we have nothing left, but everything we need. This deep brokenness feels like the end, but it’s actually a new beginning. Not only did God bring us through our darkest valley, we now share a beautiful testimony of Terrell’s freedom and my forgiveness, and the beauty that comes from both.

I like to refer to it now as BC/AC (before confession/after confession) because I believe these devastating moments in our lives can be redeeming. God can use a painful breach of trust in marriage, the heartbreak of an ill child, or a financial blow to bring us back to the basics and remind us how much we need Jesus. The hard seasons make us stronger. Struggling is part of moving forward.

From the depths of brokenness, God had given us something new, something so much better than what we thought we had. It didn’t take long for our passion and second honeymoon to lead to another baby on the way. God turned our sorrow into joy.

The day finally came when I had time to reclaim my broken pitcher. With my curious firstborn at my heels, I gathered supplies and took my project to the back porch. “Momma, that’s broken,” she said, pointing to the colorful pieces of pottery from my beloved pitcher. As I spread mortar on a stone and carefully fit the broken pieces together, I answered, “Yes, it used to be something beautiful, but I broke it.”

“Why did it break, Momma?”

“It slipped out of Momma’s hand,” I said softly.

“Oh,” she said.

I looked at the mosaic I was creating on the stone and thought, It broke because it was too weak to stay together, but now I’m going to make it into something new and beautiful, something stronger. It was true of both my work of art and our marriage.

After so many years of trying and doing, I ended up with a pile of broken dreams. But that’s God’s specialty: He loves turning broken things into beauty. When I didn’t know what to do or where to go, I learned utter dependence on God. I was broken, then mended together by Him and ready to be used. I was exactly where He wanted me.

UNPINNED FAITH

When we break something in our home, our first impulse is to throw it away because it’s damaged. In our mind, its value has diminished when it is cracked or in pieces. But it can be transformed into something different, something new. Psalm 147:3 reminds us that God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” When we embrace the empty place and cling to God in the valley, we find streams in the desert that lead us to God. It’s there that we are able to thank Him for the brokenness and the new opportunities that come with it. Sometimes we heal stronger.

Telling you about this “ground zero moment” in my life wasn’t easy.

I couldn’t imagine God taking the broken pieces of my life and repurposing them for His glory, putting me in a position of saying yes to whatever He asked. But that’s exactly what He was about to do.

Be honest with yourself: What are you struggling with today? How can you turn what you are wrestling with into an opportunity for growth and strength?

Change your perspective: view brokenness as a place to find God. Look for the beauty in barrenness.