Chapter 13 
Chapter 13 Whoever digs a pit will fall into it,
And he who rolls a stone will have it roll back on him.
—PROVERBS 26:27
LISA: By the summer of 1989, I had left my job at the bank to work for a loan company. When one of my bosses at the bank left to open his own loan company, he asked me to come to work for him—for a nice raise. I agreed. Soon afterward, one of my previous employers ended up in trouble and had to go through a bank investigation. Although I was no longer employed there, I had to answer questions about what was happening in my department while I worked there.
Without going into great detail, I admit I became attracted to one of the investigators. Al and I knew this man and his family, but I never considered him more than an acquaintance until I met with him as part of the investigation and got to know him better. My relationship with Al was strained at the time, and Satan knew exactly how to entice me with a good-looking, stable man who had a good job and who seemed to have his life together.
Anyone who has ever been tempted to build a relationship with someone of the opposite sex outside of marriage may doubt me when I say I did not go into it consciously. But I did not. I had no intention of becoming attracted to that man. Almost before I realized what was really happening, we were involved in a romantic relationship.
The relationship never became sexual, but it almost did. I had booked a hotel room for the two of us, and once I had made those arrangements, the man either got scared or woke up to the impropriety of what we were doing and confessed everything to his wife. She called Al almost immediately, and he was devastated.
AL: By the summer of 1989, I could hardly believe how great my life had become. I had a beautiful wife and two healthy, adorable little girls. My spiritual life was strong, and as I went through preaching school, I felt I was finally pursuing the purpose for which I was created. I was learning so much in school and enjoying great ministry opportunities almost every weekend. Every time I preached, people seemed to appreciate it and responded well to me. I finally realized that the church leaders who encouraged me to attend preaching school were right. I did have potential. I could finally see it and was excited about the future. How lucky could a guy get?
For my situation, a better question is, how clueless could a guy be?
I could not have been more shocked when I answered the phone one afternoon at home after work and heard the distraught but somewhat familiar voice of a woman on the other end. She identified herself as someone Lisa and I knew, not well, but someone with whom we were definitely acquainted.
I listened in disbelief as this woman told me that her husband had just confessed to an inappropriate relationship with Lisa.
I listened in disbelief as this woman told me that her husband had just confessed to an inappropriate relationship with Lisa. I did not even know the two of them had been meeting about the bank investigation, much less that they had developed a personal relationship. At first, I refused to believe what the woman told me. But the more she talked, the less I could deny it. I was totally blindsided, but I also realized the woman was telling me the truth. The most painful part of it all was that all the signs pointed to Lisa as the initiator of the relationship.
I went home that day and waited for Lisa. When she arrived after work, I confronted her about the woman’s phone call. After talking around the situation for a little while, she eventually admitted it. I literally ran out of the house, shaking and quivering, as though I had been attacked or traumatized in some way. Lisa left for her parents’ house.
Immediately, I told my mom and dad what had happened and then went to sit on their boat dock to try to collect my thoughts. One of them must have called a friend of mine from preaching school, because he soon showed up and sat down beside me. He said very little, but he listened at a time when I really needed to talk. I kept saying, “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.” I knew Lisa had not slept with the other man, but what she had done was enough to be truly awful to me.
Lisa stayed with her parents for a couple of days while I stayed in our home with the girls. We did not really separate; we just spent a few days apart. I was hurt, angry, and not sure what to do next; there I was, training to be a preacher, and my wife did not even think I was a good husband.
I continued to speak with the man’s wife during this time, trying to figure out what all had happened. Weeks later, I saw the man and he faced me with humility and courage. He was so humbled and so sorry about what he had done. I could tell he genuinely felt terrible about it.
Lisa felt terrible too. She was truly sorry for hurting me. She says that now, in hindsight, she has to admit that her thought was, I got caught. I’d better not ever do this again. I was thinking along the same lines and made the mistake of threatening her by saying, “If you ever do anything like this again, I will divorce you!”
In the wake of the infidelity, everything we did for the next several months, we did wrong. We wanted to reconcile, but we really did not know how. We never saw a counselor or anyone else who had the qualifications to help us. Every time we had any kind of argument, I managed to bring up Lisa’s extramarital relationship and used it against her.
We never dealt with the core issues, deep feelings, and real challenges that got us to the place where Lisa was so unhappy. Looking back, we say we viewed it as a “near miss” during a stressful time. Even though we did not handle the situation well, we did stay together. The problem was that we did not learn enough from it to let it change us. When I went back to school in the fall, we went back to living the same way we had lived during my first year—the same routine, and unfortunately, all the same relational patterns.
Not long after I finished preaching school, I took a job at our home church, White’s Ferry Road. I could not imagine a better place to be a minister than in my own hometown. I did not have to uproot my family. I would be among family and friends who loved me, and I would be in the same church that had provided love and care to my mom and to our family when we first moved to West Monroe with little more than the clothes in our suitcase.
I felt so blessed to have that job. I worked hard and went the extra mile in preparation, serving people, teaching, and leading groups. I even got to travel around the world preaching the gospel. As my ministry stock rose, my marriage stock went down. Lisa felt left out and marginalized, like what we call “second fiddle” in the South. A distance began to grow between us. I could sense something sinister at work against us, but I was too busy or too afraid to dive into it and deal with it. I did what most people do: I ignored the problem.
I could sense something sinister at work against us, but I was too busy or too afraid to dive into it and deal with it.
Lisa and I were busy, like most young parents. We had two growing girls, I had a growing ministry, and Lisa was working for Duck Commander, which had finally started growing too. Lisa certainly had the perfect skills and experience for a job in a small business, but the main reason she went to work there was for safety and accountability. My family had been very disappointed about her relationship with the bank investigator, and my mom thought the Duck Commander office would be a good environment for Lisa. She and Lisa had become very close over the years, and Mom really wanted to protect Lisa from falling into a similar situation a second time.
Over the next ten years or so, our lives and our marriage rolled along. As I said before, we were busy raising our girls, and we were extremely busy with our church and ministry work. I poured a lot of time and energy into ministry work. I had other pastoral joys and responsibilities too, such as conducting weddings, baptisms, and funerals; making hospital visits; and counseling people who needed help with the struggles of life.
Lisa and I functioned well, and maybe that was our downfall. We kept up with our obligations and we did everything we were supposed to do for our family and our ministry, as best we could at the time. We would later discover that taking care of our family and ministry was not enough. We also needed to be taking care of our marriage. We heard a few alarms and saw a few red flags on occasion, but we did not stop to deal with them. Eventually, our failure to nourish each other as husband and wife and our failure to be proactive in protecting our marriage became a major problem.