Thread: I'm not sure it's worth following God anymore.
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I'm not sure it's worth following God anymore.
Posted : 30 Jul, 2012 12:03 AM
I will give the long version of the story since I don't want people to get the wrong idea and try to give me advice I've already heard/taken/ and know.
I was a drug addict/alcoholic atheist until I was 19. I got saved by Christ at 19 and became a believer. After growing up in such a home for so many years, it took a few years to figure out everything I had been doing wrong. I still struggled with my addictions and lived very promiscuously.
I didn't attend church for several years and built my faith and understanding of God solely from reading the Bible. In January of 2004, I finally got totally clean (and have stayed clean), stopped sleeping around, etc, and started attending church and Bible study very regularly.
My faith grew leaps and bounds at this time and I spent several years evangelizing and growing Christ. I was very lonely and prayed God would send me someone to be my wife. After 2.5 years of celibacy and loneliness (I was 25 then), I ran into Joan. We had known each other previously from attending Bible study together for a long time. Since I was going to college for Journalism and she was a reporter, we hit it off and I started to tag along with her as she covered news stories for the experience. She told me she had always wanted to date me so we ended up getting together. Eight months later we were married.
I did not know the extent of the things she struggled with when we got together. She was a full-fledged alcoholic and was extremely promiscuous. When we got together, she quit doing both. But I was still going to school and we struggled to budget money and the like as we lived together. I had to take control of the finances as she had driven us horribly into credit card debt to the sum of $14,000. She also had a student loan and a car loan. I came into the marriage with no debt, so I ended up taking on hers.
I got a very stressful job as a Youth Care Worker for a children's home where I was constantly having to deal with fighting and redirecting troublesome teenagers.
As the years went by, we began attending her church rather than mine and became youth ministers there. We attended church regularly, but I became disillusioned with the whole scene because it wasn't very God-centered. We were basically event-coordinators for the kid's weekly church visits. I got burned out on it because I met such resistance every time I introduced things pertaining to faith in Christ. My wife and I argued a lot because she was the paid minister and she didn't like butting heads with the preacher lady. At one point, my wife began drinking again and we fought about this a lot because I told her she had a responsibility to set a good example to the kids in the youth group. She began talking to another man online as well and the woman who Pastored that church actually encouraged Joan to divorce me because I was controlling about the money and was insistent on not allowing sin into our home. At this time, I started working third shift at my job and I was able to relax a bit about my stress.
Well, we eventually left there and returned to my old church. We began working with the youth there and things were going good. Joan was attending a women's Bible study and made a lot of close friends that were godly women. Joan also got pregnant and we had our daughter, so he had to take a hiatus from working with the church for a while.
Fast forward to Daphne being 1.5 years old. I'm still working thirds and I have my life set up so that I spend all morning and part of the afternoon with my wife and daughter and sleep all evening before going to work. We have been married for 4.5 years at this time and we just got the money to pay off the last of the credit card debt. Daphne stopped nursing as well, and so my wife decided to start drinking again.
Since I was so stoked about finally having some the financial freedom I had worked so hard to gain after all those years of budgeting to pay off the credit card, I went and bought my wife some jewelry. I also went home and was planning a surprise Valentine's Day dinner when I looked on the computer and saw she had been visiting the site she had use to talk to the guy online three years earlier. It didn't take long to figure out her username and I also figured out her password. Sure enough, checked her mail on the site and she was talking to another man.
In the course of their emails, she admitted to the other man that she had cheated on me three years ago with another man on the same site. We live in Illinois and I later found out she had the first guy drive from Virginia to Kentucky to sleep with her in a motel room. Well, I didn't keep what I found out a secret and I approached her about it. She decided she didn't want to be with me anymore and was going to pursue this new affair with another stranger she met online from Massachusetts. Some guy five years younger than her with no job, no career, no degree, no faith in Christ.
She kicked me out of our apartment and moved him in three months later with our daughter while I lost everything and had to move in with my brother. We are divorced now and I'm as lonely and humble as I've ever been.
She is having a great time living it up and drinking with her new boyfriend who gets to spend more time with my daughter than I do. I have to pay child support to support my daughter and him as well while he sits at my house and sleeps with my ex-wife and plays video games (she got a job right after she kicked me out).
I'm at a point now where I find it is completely useless to pray or read the Bible. I figured if God didn't think my marriage and my family worth saving when I prayed, what is worth saving? Now, don't get me wrong, I still believe in God and that God has the power to do anything He wants. But He apparently didn't want to save us or He would have.
Now, I'm completely ruined. I could have been a great Christian husband to some faithful woman, but I can't see the point in it anymore. Furthermore, I can't live a life of sin because I detest it. All the women I know of in this town of 13,000 where I live are, basically, just like my wife.
I have no place in this world. People say, "You gotta take care of that little girl." How can I possibly be anything to her when her mother is going to drink, do drugs, and sleep with whoever she wants and her Dad doesn't pray or read the Bible anymore?
Really, I just don't see the point anymore. Whether I follow God or not, I come up as empty as ever.
I just got back today from an awesome float trip down Current River with my friends and the whole time I was having fun, I wasn't really having fun.
I don't want to be lonely anymore and I don't really feel like waiting to meet another wife at a Bible study, who I read the Word of God with, who I minister with, who I attend church with, who I work with kids with to cheat on me again.
I can't see any point in not going out and sleeping with any number of women in this town and just going back to who I was a decade ago. I waited a long time to get lose everything I had worked for and loved. What's the point of waiting again?
Here's something I posted here in the forums a while ago, but it might be helpful.
The Lord has used my time away from physical intimacy to bring me into a deeper spiritual intimacy with Himself, as well as a greater understanding of what physical intimacy is for (2 me personally anyways).
Has anyone here ever felt unseen, unknown and therefore unloved within a relationship? Have you ever felt that you were not cherished, desired or special within a relationship?
I have personally felt this way before. And you know what God showed me?
That the way I'd "desired" to be seen, known and loved was the way HE'd desired for me to see, know and love HIM for a long, long time...
That the way I'd longed to be cherished, desired and seen as special was the way HE'd longed for me to see Him...and I never had.
Throughout my life, I had wanted, pleaded and prayed for God to give me something that all along I'd unknowingly withheld from Him. I had not viewed or treated the "Lord" the way I myself had wanted to be treated. And when He by His mercy opened my eyes to this realization, it broke my heart in a way it had never been broken before - in a beautiful way, and for the first time in my life, I began to follow my beloved Savior.
Something else,
By denying God my love / my spiritual intimacy in the past, I had unknowingly denied the ONLY thing about me that would ever be worth cherishing, desiring or special - Christ within me.
Over time, many of my personal longings (including my longings for physical intimacy) have changed - not diminished, only changed.
Instead of physical intimacy seeming so physical, the idea has evolved to a longing to know Christ in whatever way He chooses to make Himself known to me, whether through a spouse or through the obedience of a single life serving and finding my joy in Him. My focus has become Him.
You must not lose faith and hope. I have lost four kids in two relationships and it was hard to accept this. God probably blessed you from something worse that could have happened in the future. Now I live alone and it takes time to learn to live alone again. But now I am in school fulltime and ready to graduate. Then I will be going to grad school at the seminary. Sometimes if we lose ourselves in our work and stay focused we wont bring ourselves down. And one day your daughter will come to you but dont give up on her. Like Joshua we need to be strong and courageous.There are things that could make life more miserable so we should be grateful for just having the simple things in life, God Bless...
So, since I'm looking at being homeless at the end of the month and going insane from being alone all night on my third shift job, I was trying to get a part-time job at the Post Office that would basically have changed my life.
I was denied the position. My ex-wife, however, just got a job as a Chaplain at the local catholic hospital. She lives with the man she cheated on her husband with and they're not even married and she drinks and has pretty much no other moral values at the moment.
I'm completely baffled. Does God have His face set against me? I just don't get it.
I'm going to be taking my profile down because I'm going to be homeless and living in my car - until the bank comes and takes my car too (which will destroy my credit and leave me in debt.) Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be paying child support to my ex-wife and she is getting a job making a sh!t-ton of money (comparatively speaking) and her boyfriend who gets some kind of stipend for some investments he supposedly has.
I have friends who will let me live with them, but I can't mooch off people anymore.
Each of us are given trials by God. It is a test. Recommit yourself to God and God will comfort you. Im not saying that you have not put effort into this, but have you put your efforts in the correct direction. Know this, it is not God who is rewarding your ex for bad behavior. None of us were promised a perfect, comfortable life while we are in this world. Place your trust in God and only God.
Somewhere along the way my friend, you have been indoctrinated with a very faulty understanding of who Yahweh is probably through no intentional fault of your own. This is the underlying disruption in your soul.
I and others can pray for you. However, the only solution in the end is going to come two ways:
1. Yahweh (the God of the Bible) reveals His true self to you.
2. You make a concerted effort to dig out who He is from His own declarations in His Word. I am suggesting several hours a day until further notice.
If you apply yourself to number two, chances are good you will get the result of number one.
I hear a lot about how "you" have done many things in your life on your own. Well where is God in all of this. Have you truly given yourself to Jesus Christ and trust him with all your heart? Prayer is great, but if you don't have the faith that He will help you it is useless to pray. Not only that how do you know what God's will was and is in this situation of yours.
I have to accept responsibility for my actions in life, I play a part in everything that happens to me. Good and bad. You may give up on God, but He will never give up on you.
Get to the right church to hear the Message of the Lord and remember "To thy self be true" God Bless
You know, let's just say, your loving wife and the mother of your children died, would you want someone telling you to "get off the pity pot?" Because that's the equivalent of what happened to me. You want to know the only difference? I cannot look at the pictures and memories we built together and remember the happiness and love of those days - it doesn't exist like that anymore. They're just painful reminders of a love that didn't last.
Perhaps you've never experienced such loss and cannot relate. As someone who lost his Dad when he was age seven and has lost both sets of grandparents, cousins, uncles, and numerous friends from drug overdoses, I've never been so hurt in my whole life as when my wife left me for another man and destroyed my family.
Perhaps, I've suffered more loss in this life than you can possibly fathom, having been homeless twice and looking at a third go-round at age 30. Perhaps you should consider yourself so fortunate to have such a "positive" outlook on life, but please, for those who have suffered, show mercy - literally, for God's sake.
And yes, I did put forth an exemplary effort to be honest and obedient to Christ in EVERYTHING I did. And maybe after trying my hardest to live in such a way, I found out in the end that I am not as stalwart a Christian as Paul the Apostle. Do I deserve less sympathy or mercy for that?
