It’s Not Okay

My husband proposed twenty years ago this May, on the day I graduated from college. We went to dinner together at the Macaroni Grille to celebrate my brand-new degree, and then, with my leftovers tucked neatly at my feet, we headed towards his parents’ house.

But instead of turning onto their street, he asked, “Want to go for a walk?”

It was then I knew that something was up. That simple question now would never raise my suspicions; we walk around our neighborhood with our Westies nearly every day. At the time, though, Brandon was not a “go for a walk” kind of guy. 

We walked in the dark along a river boardwalk a few minutes until Brandon stopped to get down on one knee. I said yes, obviously, and doted over the shiny diamond engagement ring that decorated my finger.

Several weeks later, I began assembling a scrapbook of our relationship. I was big into scrapbooking back then. I sought to preserve every memory in scraps of notes and photos, cropped with decorative edging. While snooping around his bedroom in search of our dinner receipt from that night, I unfolded a different receipt, the receipt for my engagement ring.

I quickly wished I hadn’t found it. The ring was beautiful, but it was not real, a cheap knock-off from a local department store. I was mortified. Brandon had been engaged before, and I knew how much he had spent on (and lost to) his ex-fiance, who had kept her ring. I knew we didn’t have any money, but in my heart, the purchase felt cheap and thoughtless. I would have taken a much smaller, authentic ring, over a fake one. Wasn’t I worth more than this to him?

I told his parents I was going for a walk at the park down the road. When he finally came to find me from wherever he was, I gathered all of my courage to confront him about the ring. I cried and told him how finding that receipt had made me feel. When I finished, awkward silence rested between us. 

I waited for him to become bristly and defensive. This had been the posture of most of the men in my life—they were men who could do no wrong, men who said I shouldn’t feel that way when I did, men who brushed me off and went on with their lives, expecting me to adjust and accommodate for their behavior. This is what I expected from my new fiancé too. I braced myself for it, prepared to agree with all of his excuses and convince myself that it was fine, all fine, I’m fine, it would be fine.

“I’m so sorry,” Brandon said. That was it. No excuses? No defensiveness? Just hunched shoulders, lowered eyes, and an apology?

I blinked, taken aback, and then sighed. “It’s okay,” I said.

“No,” Brandon replied. “It’s not okay. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

I didn’t learn forgiveness from my family. I didn’t learn it, really, from my friends or my past boyfriends or even my church, and even though I had been rescued by the Lord my freshman year of college, I don’t know that I had accepted any kind of forgiveness for my past sins. I still carried them and every other thing I’d done wrong in a scrapbook of the History of Sarah: Sins Committed, stored away in my brain.

God had made a covenant with me. He had put his law in my heart and mind, and I called Him mine. He had even insisted that when He forgave, He would no longer remember my past sins (Jeremiah 31:31-34 NIV). But I hadn’t grasped that yet. 

When people had wronged me in the past, my response had always been “It’s okay.” This hurt is okay. Your behavior is okay. It is me who needs to change, to be stronger, more resilient, more impenetrable. You do you. It’s okay. Meanwhile, the pain of that past hurt etched itself in the second volume of the History of Sarah: Sins Received. The next time someone would hurt me, I could dial up the last offense in a millisecond. Remember last time? Remember last time? Remember the time before that? Each of those remembrances formed a thicker brick wall around my heart. Someday, when I finally became hard, invulnerable, and inaccessible, no one would be able to hurt me again.

I don’t think anyone had ever asked me to forgive them until that moment with Brandon. It was new, jarring, and unexpected. It melted something that had been forming around my heart. Brandon had learned the art of forgiveness from Christ long before I accepted that part of my faith, and in that moment, he modeled the humility of one who knows the thread that knits relationships back together, the chemical that dissolves bitterness. I forgave him.

For our  tenth wedding anniversary, Brandon replaced my cheap engagement ring with an upgrade, an authentic ring with several additional stones. What I wear today with my wedding band commemorates the ten years of marriage we survived together up to that point. It came during our hardest year, a year defined by my own desires, loneliness, and temptations. One evening, I broke down before Brandon. The last year before our tenth wedding anniversary I had felt distracted and distant, striving to preserve a toxic friendship instead of protecting our relationship and our family. In my confused priorities, I had compromised our relationship.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” I wept. “I failed to protect what is most important here. You. Us. Our family. What we’ve built. That is what kills me. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t stop saying it.

“I forgive you,” he said, holding me in his arms. “For whatever you feel like you need to be forgiven for, I forgive you.”

Forgiveness is giving up the desire or power to punish, to hold a person’s wrongs against them. I have written a lot about the sins my husband and I committed against each other in the last 20 years. I even wrote a whole book about them, called American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation. I’ll probably continue to write about our shortcomings and our failures as a couple, as parents, as people. 

It isn’t because I haven’t forgiven those hurts. It’s because I haven’t forgotten them. God might be able to forget our sins, but the scars in his hands remain. Holy and sacred and meaningful work was done there, work that didn’t break our relationship with God, work that sealed that relationship in love, forever.

When I remember our past hurts and the forgiveness that accompanied them, there’s no scrapbook of sins committed. Forgiveness wipes the History of Sarah: Volumes 1 and 2 clean. Instead, our book is stitched with forgiven sins, embellished with love that forms a foundation of trust, I will never leave you nor forsake you. Our sins against each other are not okay, they hurt me, but I love you, and I forgive you.

If my husband can do that for me, if I can do that for him, how much more can our God do that for us? It is God who modeled love’s mending, the salve of salvation that restores our relationship with God and with others, and then told us to go and do likewise. The teachers that followed after Jesus said the same thing, “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Colossians 3:13 NIV).

I am grateful to walk everyday with my husband in the merciful, life-restoring light of forgiveness.

–Written by Sarah Wells. Used by permission from the author.