Original Sin

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

God has a way of showing a person what is truly their hearts desire. This is where sin originates: intent.

I always saw myself as innocent, my intentions as pure-ish - occasionally I saw myself as a victim. I perceived the world as if everything was happening to me, as if my life was the product of everyone else’s actions. I was walking through life allowing myself to be lead along, believing myself to be lead along, but our choices have consequences and our intentions manifest into our world. So, when an ex-boyfriend text me, and I began an affair with him, I allowed myself to believe I was being drug into it against my true hearts desire. But what our heart wants, what we truly want is what we bring to ourselves and we are not blameless in our choices. We make excuses for them. And, so I did.

When Scott reached out to me I was stunned. This is one person I never dared to even look up on social media because I had a lot of deep pain around him and our breakup. Somehow, he stuck as “the one who got away” Im not sure how, I wouldn't categorize our relationship as something to be sought after. It was full of trauma and broken hearts, at least my heart was left broken. I really struggled to move on from him and was still healing when I met my husband.

My husband was everything I needed at the time. He loved me deeply. He made me feel beautiful, sexy, and smart. He gave me confidence and pride, he understood me. He helped me with everything in my life. I have a repeating pattern of making poor decisions and he picked me up and pulled me through all of them. The hero I never fully saw, despite all the ways that he stood behind me, loved me, cherished me. The way I always saw it, is that he paid one too many pigs for me.

I was financially successful and secure. I was proud. I had a new baby and a sweet man by my side, and I was COO. I felt untouchable. My job was set and stable, I had sacrificed so much of myself over the years I had gained a lot of trust, people came to me for decisions, they respected my opinions. They too saw me as valuable. I really did not want anything to destroy that.

Scott reached out and I remember saying “you will bring problems to my life I do not need.” And I blocked him. But, i felt that rush of emotion come back to me. I don’t know why, it had been many years, many happy years with my husband and I will never understand why I could just not be content: I had everything.

We are not here to be content. We are here to be forged in fire. We are here to experience, to change to grow, to have honor and courage. We are not meant to lay dormant undergound as a seed. If we refuse to grow and change we may find our hand forced. God blesses those with honor and courage, not the content. That is not to say that God would want us to have affairs and betray people, but he does want us to follow our heart and be honest even with ourselves, and sometimes that is the hardest thing to do.

Unfortunately for me, my heart wanted something different. I did not. But, our true hearts desire will be shown to us and we can either have the courage to do the right thing or we can try to hold on to our lives. I wanted to hold on to my life. And, rather than leave my husband who I had become comfortable with, content with, who was sweet and whom I did not want to hurt, rather than leave him I had an affair. I told myself I did not want to have an affair, but I wanted to feel everything I was feeling, love, infatuation, dating, feeling sexy I wanted to feel all of it. This is the moment of sin: desire.

I want to be clear through my story that i do not believe God wanted me to have an affair, but he did want me to have courage and to be honest. I could have done that a million times, in many ways, and was given ample opportunity through the course of my betrayal. I did not realize it for a long time, but I was being shown my hearts desire, and I only had to have the courage to stand with it. Instead I blamed my actions on everyone around me.

Shortly after I blocked Scott my husband and I got into a minor fight. We were drinking together one night, something I wished we stopped doing as new parents, and he said something to me that made me feel insecure, he said something about men marrying down in the looks area, and it offended me. He claimed to have gotten his words mixed up, and that he had meant something different. But, it's all that it took for me to reach back out to Scott. Hurt pride. It was a simple text, relatively harmless, but I asked for his phone number and sent him a song.

This message is the first of many that shows my intent and culpability in the affair. Despite how badly I wanted to deny my part in it. He text back with his phone number and we began texting, slowly and timidly at first. I remember watching my texts very carefully and choosing my words wisely, as I knew, as we all know, anything in writing, anything over our vast network of computers and phones is forever. So, I was very careful. I was curious, wanted to talk with him, but didn’t want to cross any proverbial lines. The very act of talking with him was the first step crossed a major marital line, as it was a secret, but I Justified it - as long as the conversation stayed friendly, and I intended it to stay as that.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the decent slow. But, if you travel the path you will find yourself in hell very suddenly, and very jarringly. It was like sleep walking, and then turning to find yourself in the very depths of hell. There was hope, there was light, there was life, I turned, and I stayed, I stayed in the darkness in the shame in the very depths of Hades. And, sadly, it was all by choice.

Follow my story to learn more about my fall from Grace, about how I went from standing in the brightest light, and falling back down. Of choosing to rebel against God, love, grace and truth and instead choosing to follow the darkness.