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    Marriage Off Course: Trusting God in the Desert of Unwanted Separation or Divorce
    Marriage Off Course: Trusting God in the Desert of Unwanted Separation or Divorce
    Marriage Off Course: Trusting God in the Desert of Unwanted Separation or Divorce
    Ebook198 pages2 hours

    Marriage Off Course: Trusting God in the Desert of Unwanted Separation or Divorce

    By Clint Bragg and Peggy A. Bragg

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    About this ebook

    What to do when your partner is done

    "My spouse left and I don’t know what to do."
    "This pain won't go away; what's wrong with me?"
    "How can I save my marriage?"

    These are common questions from hurting spouses encountering unwanted separation. When you're the only one who wants to save your marriage, what do you do?

    Clint and Penny Bragg have experienced the excruciating pain of separation firsthand. They also have a decade of helping hundreds of other hurting spouses. From the lessons they've learned, the Braggs have crafted this guide to navigating marital strife, separation, or divorce, showing readers what to do when your spouse is done with the marriage--and what not to do.

    Wise counsel, support, and hope that the marriage can be saved are critical. Equally important is learning to seek God and deepen your faith in Him. The Braggs share candid stories from others who have experienced the desert of broken marriages as well as applicable stories from the Bible. Helpful charts, lists, and diagrams, and QR codes linking readers to audio prayers, provide even more personal interaction.

    With innovative tools, deep empathy and understanding, and a biblical basis for all their advice, Marriage Off Course contains a wealth of help and the ultimate message: there is hope--and there is help.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKregel Publications
    Release dateNov 20, 2018
    ISBN9780825475092
    Marriage Off Course: Trusting God in the Desert of Unwanted Separation or Divorce
    Author

    Clint Bragg

    Clint and Penny A. Bragg serve as marriage missionaries through the work of Inverse Ministries, their nonprofit organization. They share their testimony with audiences, teach seminars for couples, and equip ministry leaders. Their own story of reconciliation has been featured on multiple national and international television and radio programs. The Braggs are an active part of a countrywide network to strengthen, reconcile, and restore marriages.

    Read more from Clint Bragg

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      Book preview

      Marriage Off Course - Clint Bragg

      hope!

      Chapter 1

      Do the Desert Well

      Behold, I will do something new, now it will spring forth; will you not be aware of it? I will even make a roadway in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.

      —ISAIAH 43:19 (NASB)

      Nancy’s Story

      God had always been a central part of my life. The home I grew up in as a pastor’s daughter served as a safe haven for visiting evangelists and missionaries. Back then I never dreamed that one day I myself would be out on the mission field and there meet my future husband.

      Not long after Glen and I married, we began having children. When he obtained his first job as a pastor, I felt as though we would serve God side by side for the rest of our lives. Six months into that first pastorate, I decided to take our kids to my parents’ house for a visit. When I returned home, something had dramatically changed.

      I remember walking toward our bedroom and somehow sensing the Holy Spirit say, This room has been defiled. I tried to shake off what I felt, but the feeling lingered for days. Prior to this, I’d heard a story about a person who led a double life, and I wondered aloud to Glen how such a horrible thing could happen in a marriage. Soon I would realize that Glen himself had started down that road.

      One afternoon following church, Glen left early to come home because he said he wasn’t feeling well. The children and I stayed behind. When we got home, I expected to find Glen resting. Instead, he had packed his bags and left a letter on the kitchen table. He was gone.

      Everything that happened after that was a blur. Although Glen came and went from the house several times over the next few years, he eventually gave way to his other life and moved out of state.

      I didn’t want a divorce, but it seemed the godliest thing to do under the circumstances—to give Glen what he wanted. When anger would arise over what he had done to our family, somehow God would always remind me, Glen is not your enemy. I am the judge, not you. Sometimes I just gave in to self-pity, anger, depression, and crying. On those mornings, I’d wake up with that hangover headache you get when you’ve been drained of every tear. How long would I have to wait for God to respond to my cries?

      Each day we hear from desperate spouses just like Nancy who are living the nightmare of a marriage gone awry. Some are in the first few hours of separation. Some have been separated for months or even years. Others have watched in helpless agony as their marriages have ended in divorce. Many years ago that was the case for us, too.

      Our marriage was brief but not short on trial or trouble. I (Clint) felt like our relationship was rolling out of control, and nothing I did seemed to stop the swift momentum of destruction. Penny was distancing herself from me, and I feared that there was someone else. I went to our church for help, but because Penny and I were in leadership, the deacons floundered for a plan of action. After several months of ongoing turmoil, our pastor called Penny and me into his office at my request. Penny was extremely angry that I had involved him, and she sat in the chair with her arms crossed and her jaw tightly clenched. The tension in that room was thick and foreboding.

      Our pastor opened his Bible to Ephesians 5 and read the verses about wives submitting to their husbands. Penny’s face immediately flushed while she fidgeted in her seat and stared coldly off into the distance. When she finally responded to what he said, it was with much anger. Both of you are ganging up on me! Neither of you understands a single thing I’m feeling! She stormed out the door of his office and into the cab of our truck. If she could have walked home, she would have. Things only got worse from there.

      I was hopeful when Penny agreed to see a counselor, but my hopes quickly plummeted at our first session. Each time the counselor asked Penny a question, she would tense up and nervously spin the golden wedding band I’d placed on her finger. In my heart I knew she was ready to take off that ring and run.

      Eventually I suggested that we both cool off and take a weekend apart to think about our future. When I came home, Penny had moved out. In shock, I stumbled from room to room, trying to figure out what she had taken with her and where she might have gone. When I realized she’d packed only one suitcase, I hoped she might return right away. Wrong.

      I tried everything the Bible said I should to repair our shattered relationship. I went to her alone, and then I went to her with others (Matt. 18:15-17). I apologized and tried to reconcile with her (Matt. 5:23–24). Most of all, I prayed relentlessly (Matt. 7:7–8). Nothing worked. All the while, Penny was on the fast track to ending our marriage. And end it did.

      Our crisis took several months to reach its climax. Once she walked out, I felt alone, as though I’d been hurled headfirst into an uninhabitable desert with no visible way out and no one around me to help.

      I don’t even know how I got up each morning and went to work, especially during those first few weeks after everything blew apart. It felt like the whole world was moving on while I was frozen in time. My world stopped the day that I came home and Penny was gone. Still, I couldn’t afford to lose my job. Although I managed to make it to work each day, most of the time I couldn’t even remember driving there. Basically, I just went through the motions so that my boss wouldn’t notice that something was wrong. But inside, everything was very, very wrong. Consumed by my bleak circumstances, I convinced myself that no one could understand what I was feeling.

      I (Penny) used Clint as a scapegoat to justify why I left. At the time, my heart was so closed to God and Clint that it didn’t matter to me that I was engaged in sin. Secretly I hoped that all my callous reactions would scare him off. But way down deep, I felt guilty and ashamed about what I was doing. My coldness and anger toward him was just a cover-up. Still, I had asked Clint to stop pursuing me, and he wasn’t listening.

      I look back on it all now and realize my behavior was ridiculous in many ways. But I was too proud to fess up to my own wrongdoing or admit I had screwed up. Instead, I made Clint out to be a mean ogre who didn’t know a thing about how to really love a woman. He was the bad guy, and I went to great lengths to make sure others knew our problem was him, not me.

      As Clint and I share more of our marital blowout and miraculous reconciliation in the chapters that follow, I want you to know that we fully understand what you’re experiencing. The unthinkable has happened. You tell yourself that you’ll wake up, and the reality of what has transpired in your marriage will be over. Instead, the pain remains. This isn’t just a bad dream. Your marriage is broken. You are shattered. Although the intricacies of your crisis may differ from ours, we’ve heard thousands of stories that may sound more familiar:

      She told me she was done, but I never thought she’d leave. How could God allow this to happen?

      My friends and family told me to just forget him and move on with my life.

      My church friends said I should accept what’s happened and sign up for the divorce class.

      His porn addiction has torn us in two.

      My wife connected with an old boyfriend online. She said there was no one else, but I didn’t believe her.

      Can you relate to any of those statements? In the chapters that follow, we will surround you with a community of brave men and women who can fully relate to what you’re experiencing. You aren’t alone in what feels like a forsaken wasteland. Hear these collective voices of compassion calling out to you, and picture their hands reaching back to take yours.

      Every shattered marriage is repairable, no matter who or what has crushed it to the core. Even when only one spouse wants to save a marriage, God can mend it. We’ve seen it happen many times. Or sometimes a marriage is reconciled after divorce, like ours and others’ you’ll read about in this book. In other words, divorce is not the final death sentence for a

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