​On paper, my life was going about as well as it could possibly go. I was happily married. Our son had just had his first birthday. I loved my job, and I was good at it. I had been selected by my department for their annual “Outstanding Educator” award. In fact, the day the sheriff’s department called to “ask me some questions” was the same day that I was signing paperwork for a full sponsorship from my department to pursue a PhD. Appearances had never been more sterling.

But the reality was hollow.

I wanted to believe my pursuit of sexual material online was “typical” for a twentysomething guy, but I had lost control. It is difficult to explain the baffling power of dark desires, especially to anyone who hasn’t faced the uncontrolled behaviour of themselves or others. For years I was engaged in a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with myself. I would put blocks on my own devices and then find ways around them. I rigged my phone so that I couldn’t download any new apps, only to resort to performing a hard reset. Good behaviour of weeks or months was punctuated by days of desperate and secret binges. I hated myself for it, but anyone caught in addiction can tell you that guilt and self-loathing only pull you deeper into the cycle. There’s only one way out.

Unfortunately, I never found it in time. In the face of everything that was going so well—a happy marriage, a beautiful child, a promising career—I returned again to the chat rooms that I had sought out as a young teenager, pursuing the same delusional imitation of love and acceptance as I did back then: instant sexual intimacy with strangers. This is destructive at any age; but when you’re twenty-nine years old, seeking out the same young teenagers as you did when you were fourteen is criminal. That’s why the sheriff got involved.

What happened next was the perfect cliché scandal for a news headline. A local teacher, husband, and father got caught in an online chat-room sting operation by a sheriff’s deputy posing as an underage girl. When I got the call from the sheriff’s office wanting to ask questions, I rushed off to an attorney’s office to prepare for my arrest instead of signing the paperwork for a PhD scholarship. The decisions I had been making for almost fifteen years had finally came to terrible fruition. Just when it seemed like my life was really coming together, everything fell apart.

Or so I feared. But, emphatically, not everything fell apart. I did lose my career. And my dignity.  But my marriage stayed miraculously intact. In the very public unveiling of my dark interiority, the strength and goodness of this relationship was also revealed. Again, appearances can be deceiving. I was drowning. But in the storm I had made of my life, I felt I was finally being pulled out of the flood of guilt and shame. Forgiveness was my first gasp of air. But the new life could only be found on the far side of death.

Living in a Fairy Tale

Theological concepts have a way of anaesthetizing us from the spiritual reality that we inhabit. We can wrongly equate Christian discipleship with knowing the frameworks of guilt and salvation, debt and grace. But when you are caught in the actual whorl of sin—the devouring lion itself—trying to modify behaviour by thinking theologically is like trying to steer an ocean liner with a canoe paddle. When pastors say things like, “If you only knew how much God loves you, you wouldn’t want to sin anymore,” I find it perennially unhelpful. It was unhelpful for twenty-nine years. We can’t “know” ourselves to holiness.

With the sudden convulsion of disaster on me, it was helpful to view my life as a kind of fairy tale. Bible stories took on new life as I suddenly found myself in the midst of several. I had been exiled into a surreal landscape of wilderness and monsters. The doors of the county jail opened before me like a maw, but when I descended, there was no beast that awaited me, only a mirror. I now saw what I had really become. Any person who would treat a young helpless girl as sexual prey deserves to be regarded with revulsion and banished to the depths. That person was me. Guilt is no mere concept. I shook with horror in my cell and wept until my eyes ached. After two nights in jail I was released (on bail) on the third day.

But just as my own monstrosity was revealed, the reality of forgiveness finally became tangible. No longer did I have to try to understand forgiveness by imagining, through some miracle of empathy, how an infinite loving God must feel toward a creature like me. When I told my wife what I had done and that I was about to be arrested, she had a profound intuition that this moment would cut to the heart of our shared being, that of our relationship with God and each other that we had pledged in our marriage. She instantly knew the story that she had been thrust into. Far from fear and denial of the death that was coming, she knew that she was given the chance to hold the beacon that would light the way through to the other side. In a real sense, my new life began when she forgave me. I was on a path out of the valley, and my wife was with me.

It is easier to understand forgiveness when you use the pattern of death and rebirth found in the greatest stories or myths. Because when you try to flatten forgiveness out into some moral concept—a universal formula that says what you ought to do when someone injures you—there’s no right answer that applies in every situation.

For many, reason would tell us that people should always get the consequences they deserve. Transgressors be damned. I saw a bumper sticker once that said, “Kill All Pedophiles.” If you cross me, I will leave you: that’s justice. On the other hand, we might overemphasize acceptance, offering cheap forgiveness to the point of minimizing the very real destruction that criminals, that sexual predators, cause. The battered wife who can’t leave her husband because “he really loves her”—that is not what forgiveness means.

When I came home that night and told my wife what I had done—what I had been doing—and that I had unilaterally scuttled our marriage vows in the most public way possible, the temptation of reason was to believe that the only options were harsh justice or mere acceptance. Either our marriage and family would be forever shattered, or we could continue together in some kind of desperate sham. But the miracle is that she knew the narrow road in the middle, secret only because it is as foreign to reason as it is natural to the unconscious contours of story. The middle way is forgiveness: neither mere justice, nor mere acceptance, but their alchemical combination that can transmute lead into gold, death into life.

The Fear of Non-forgiveness

In conservative Christian circles you often find high-resolution doctrine, replete with proof texts, about the grace of God and the forgiveness that his people ought to continually reflect. But knowing right answers doesn’t always lead to healthy Christian cultures. In the millions of discussions and interactions outside Sunday school or Bible studies, too often grace is forgotten, and it is made clear what is really thought of outsiders who violate moral expectations. They are treated with disgust.

We shouldn’t underestimate how much the disgust we show toward other people affects children. Growing up in this culture, I came to believe that if I crossed a moral boundary, I would be permanently cast out of the community. This belief was not held explicitly, but profound anxiety developed around any action that might get me labelled as one of those people, outsiders. I began to perceive moral boundaries as absolute, the iron curtain that separates us from them, the good from the unacceptable. The child mind believes that, once crossed, the door slams shut and there is no getting back home. Forgiveness as a mere doctrinal idea left almost no room for the experience of welcoming the outsider, the sinner, back home.

Of course exile is a constant theme in the biblical narrative. But in these stories, exile is not permanent, just as death is not final. It is only a crucible, a winnowing process through which a faithful remnant is always preserved. The repentant come home like the prodigal son, but my community was at times more like his older brother: it’s better not to need forgiveness in the first place. It’s a position as rational as it is unattainable.

I had intense anxiety surrounding my moral failings within such a community. And rather than confess and find myself exiled, I went to extreme measures to keep my secret and lead a double life. Days spent volunteering at church would end in evenings spent obsessively surfing dating sites and chat rooms, engaging in conversations and fantasies ever increasing in sexual explicitness. These binges were so all-consuming that I often forgot to eat dinner and was unable to put my device away until a few hours before I had to get up the next day.

The double life preys also on the double mind. I really believed that I was a good, upstanding Christian man who was checking all the boxes. At the same time I thought that I was a deceptive and disgusting failure who deserved to be shunned. These parallel perceptions, both lies inasmuch as they are half-truths, cannot be reconciled without undergoing the proper death, the true repentance. It was only in my jail cell that a kind of fusion was achieved: I am the monster I feared I was, and I am the beloved of Christ. With his help I could finally put the monster to death, but I would die with it.

So why do boundary-obsessed people often end up compulsively crossing boundaries? The best answer I can come up with is that we are looking for something “out there” that we don’t think we can get in our family or community. What we want is to be known and accepted, to find our place, our home. And, my reasoning went, if I am guilty of unhealthy sexual desires, then clearly there is too much at stake to be truly known within my Christian community. That would only result in exile. Much better to let my darker side be known to those willing participants online. It is a neat division of intimacy. I can find meaning, value, and approval for my positive characteristics in my shallow daily life, while finding the same for my darker behaviour online.

The logic of this arrangement led to deeper entrenchment of the pattern. The more I depended on destructive sexual behaviour to keep my psyche afloat, the more worthy of exile I knew myself to be. The anxiety that that threat induces can only be medicated by going deeper into the sexual darkness, searching for an acceptance that is never satisfied. And down the rabbit hole I went.

This is the downward journey that I began as a young teenager. While I had made significant strides toward health before getting married, ironically, the “husband” label made me that much more vulnerable to shame and fear. I was glad that my wife knew of my bad behaviour in the past, but was it possible that she—or anyone—would forgive such behaviour within marriage? Screwing up now as a husband meant delving to a new low. The old, implicit belief in the impossibility of forgiveness reared its head. A minor slip-up thus went unconfessed, and the cycle began again, by millimeters at first, but then by miles. Shortly after our second anniversary, the sheriff’s department called.

False Forgiveness

It would have been wrong for my wife to make light of my behaviour, to respond with a smile and a hug and say something like, “It’s okay, we all make mistakes.” It may be wrong to overemphasize boundaries, but the solution is not to eliminate them altogether. This would amount to a willing denial of the destruction of my actions. Whatever forgiveness is, it is not a breezy overlooking of wrongdoing by the victim.

Yet this caricature of forgiveness can be found in churches conscientious of not being judgmental. So happy are they to announce the free offer of forgiveness in the gospel that they neglect to mention the necessary follow-on: that we sincerely repent and get back on the right side of the boundary. “Go and sin no more.” Take up our cross and follow Christ to our death. Without this, our idea of forgiveness is false.

Cheap forgiveness is part of the recipe for my behaviour. However bad I felt about what I did, I could always turn to this caricature of grace for comfort. There was no action so bad that I couldn’t put a Jesus Band-Aid on it and continue on. I spent years of my life in this incoherent state: weekly assured of my being forgiven and sanctified by God while daily unable to keep from harming myself and others by my uncontrolled sexual impulses.

I am not making a theological statement about when forgiveness is or isn’t offered by Christ. Certainly there is no depth of sin that cannot be forgiven. But what I can say from experience is that appealing to the forgiveness of God for comfort without actually going through the death of repentance will not lead to any change. You will only stumble further into the valley in a haze of shallow comfort amid self-loathing. When forgiveness is tossed around on such cheap terms, it does not bring you closer to God so much as enable you to stray further afield. Boundaries, repentance, and forgiveness all become meaningless.

My wife did not opt for unity by way of a cheap coverup or a “nothing to see here” approach. She did not shield me from the destruction of my actions but stood with me in that storm. She held my hand as I fell, away from my career, through hundreds of denied job applications, to a new job scrubbing toilets; away from freedom and into virtual house arrest as a sex offender; away from dignity to humiliation. And if I verged on self-pity, she was there to remind me that these consequences were what was needed to learn a better way of living.

Resolution

What my wife did was retrace the path of Christ. She had every right to leave me, but she did not insist on her rights. Neither, however, did she prioritize our unity above the good. She freely entered with me into this crucible of death I had brought on, and together we began to walk out of the valley and up the mountain of real discipleship. Our marriage shattered, but through her forgiveness we were able to form something new.

The impossibility of forgiveness that I feared was resolved by this experience. My anxious child mind was finally put to rest. The person closest to me was injured by my dark secrets, but she did not turn me away. The healing was profound.

Whether we speak of psychology, relationships, or society, forgiveness is a vital asset that is too easily forgotten. Without it, nothing can cohere. Having a rigid sense of justice or disgust for transgressors will result only in permanently casting out the unacceptable. But this leads to a puritanical culture keeping up false images of perfection. At a certain point, the hypocrisy becomes palpable, and the culture is unsustainable.

The proper alternative is not a starry-eyed acceptance of transgressors, supposedly in the name of love. Relationship may be preserved through a cheap acceptance, but without acknowledging and enforcing boundaries, it creates dysfunctional community. It does not correct destructive behaviour but enables it, even enshrines it.

Forgiveness is the only way of preserving relationship that does not sacrifice the meaning of boundary. The threat that I posed to both my family and anonymous girls online through my destructive behaviour is not something to be brushed aside. It required consequence, deserved some smaller fractal version of death. This satisfies the concern for justice. But that is not to say that I am personally to be forever banished. There is a place for me to re-integrate into relationship, community, and culture—if I can do so in good faith, if repentance is genuine.

This is the journey on which I embarked, and the pattern of story proved true. I crossed the boundary, wrought and reaped destruction. It was my wife who through her wisdom and humility was able to love the beast, kiss the frog, save the prince, and preserve the kingdom.

​Into the Depths

The cost of forgiveness will be your life.

Two days past Easter 2019, I was catching up on a Good Friday sermon from a pastor-friend via his podcast. He quoted Charles Spurgeon:

The words played through my speakers as I drove home, not knowing. The Spurgeon quote rang pure and true. I believed it. God and I had fought for my faith many times before. I pulled into the garage and walked inside.

The fight waiting there was big. And it hurt. But it was no different in essence from the ones I’d been through before. “Well, darlin’,” I heard Yahweh say, “Are you going to believe me or not?” What did I believe? I believe Romans 3, that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I believe the stories of Abraham, David, and Paul, who all royally blew it, and yet all walked faithfully with God. I believe the story of Yahweh violently rescuing the fledgling Hebrew people out of the land of slavery, bringing them through the valley of the shadow of death, and faithfully disciplining them for forty years until he finally planted them on sacred soil.

It was my firm conviction that, while my husband’s choices were entirely and irrefutably his responsibility, this monster of sin had him in a deathly chokehold. I had known my husband for a couple years before we started dating and knew he had struggled and failed to maintain sexual purity. I witnessed him searching for help with his addiction. I saw him make strides to set limits on his behaviour, seek accountability, and make amends with those he had hurt by his destructive choices. He demonstrated his ability and willingness to repent.

And that night when our life as we knew it would come crashing down, I was conscious that how I responded would be a decisive moment in this battle. Unforgiveness and shame would give further fuel to the monster, but, I knew, forgiveness and mercy—as hard as that would be—would make room for the crucified and resurrected Christ to crush that monster and rescue my husband.

I also felt, so solidly within my soul, that Yahweh was saying to me, “Child, this is the moment I created you for. This is what it’s all been for.”

He’d given me so many people who had trained me and taught me about godliness. I’d spent more time in Bible study than in school. I’d had more mentors than friends. And I’d had a vision, since I was very young, of my grandmother, who glowed gold in my eyes. There was a brick placed in the courtyard of her church after her death with what has been my life verse ever since: “Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loveth much” (Luke 7:47).

As far as I understand, the foundational principle of Christianity is forgiveness. It’s what the Father has been doing since Eden, and it’s what he did through Christ on Golgotha. It’s the pivotal act that makes a relationship with God possible. Forgiveness was the gift I knew to give, because he had given it to me, time and time again.

But there is a terrible cost to forgiveness. To engage the pain of what happened, to stand next to a person who is covered in shame, to be accused of being the kind of person who would stand next to such a person, to slide a compassionate shoulder under the burden your loved one is carrying—there is pain there. It’ll cost you your own ease of following Christ if you choose to forgive.

When you choose to forgive, you are choosing the difficult path of steep ascent. I believe God honours that choice and begins refining you as well as the offender. The thing about forgiving someone is that you get extremely close to your own reflection in the mirror—until you are nose to nose. My sins needed to be confessed and to be repented of. Perhaps chiefly, my false belief that being a committed Christ follower would ultimately result in getting my way.

My entitlement to a “good, normal” life—there would be no birthday parties for our kids, no dad in attendance at the school play. My vanity—no amount of money spent could launch me into competition with the world of online pornography. My obsession with security—my husband would lose his career, his ability to be hired for a new job, to secure a home loan, and be at constant risk for permanent incarceration.

These are but a few of the costs of forgiveness that I have encountered. Yet forgiving my husband has been the thing God has used most mightily in my life to bring about my own sanctification. I think that’s the secret punch. You think you’re doing a great deed for someone else, but really God is doing a great deed in you. He’s inviting you to follow his own cruciform path, one where the shadows appear to deepen only to be overwhelmed one day by the most brilliant light. And the more I have followed this path, the more I have found him equipping me to be a bearer of resurrection, even as he is resurrecting me.