The longer I pondered Satan’s question, the more reasonable it became. Maybe I did understand parts of Ty that Rachel didn’t. Perhaps Ty did need my emotional support if their marriage was to be successful. Maybe Justin really wouldn’t care that I sneaked out of bed each night to “counsel” Ty over the phone, it being ministry, accountability, community, and all. If the fruit helped our marriages be wise and more like God, why wouldn’t I eat it?
In those moments after hearing Ty’s voice for the last time, alone in my house in the silence of napping children and surrounded by five loads of unfolded clothes, the next sound I heard caught me off guard in every way.
Laughter.
My own.
And not just tiny, breathless sighs or a chuckle but hysterical, from the belly, loud enough to wake my kids and throw my feet scissor-kicking in the air kind of laughter.
It sounds horrible, I know. Here I am holding a ticking time bomb that will destroy everyone around me and I’m laughing.
Had anyone else been in the room, I would have felt embarrassed or guilty. But as years of shackles fell to the ground and the weight of secrecy lifted from my shoulders, my heart erupted in such pure freedom that it could not help but spill over with laughter.
Rachel knew the truth. Ty said it was over. Maybe I could finally be free.
The courage to confess my adultery was suddenly forced upon me. I was no longer in control, no longer blind or deceived. My mind was more awake and clear than it had been in years.
I had no idea what life would be like one hour, one week, or one year from this moment. My mind raced in a million directions. Would Justin leave, take our kids, what was Rachel thinking, would she take their kids? All I knew was that life would never be the same. Out of sincere gratitude for that fact, I laughed.
Maybe life could finally make sense now that I wasn’t running it. Now that plates were no longer spinning above my head, I could finally take a good, hard look through all of the broken pieces on the floor.
The lie I pampered and put makeup on and played with in secret could be seen for what it was — fear. Fear I would never be enough, fear no one could love the most honest version of me, fear that I, a devoted church girl, was capable of scandalous, horrible things just like the next girl. Fear that I was exactly who I thought I was — needy.
Most people think that fear is a lack of faith. But it takes great faith to fear. Faith is hoping in something we cannot see. Fear functions in a similar way. When we are scared, it is easy to have faith in the “what if” scenarios we make up in our heads but are not necessarily true. At its core, fear is not lack of faith.
Fear is questioning God’s love for us.
How clever, Satan. We call your bluff. Use God to turn us against him. Distract us just long enough to switch the awe-inspiring fear of God into the pride-inducing fear of man. Use the cloak of godliness to disguise the subtle shift from “God is enough” to “I’m not enough.”
Which leads me back to what God really said…
God really did command Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and warn them that to do so would bring death. But what Eve seemed to forget in her conversation with the serpent was what else God really said. “You are free. Free to eat anything and everything else. Free to create, work, have sex. Free to rest in the life-sustaining peace that because I am God, you don’t have to be.” (See Genesis 2:15-17.)
God really did say that He alone is the measure of all that is true, good, and right in this world. He placed a tree in the middle of our lives to remind us of our mortality and His sovereignty over those attributes. He knew how devastated we would be when our version of truth, goodness, and justice proved to be ever-changing, misunderstood, and packed with impossibly high standards.
So, we remember our freedom tree, the tree of God’s sovereignty, His full command over all created beings. Like Adam and Eve, we’ve been given this one life, our one story, to know and understand God’s grand, eternal purpose — the best story.
So, it’s not enough to say that God uses our lives if He does not also design them.
What God permits, He permits for a reason. And that reason is His design.
Because He didn’t stop it — for me, for you, and for millions of people throughout history — He has a purpose for it. And if we don’t believe our lives are designed and purposed by God, we will waste them.
This is our story — the beginning of our end, when God takes His rightful place as the greatest love of our lives. This is the moment we finally take Him up on his offer to be exactly who He says He is.
