True love

Lynde McCormick | from The Christian Science Journal

A husband tells how turning first to God to find happiness gave him the foundation he needed to restore his marriage.

I was sitting on a boulder in the middle of a fast-moving river, taking in the beauty of the mountains and forest around me, when an unexpected thought hit me: my wife had found someone else.

I had just spent three glorious summer days with several friends climbing and hiking in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, scaling three peaks in an exhausting and exhilarating trek. We were on our way down to our base and had stopped to camp next to a river. I rock-hopped my way over to a seat amid the rapids to soak up some shimmering, summer scenery. The high mountain air was thin and crisp, the colors brilliant. But the intuition about my wife was unmistakable and unnerving.

The relationship had turned into an uphill climb. Its legs felt wobbly.

My wife was spending a month at a university program in another state, honing her craft in early childhood education. There had always been a strong connection between us, but the preceding months had been troubled for our marriage. Each of us felt we were not getting what we needed from the other. The relationship had turned into an uphill climb. Its legs felt wobbly.

So sitting there on that rock, I somehow knew my wife had made the decision to put me in her past and build a future with someone else. I panicked. How could I deal with this situation that seemed beyond my control? I knew I could have been a better husband, but now it was too late. As we drove out of the mountains, I decided that Christian Science was my only hope, albeit what seemed at first a desperate, fragile one. Previously, I had given some prayerful thought to the question of identity—of who I really am—with a Christian Science practitioner. Focusing again on that question felt right.

As I thought about this question of identity, this phrase from Science and Health came blasting through my consciousness: “He [generic man] is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas …” (Science and Health, p. 475). This reminded me that no matter what happened in the world around me, my life would always include all right ideas and only right ideas—happiness and love among them.

I had to keep working on my relationship with God rather than trying to salvage the lost relationship with my wife.

I wish I could tell you that these ideas brought me comfort amid the crushing angst. They did not. The notion that I could be happy without my wife and family held no relief. Yet, even if this idea did not “feel” right, I knew that it was, and I knew I had to stick with it—to keep praying, to keep working on my relationship with God rather than trying to salvage the lost relationship with my wife. There was a light at the end of this tunnel, even if, at times, it seemed like an oncoming train.

Within hours after I arrived home, the phone rang, and it was my wife. She said, “We need to talk.” My immediate response was, “You’ve found someone else.” The comment startled her, but in tears she said she thought I didn’t love her anymore, and she had fallen in love with another man. She then explained that she planned to move out with the children to be with this man until they could be legally married.

Whoa, OK, cue the oncoming train. This was worse, more painful, than I expected. After we hung up, I grabbed the phone again for 1-800-practitioner-you-gotta-help-me.

After I reached the practitioner, what a contrast. Here I was—desperate, hurting, and beating myself up for having been a rotten husband—yet the practitioner was the voice of calm in this howling wilderness. She knew who I was and what lay ahead for me—all of it good. She did not sympathize. She did not judge. She affirmed the effectiveness of our earlier prayers together and encouraged me to establish in my thought my identity as the expression of God’s being. In other words, to work on my relationship with God, not my wife. Again, not what I thought that I wanted to hear, but what she said made sense, if only because my wife had been very clear that there was nothing to work on—our relationship was over. She didn’t have one foot out the door; she had both feet walking down the aisle with someone else. I was already someone in her past.

I was supposed to pick my wife up at the airport the next day, and I spent the evening praying to know who I was and to accept my true identity. God had created me. He would take care of me. The Word of God says, “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” (Jer. 31:3). My only task was to express that love and that kindness with which I had been “drawn,” or created.

The spiritual command came to me that even though the marriage was over I needed to be the best husband I could be, regardless of what kind of husband I had or had not been before, and regardless of whether I would be anyone’s husband in the future. And I realized that two human endeavors would give me no traction in my effort to find spiritual equilibrium. There was no point in trying to save or rebuild the relationship, and there was no point in tearing into myself for mistakes in the past. I could only focus on who I was at that moment—and see what I could do about it.

We cannot influence what has gone before. We can only control our own thinking now.

I decided to be loving, kind, and, ironically, supportive of my wife’s decisions, then and into the future, whatever those decisions meant for both of us. It was a pivotal lesson, one that has carried me through other crises and difficulties since then. I learned that we cannot control the actions or thoughts of others. We cannot influence what has gone before. We can only control our own thinking now. As long as that thinking confirms our relationship with God, and our actions express the love that defines this relationship, we will be loved, protected, and cared for.

Jesus said as much when he was quizzed about which commandment was the greatest. He chose that moment to state the two great and revolutionary ideas in the Bible. The first appears initially in the Old Testament and calls on us to recognize and love one God completely, and the second great commandment, stated by Jesus, is the defining directive of Christianity—to love our fellow man and woman as Jesus loved them (see John 13:34). In other words, we must love God completely and express that love to others.

These were important insights. I knew that. But they were not easy thoughts. I still felt moments of confusion and hurt, and it was often a struggle to stay on this spiritual track. But Mary Baker Eddy encouraged us to keep the truth within sight, even if it sometimes seems beyond our grasp. She wrote, “We must look where we would walk, and we must act as possessing all power from Him in whom we have our being.” And she continued, “As mortals gain more correct views of God and man, multitudinous objects of creation, which before were invisible, will become visible” (Science and Health, p. 264). We can’t always see the things that will make us happy, but they arrive in our lives when we realize that God, Love, is the only reality and that this divine Love defines who we are.

When we arrived home from the airport, I told my wife I knew she had been desperately unhappy with me and that I understood and accepted her decision to leave. But we had two young children—who had just returned from a month with relatives—so I asked that since these would be our final weeks together as a family that we spend them doing things together. She agreed, so I took a week of vacation from work, and we went to museums, amusement parks, movies, and parks. They were great, happy times.

When we returned from these excursions, I knew that my wife—out-of-love with me—was making plans with the other man for her next life. And I would keep praying, would keep affirming God’s love for me as the constant, defining truth about my life. I often had to fight back the temptation to feel miserable and sorry for myself, and I sometimes lost the battle. Self-pity can be so seductive.

A beautiful, powerful thought settled over my consciousness: Love is all.

One afternoon, I was reading the Bible and Mrs. Eddy’s writings, and I had a profoundly simple revelation. A beautiful, powerful thought as solid as the Rocky Mountains settled over my consciousness: Love is all. I knew it. I knew my unity with God, Love, was complete and would carry me wherever I needed to go, with great joy. Success!

The problem in our marriage had not been that we were not getting what we needed from each other. The problem was that we each were expecting what we needed—romance, excitement, stability, money, communication, support—to come from the other. But everything we need comes from God. And when we seek all we need from our relationship with God, all of it is supplied in abundance. We just have to seek it daily, sometimes hourly.

Over the next few days, nothing much changed in our activities and conversations, except that I was no longer afraid. By the end of the week, the situation changed completely. My wife decided to stay with me. I went to work on being a better husband, and we went to work on building a better marriage. I would say that forgiveness certainly seems to be in the bedrock of a growing relationship. That was about 23 years ago, and we now have been married almost 35 years. Our two children—whom I told, at the time, “Mommy is unhappy living with me and wants to live somewhere else”—do not remember any of it, except, of course, multiple trips to the amusement parks.

And if I were to tell you that the rest of our marriage has been only smooth sailing, my wife would surely haul me back into those mountains and toss me into that river.

If you want joy and stability in a marriage, you have to work at it—constantly. And you have to love those two great commandments. You have to believe in the power of God to love and sustain you completely and follow Jesus’ lead—see past the personality traits of your spouse to his or her capacity for greatness as the expression of God’s being. More importantly, you have to see past your own faults and claim your real identity—your own unlimited capacity for greatness and love. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes not. But one thing I know: it always brings happiness.

A decision reversed

A note from the author’s wife, Andrea McCormick

Everything that my husband, Lynde, wrote happened as he tells it. We had two small children and we were completely renovating our home at the time—from the foundation to the roof. At one stage of the work, we had to move out and stay with friends. It was a very stressful time. I was working a full-time job as director of a private school, and rather than feeling my husband’s support, his words and actions suggested to me that he didn’t love me anymore.

However, I was thrilled to learn I had been awarded a government fellowship along with 40 other teachers nationwide to study at Miami University in Ohio for a month. When my husband took me to the airport, the look in his eyes all but said to me, “I don’t care if I ever see you again.” That, and being separated from my children, was more than I could bear. Another participant at the university was in a troubled marriage as well, and we quickly found we had a lot in common. We were very supportive of each other, and soon, we thought we had fallen in love. We decided we wanted to be together after the month was over and that we would leave our spouses and eventually marry. I was so startled when my husband said he already knew this. We hadn’t written one another or communicated at all until my phone call to him. In hindsight, I realize that nothing but divine Mind could have alerted him to how I was feeling. I continued to study the Bible Lesson daily while I was away, and I’m sure my husband did the same.

Our prayers didn’t go unanswered. When I got home, I found a different man, the man I always knew my husband to be—funny, kind, gentle, supportive, loving. He had worked so hard on our home and had accomplished so much. On top of that, he had filled the house with flowers for me. Even so, it still took time, constant prayer, and humility to face what I had done and to extricate myself from the other relationship. I doubt that without my husband’s continued love and support, I would have been able to do it. However, I’m happy to say that the other man also reconciled with his wife, and they, too, went on to enjoy a strengthened marriage.