The Long Liftoff

On marriage, faith, and the powerful gravity of belief

Of all things, I remember the floor lamp. It was one of those boxed swing-arm lamps you have to assemble, brass-toned, pleated shade skewed sideways like a drunkard’s crown. It sat near the roll-up door of the U Haul, vertical but wobbly, cord unfurled and dangling from the back of the truck. Maybe I remember it because it was a focal point, a Drishti, as my yoga instructor would say, something to focus on while my life spiraled out of control. I vaguely remember seeing my bed pass by as I stood in the front yard, my husband, John, carrying one end, cracking jokes like a summer camp counselor trying to rally a group of apathetic kids. Hanging clothes by the armfuls paraded by, as did boxes of various things I’d hastily tossed in that morning. The tiny condo I was moving to was already furnished, so I was leaving most of what I’d accumulated over the course of my 24-year marriage behind. Not that I was complaining. A family from church that wished to remain anonymous had offered it to me free of charge until my youngest child graduated from high school—about 10 months. They’d heard I had nowhere to go.

When I picture that lamp I envision it as the final frame in a slo-mo video of a head-on collision—one my husband and I had been playing chicken with for more than two decades. When we met in a college Sunday school class, John and I had been born-again Christians for about six months. Even though we didn’t know each other before we got saved, in many ways we’d lived parallel lives. We grew up in alcoholic families. We’d both arrived at legal adulthood without any real sense of who we were, or where we were going. And after years of chugging the triune tonic of rebellious teenagers—sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll—we were desperate for answers and desperate to belong. Then along came representatives of the Allandale Baptist Church, who witnessed to us—him on a University of Texas shuttle bus; me at party. Accepting Jesus wasn’t just about securing a place in heaven, they explained. It was also about living a happy and fulfilling life while we were still on earth. If we surrendered our lives to him, he would not only provide answers to all of life’s questions; he would also heal our trauma and guarantee a lifetime of security and abundance. We fell hard. And then shortly thereafter, we fell for each other. Fueled by our near-constant temptation to fornicate and our newfound certainty Jesus was the only prerequisite for a successful marriage, we were engaged within six months. I was 19; he was 23. Ten months after our first date, we were married.

For the next two decades we did donuts on the straight and narrow, dodging our pasts and filling all the potholes with a theology of certainty. John was a real estate broker. I worked as his escrow assistant and later thrived in a part-time freelance writing career, but my main job was to be a wife and mother. I was 26 when our third and final child was born—all precious baby girls. We hosted Bible studies in our home, sent our kids to church camps and went on mission trips. By all outward appearances we were an exemplary Christian family—or at least that’s what we were earnestly working toward.

But underneath it all we were constantly playing Whack-A-Mole with things we couldn’t seem to conquer: deepening marriage conflict. Chronic financial problems. A host of physical and mental health challenges. We did numerous stints of counseling, attended retreats, and read scores of books—most of them led or written by people with a conservative Christian worldview. We also immersed ourselves in the teachings and disciplines of various parachurch ministries, each one claiming to possess the spiritual formula that would finally heal our fractured relationship and get us back on track to the abundant life. Depending on whom you asked, our problem was that we hadn’t fully surrendered to Jesus. Maybe we were harboring sin in our lives. We didn’t have enough faith. Or like Job, the Lord was testing us to gauge just how serious we were about trusting Him. I couldn’t speak for John, but the only one of those I thought was viable was the last one. I was surrendered—at least as much as any imperfect human being could be. I was dead serious about rooting out and eliminating sin in my life. I had a strong faith, choosing to believe in God’s love and His word regardless of how difficult my life was becoming. So the only thing I knew to do was endure. Just keep asking. Just keep seeking. Just keep knocking. Whack, whack, whack.

In 2002, however, the moles began to multiply. John started taking a variety of prescription drugs to deal with his deepening depression and anxiety—many of which made his symptoms worse. He also started “enjoying a few beers” in the evening, after having identified as a sober alcoholic for most of the time I’d known him. When I expressed concern about his adding alcohol to the cocktail of new medications he was cycling through, he was indignant.

“Do you really not see how controlling and judgmental you are?” he snapped.

His words crashed into my chest like a giant wrecking ball. Was I controlling and judging him? I’d been trying really hard to be supportive and understanding, but I did have a history of trying to control things—especially him. For most of our marriage, John had gone off on tangents. At best, these episodes were intense, hyper-focused efforts to accomplish a slew of new goals; at worst they involved reckless financial decisions that left us without resources to buy groceries, or make our mortgage payments. I spent an enormous amount of energy trying to keep him on the rails, whilst trying to prevent others, including our children, from knowing how bad things were. Did I ever cross the line in terms of trying to control outcomes? Yes. Were all my perceptions and concerns unfounded? No.

Adding alcohol to strong psychotropic drugs and a brain chemistry that was already fragile sounded disastrous to me. I didn’t think expressing that was out of line, but John was incensed. As usual, the shortest way to end our conflict and avoid the silent treatment was to choose his perspective over my own. I apologized and resolved to keep my worries to myself. I was terrified that his life was about to spin out of control. And I knew that if it did, the repercussions for our family could be severe. Like most conservative evangelicals, our marriage was rooted in complementarianism—the belief that the husband, as the spiritual leader of the home, had the final say in everything. If a wife respected and surrendered to her husband—even if his behavior was sometimes erratic and wildly contrary to the spiritual truths he espoused and supposedly embraced—God would honor her submission by eventually fixing it all. Since I believed deference to the complementarian setup was an ongoing test of my faith, I was determined to pass it.

This time, however, waving the white flag didn’t ease the tension. No matter how upbeat and encouraging I tried to be; no matter how carefully I tiptoed on the eggshells that surrounded us, John became increasingly belligerent and withdrawn. Even though stalemates were nothing new for us, the path back to each other had always been visible. This was different. He started coming home late at night and leaving by dawn so he wouldn’t have to see me. He began sending most of my phone calls to voicemail. For a while I was able to deny the growing chasm of our estrangement by telling myself he was just busy. But when he sent me an email saying if I wanted a one-on-one conversation with him, or to have sex, I could schedule it with him on weekdays between the hours of 7:00 and 10:00 pm, a wave of panic swept through my body.

This was bad.

I replied immediately, asking if we could have a conversation about it. But he said he wasn’t ready to talk to me—as though I had done something so egregious I needed to give him time to decide if he could forgive me or not. Until further notice, he added, our primary mode of communication would be via email—even though we were living under the same roof. Seeing him as we were coming and going was excruciating.

Frantic with fear and desperate to save our marriage, I decided my only option was to force God’s hand. Since I believed that the Bible reflected His perfect will, I searched the scriptures and found passages that referenced healing and restoration. Then I obsessively wrote them out and prayed them back to God, to remind Him of what He said He’d do. This, I believed, was evidence of my unshakable faith.

But ironically, I didn’t even want God to save the marriage—I had prayed many times to be released from it. I’d made a vow to stay with John, “‘til death do us part.” And as is common in most Christian wedding ceremonies, the minister sealed that promise with Matthew 19:8 “What God has joined together, let no man separate.” God was the only one who could let me out of a marriage that didn’t even remotely resemble the union of mutual devotion and unconditional love we’d promised each other at the altar. But if I left of my own free will, I believed that would be the same as walking away from God. Besides, if I gave up now, I’d endured years of adversity and conflict for nothing. What if I failed this test of faith and endurance, and then John got remarried and created a whole new family with our kids and another woman? Would it serve me right for not having the faith to stick it out? I couldn’t bear the thought of it.

It seemed like the only way to be happy—at least in the long run—was to stay married to a man who was not only on a crash course with himself, but was also breaking my heart with a greater intensity every single day. I told myself that once I passed this arduous test of faith, God could wave His magic wand and make me fall in love with the life I so desperately wanted out of. Was that so far-fetched? How likely was the parting of the Red Sea? Who would’ve thought a shepherd boy with a slingshot could defeat a giant? What were the odds of a man spending the night in a den fully of hungry lions and emerging the next day, unscathed? If God could save them, He could save our marriage.

Except there I was, loading a moving truck.

Clunk.

The sound of the plug hitting the metal bed startled me. I don’t remember who threw the dangling cord back into the U-Haul and began closing the overhead door, but there weren’t many people there that day: my husband; one of our daughters; my friend Karen; a couple from church who were in our orbit, but we weren’t particularly close to. By this time most of my trusted church friends had moved away. John still had some “accountability” buddies, but I heard through the grapevine that one of them had already declared me “in sin” for leaving. Even though his judgment didn’t surprise me, I was still baffled by it because he’d had a front row seat to everything that had happened over the previous two years. He knew John had secretly racked up $200k in credit card debt, forcing us into bankruptcy. He was aware he’d kicked me out of our master bedroom and put a lock on the door, dumping all my personal belongings in boxes and stacking them in the hallway. He knew he had abandoned his longstanding career in real estate to mow laws for $50 a pop. John was clearly unwell. But he wouldn’t listen to anyone who wouldn’t affirm his perspective, especially me. This once affable guy—whom everybody loved—had shut everyone out and become highly contentious and irrational. What else did his friend think I could’ve done?

In the end, what finally pushed me over the double yellow line was ridiculously ordinary: a three and a half by five inch postcard. After finding it in our mailbox, I had marched into our backyard and angrily thrust it towards John while he was mowing the lawn.

“What is it?” he barked, irritated I’d made him kill the engine.

“OUR HOUSE HAS BEEN POSTED FOR FORECLOSURE,” I yelled, guttural sobs rising in my chest. He had been lying to me about making our mortgage payments.

“You’re overreacting,” he replied, clearly exasperated. “It’ll take at least 90 days for them to put our things on the lawn and lock us out. Trust me; I’m working on it.”

And with that, he ripped the cord of the lawnmower and rumbled off to finish the job.

This was the moment of impact, the head-on collision that finally sent me flying through the windshield of our 24-year marriage. For more than half my life I’d been sitting behind the laminated safety glass of conservative evangelical Christianity, believing it was the only way to know God; the only way to be okay. I had bet everything, everything on the fundamentalist theology I had lunged at as a profoundly broken teenager. Now I was 44 years old, bankrupt, jobless and about to be homeless.

As I stood there in the afternoon sun, watching my husband mow stripes in the grass as though it were any ordinary day, I began to feel weightless. The sound of shattered glass and screeching tires grew distant, burnt rubber rising in a vapor beneath me as I shot towards the sky. But in those first few moments of being airborne I wasn’t afraid. The shock of knowing I was finally moving on had temporarily numbed the fear and pain. I didn’t have a job. I had nowhere to live. And I had $200 to my name. But in the space between my ejection and what was sure to be a crash landing, time stood still. I had forgotten how wondrous it felt to fly.

This essay is one of several intros I wrote (and didn’t use) for my upcoming memoir, “Shed.” It will be completed Summer 2026.

Photo by Patti Black on Unsplash