I am on my third marriage. Like a lot of people, I haven’t led a charmed life. My life has been a lot like a roller coaster with plenty of ups and downs. Divorce and then death ended my first 2 marriages. My first marriage ended in divorce. We were together 1 year. Enough time to have a son. My second marriage, which should have been my first, ended after almost 30 years of being together. Two and a half years living together and almost 27 years of marriage.
Ernie
In 1980 my second husband, Ernie, and I bought the house we believed would be our last. The next 10 years saw us struggling to make ends meet, pay the mortgage, put food on the table, and deal with raising 2 boys, like so many other families.
We also struggled in our marriage and for a long time we didn’t have much of a relationship. There were times it was so bad I saw no way out and tried to take my own life. We were 2 people living in the same house whose paths happened to cross as we took care of our responsibilities.
Our family was very dysfunctional, and our sons grew up in a very worldly environment. And as Jon Courson says, “The tragedy of a compromised walk is that it affects more than you know.”
Love died, but it blossomed again. We became best friends and really appreciated what we had. Our last years together were special and the memories from them far outweigh any painful memories from the past.
I don’t know if anyone can understand this, but through it all we really did love each other. We had both just focused more on our own needs than upon the needs of each other. Had we been focused on God, and had we put God first in our lives, those earlier years of our marriage would have been much different.
I may have put God in the background during those years, but He didn’t put me there.
On March 15, 2001, Ernie, my husband of almost 27 years, passed away.
Getting To Know Me – Growing Up