I know that I have had many crisis in my faith over the years. I certainly believed in God and accepted the Lord Jesus as my Savior. But I didn't really know how to pray any more than the prayers I had been taught and I certainly had never been taught how to read the Bible. When life got hard it seemed like I would look to God to get me out of the problems but that was as far as I would really take my prayers. I didn't know how to really have a relationship and pray for every part of my life.

That was until about two years ago when I decided that I needed something in my life. I struggled for the first year but about a little more than a year ago I fell into some very good basics that taught me the fundamentals of what prayer was all about. I was asked to join a prayer group which I did for a short time and was actually disappointed when my work schedule would not allow me to continue. It has led me to reach out and try to learn how to pray with my heart and not just my head. It has led me to look to God for the answers and to try not to do it all on my own. It has led me to offer my life and my problems and my family to God to lead us through some very troubled times.

The last year – actually two – have been very difficult in my life especially in my family and marriage.

I have struggled to not just give up and walk away from everything I have worked for and dreamed of. My marriage had many problems but I know it really fell apart when my husband had his affair. I don’t know how long it lasted (more than a year) but I know that it physically ended in November when he said that he would get counseling with me, but that lasted a much shorter time than the affair itself.

I have truly looked to God through all of this. Until I realized that I wanted to have a strong relationship with God and do His will and not just mine, I considered just giving up on our marriage. But then I realized that God gave us the gift of our love and I knew that the commitment was more than just something that we had done in church almost 16 years ago - it was a commitment to God as well - a commitment to stand by each other regardless of how we felt about one another or our marriage.

Our marriage has a good foundation and I believe that is why I could not give up regardless of our frustrations through the years. Our marriage has been based on love and a mutual faith in God - we truly liked each other and were friends above everything else. Because of that, I always tried to tell myself that we could put up with the problems and we would have time to work through the issues when our three boys got older. Truly the issues were not earth shattering - issues with time and responsibilities - worst of all - our biggest problems were the reactions to those issues that pushed us emotionally away from one another.

I have been asking God to show me what I need to change, how I need to change and how I need to pray for my husband. It has been an awakening for me to discover through prayer the parts of me that had hurt my husband so badly. It has been an awakening to find how deeply I want to be committed to my husband and to my family - not out of guilt or obligation but because it is what God wants me to do.

Every time I needed an answer I prayed and I was given the answer no matter how difficult it was for me to deal with. It was only when I prayed for a real answer to what was standing between my husband and me that I was led to exactly where I needed to look to find the evidence of the affair. When I asked for the answer about what was still holding us back, even after the affair, I was led to the answer – my husband had been in constant email and phone contact through January – maybe not still an affair but not starting to letting go and letting himself heal. I also was led to ask some very pointed and surprising questions – I was able to pinpoint times when they were together and places they had gone together. There was nothing in his actions to have led me to know – I know that the questions to ask were put there after I had prayed.

My three boys know about the affair at this point. I think that is when my husband had to face reality about what was going on with his life. The boys were very afraid that we were going to separate and I was truly about to leave shortly after the first of the year. However, we had a huge fight after I found about his continued contact and after saying everything that I had held in for so long, I felt a strange calm come over me and I was able to actually tell him how I really felt and that I really wanted to work things out. I believe that was God's work in me since I had been asking Him to help me deal with things better instead of just being reactive.

Since April, my husband has been living at home but also staying at another house less than ten minutes from where we live. He had originally wanted to move out for a period of time to work things out with himself but I asked for this compromise of living at home but staying at the other house on certain nights. I didn’t want to hurt our children and I truly felt that if he left it would be the first step towards not ever being back together if he left.

It has been difficult. It hurts every time he does not come home or stops to see the boys and then leaves. It does not give us much time to deal with any issues between us because I don’t want to ruin the time we have together when he is at home. I have had to make him deal with some things during the little time we have together and I really hate that it is rushed and it takes an evening that should be spent together as a family. However, when I don’t push the issues and make him deal with them, he now just does not respond – the silence is slowly killing me.

I never believed that if my husband would have an affair that I would even think about staying with him much less be the one to really want to find a way to work things out. Several years ago, an affair would have given me the reason I needed to walk away. But I believe that God was good to us. I believe that I found out about the affair many months after I had started counseling and started taking responsibility for my life and my part of the unhappiness in the marriage. It was during that time that I discovered how much I really did love my husband. It was then that I discovered that although we had many good times throughout our marriage, we were not living the life that God had intended us to live together.

I know that I have been given the answers to my prayers at the time that I not only needed them but when I was ready for them. It has proven to me over and over what we learn from young age – in God’s will, in His way and in His time.

Our life together is much better with how we deal with each other and most issues. However, no matter how well we are doing on the surface, we are only a family together and certainly not a couple. My husband will not commit to whether he even wants to try to work things out although he works on making our life together better everyday and our life together is so much better than what it had been. He has admitted that he is at that "safe place" that he has been at for many years - the emotional distance that we put between ourselves that is not allowing him to open up and even be willing to try for fear of where it would take him emotionally. I understand that. I was there for years and am only not there because I knew that I had to deal with my pain after his affair if I was ever going to make sure that I was not so bitter that I ruined the boys' lives and relationship with their dad. I discovered a few months ago that working through my pain from his affair and learning to trust and respect him again has led me to not only move forward from the affair but also from the hurt and problems of our past. I am having a difficult time with living in limbo and have told him that although it was not an easy decision to make, I could not feel like I wanted to move forward with anything until I made the decision that I wanted to make our marriage work. It has given me a goal to work for. We have been told in counseling, individually and together, that love and forgiveness are decisions and not feelings. But he seems to be waiting until the right feelings come along before he will commit to even wanting to make it work.

He has made it very clear that he felt I was guilty of holding grudges and not letting go of the past. That statement has been very true of me and something that I have been truly working on for the last year, especially the last six months. I pray for guidance and the ability to let go and only look towards the future. My problem now is that although I see myself changing, I now see that he is very unable to move out of what our life was into what it is becoming and what it can be. He actually admitted that he is having a hard time looking at the past and finding much good in our marriage although we had many more years of good, and even during the bad times we loved each other, stood by each other and had many good times.

He made a comment one day about having to resign himself to the fact that this is all that our marriage is. With that comment it has been very difficult for me to go on. However, every time I want to give up it seems that I am given the answer to my prayers and the answer is always that giving up is not what is intended for me to do. I know our marriage once was something much better and can be something much better once again.

I have realized that I can not change my situation and I can not change my husband. I can only change myself and there was and still is a lot of changing to be done. All I can do for my husband is to pray and that I do over and over every day. I pray for his guidance, for his spiritual life, for his heart to heal and soften and for peace in his life. I pray for his happiness and have truly asked God that if he will never be happy with me then to just shut that door and take me out of his life in a way that it will not hurt him or the boys.

Every time I get frustrated about where we are in our relationship and the distance he has kept, I pray about it and always have certain things happen. Specifically, during that time, various feelings rise to the surface and I realize how much I still have to work on especially in dealing with the hurt and working on truly forgiving my husband not only for the affair but for his part in the problems in our marriage.

I pray every day for a forgiving heart and for the changes to be made in me that need to be made. I also pray for the guidance that I need to know what to continue doing to make our life together as a couple and as a family better. I pray for the patience and strength to continue working on our marriage because it is what I believe to be God’s will for me, and for my husband and me together. I have found some very good audio tapes that I listen on my way to and from work daily. One of them has a part that I have really taken to heart – it simply states what has always been said to all of us since we learned to pray – give your problems over to God. It is more simply stated than that – it states that there cannot be two drivers in life – we can choose to try to lead our own life or we can give it over to God to be guided in His will and way.

It is when I decided that I was just going to hand over my marriage to God that I felt better and worse at the same time. It was then that I felt as if I really started struggling spiritually. It was then that I felt like I needed to take the control right back and do it my way.

I recently listened to the audio book "The Secrets of the Vine" which is based on John 15. During the second time I was listening to it, I found myself wanting to really understand something that I thought may be going on in our life. I prayed with all of my heart, "Where am I in life and where is my husband in life with what You are trying to do in our lives?" What I discovered, is that we may be at two different places of what God is trying to do in our lives.

There is a question that I found myself asking when I prayed, "What do You want me to do so that you can continue to do Your work in our lives?" The answer came to me immediately and I hated it. I immediately knew that I had to let go of my husband. Not stop trying, not stop working, but just let go and pray for him and let God work in him.

I am struggling with all of this because I can't see any improvement in my husband's desire to take us anywhere further than where we are now which is just parents and friends. He admitted that he knows that he is selfish but doesn't know if he wants to try to make things better because of that safe place his heart is in and how hard he knows it will be. I am devastated every time I think about that because I realize that somehow I have done something so terrible that he is unwilling to forgive me, love me or put faith in me and our marriage in the same way that I have done for him. I understand that it all has to do with healing and letting God work in our lives but it is hard to not want to give up when I look at the amount of time our life has been like this. But after really praying about it, I know that I can’t put a deadline on God and how long it will take to heal us. When I realize that, I no longer look at how long we have not been a true couple but instead, I look at the progress we have made since we started first addressing our issues, then how far we have progressed since the affair ended. It puts life into a different perspective.

It is hard to always look at our life as "the glass half full" instead of "the glass half empty". I had not looked backward at how long it had been since the problems had really gotten bad. I had not let myself look at it from the past and that it had been almost two full years since we slid so far away from each other. I had always looked ahead because of the changes we were making in our life. I know that I am suddenly looking backwards. Looking back at how long this has been going on discourages me so much that I just want to give up especially when I see no end in sight at this point. But I have gotten this far and I know that with God’s help I will be able to continue on. I have no doubt that I have been told that giving up at this point in our life is not what is intended.

I had told my husband a while back that just because we have had some bad years doesn't mean we can't have twice as many good ones in the future. If we live another forty years we can have more than twice the amount of time together than we have already spent and now that we are dealing with our issues then there will be so much more good than bad. It is true that God wants us to regain what was taken from us and he will restore it to better than what it had been before. I want more than anything for my husband to believe that God wants us to regain our love and that He will restore it to better than it ever was before.

I certainly have come to believe that my husband was my gift to me as were my children. I have come to believe that it is God's will for us to fight for our marriages regardless of hopeless it all seems.