Sometimes I focus so much on the cross and what hangs on it along with Jesus… guilt, doubt, anger, embarrassment…that I forget about the empty tomb. But He didn’t resurrect any of my sins along with Him. Honestly, I feel like I’ve been doing Jesus, others and my redemption a disservice by not sharing my full story with the freedom that His resurrection has granted me.

There’s a lot of things in life I don’t get right. More things wrong than there are right, for sure. But my marriage is good. It’s really good. Better than I expected marriage could be. That’s not to say it’s come easy. We’ve worked really hard, and we’ve come a long way.

But God forgive me for ever allowing someone to believe that I’m just one of the lucky ones, because I was too embarrassed to share my need for God’s mercy and His generous response with it. There’s a layer of redemption down toward the core of my marriage that thanks to time and distance, I’ve been able to keep secret…or at least kept control over its narrative.

And evil loves that. Evil loves for us to keep our struggles, stories and redemption to ourselves and rename it shame. I am so serious about leaving shame behind and living in the freedom available to me through Christ, that before sharing this with you, I started with sharing it with my daughters.

When I was twenty-one, I married my high school sweetheart. When I was twenty-two, I divorced my high school sweetheart. I spent years with a soured opinion of marriage and felt like it was an outdated institution. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to remarry, it just wasn’t on my radar and I was perfectly fine with that.

But then I met my husband and my heart softened, and while being a wife wasn’t my goal, being his wife was. And 234 days later, I became just that! We always joke that it was Divine intervention that he and I have “made it”…that after ten years we still really, really like each other. It’s absolutely true…it is entirely by God’s grace.

And as God often does, He has used our marriage to draw us closer to Him, to minister to others, to enact generational changes in our family. I am always hesitant to share my story because I would never want someone to think that I don’t value marriage because I’ve been divorced. I don’t want people to think that when things get hard, that divorce is an easy option for me. I didn’t want my children to think that because it happened with someone else, it could happen with their daddy.

I have been bearing my own cross following my divorce and the shame, embarrassment and failure that was nailed to it entirely on my own…but it’s not my cross to bear. That work is done, thank you Jesus. Moving forward, I am choosing to look at this part of my life through the lens of the empty tomb.

Romans 8:34 says:

“Christ Jesus who died – more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.”

The cross and the empty tomb are a packaged deal. One without the other doesn’t tell the full story. And the same can be said about the work He’s done in my life. If all you know about me is the good, then maybe you’d confuse me with being lucky. If all you know about me is the bad, then maybe you’d think of me as a lost cause. But when you put those two together, it’s a beautiful testimony.