This is going to be a very long beginning to a thread so only keep reading if you have a ridiculous amount of time on your hands.
I committed my life to Christ here in Australia when I was about twelve years old. Since then (I’m 38 now) I’ve had all kinds of ups and downs and been in and out of church genuinely struggling. But through everything I believe in my heart God exists and he loves me. I know I am capable of an incredible and a kind of love that has an overwhelming depth to it when I allow myself to feel and express it. It’s why I have always been so careful about doing that. I have always been told never to be “unequally yoked” with non believers and so for most all of my years I remained single, no Christian women have ever been remotely interested (it’s a small town) and to be fair 98% of the Christian women are and were already taken. If they hadn’t been I’d have been too self conscious and shy to start even talking to them anyway. I’ve always been a very outwardly ugly guy, shy and nervous around women. I wouldn’t blame any woman Christian or no, for rejecting me outright for my appearance alone. And boy have they. I have been ridiculed my entire life by a hoard of people for never having had a girlfriend and while I’ve watched thousands of relationships blossom with frustrating ease over my years on this earth, that was always impossible for me and I had to learn to accept this would never happen and to let it go. And eventhough I had prayed every day for many long years that God would lead me to a companion, there had been no one and the loneliness of that was crippling and plunged me into depression time and time again. No matter how fulfilling my relationship with Christ was, my heart had always longed to have a wife who loved me unconditionally and a family of my own. And that desire has never left. For me falling in love with a woman.. any woman and them loving me back.. that situation alone arising even once in a lifetime, encompasses astronomical odds and so in my twenties in the summer of 2008 when it happened it was the best time of my life. I had never been so in love before and she loved me just as much. It was a miracle. My prayers answered in my mind. The girl however was not a committed Christian.. she was open to it in a very broad “I believe something is out there” kind of way and went to church with me sometimes but she did not believe as I did and she did not believe sex before marriage was a sin and the army of people in my general vicinity including my pastor were quick to point out I should not be “unequally yoked” with this woman and should cut all ties immediately. I loved her so much by this point and she was the only person in my life I felt ever understood me in the slightest and accepted me for who I was. Because of the guilt from my pastor and other church members and my family I began to feel extreme guilt for the love I felt for her and then one night as she talked about how she wanted to marry me and proceeded to attempt to have sex with me, with a broken heart I stopped her and I told her I couldn’t and that I felt it was wrong and we were wrong. She felt extremely rejected by this but eventually said she understood and proposed that we first get married then it would all be permissible. I told her I’m committed to my faith and could only marry a girl who was also a believer. She persisted that she didn’t know where life would lead her and if this truth of mine would be eventually revealed to her but right now she couldn’t believe because she just wasn’t 100% sure. But she was getting older and wanted to marry and start a family and didn’t want to wait. And so and it utterly broke my heart more than anything else in my life had, but I broke it off with her and let her go. Something I would come to regret deeply. She was utterly devastated and went into a deep depression and eventually turned to drugs and alcohol and hurt herself in many horrible ways until I lost track of her and never heard from her again. She may have died in her grief for all I knew. The bottom also fell out of my life when she was gone. It was like the lights went out. I had never felt such deep despair. I blamed God, I blamed myself for the drastic consequences me rejecting her had done to her life. I left town and moved to an island off the coast where I lived alone for ten very long years and severed all contact with my family and everyone I knew who was a Christian .. which was everybody. I became an alcoholic. A recluse, completely alone in my pain and tears that felt like they would never stop. I almost died of liver failure. I prayed every day for god to take this pain and grief at the loss of this girl away but it never left me and within my deep well of pain I became angry at the world and at God that what seemed like an answer to prayer became instead such a living nightmare beyond my control. But one day ten years after this relationship ended I woke up one day and I was okay. I felt numb to it all as if I could never love another human being again, but it was a numbness better than the pain. I quit drinking and took a long journey home and looked up my parents. The prodigal son returned, and having no where else to go I lived with them again at 34 years old. I began going to church again, my faith renewed. I asked for forgiveness from God for my mess of a life. He fulfilled me again but again I was still plagued with this crippling human loneliness for a human partner. A desire that it was impossible for God to fill. And again I prayed that he would provide me with someone I could share my life with.
One night that year I was awake and at my computer in a chat room and I met an English girl online who was dealing with grief over a loss. She was clearly suicidal.. I recognized all the signs.. I had been in her place myself. It was an instinct to try and help. I called her and stayed up with her all night talking her out of what she was about to do. It turned out she had attempted suicide many times. Her legs and arms full of deep cuts. Scars she couldn’t hide anymore so didn’t bother trying. She had been in and out of mental wards most of her life but was extremely intelligent and certainly not delusional. As we shared our lives with each other with words alone night after night we quickly became good friends and supported each other. She revealed to me her awful upbringing and how as a five year old child she was taken from her parents by an evil monster of a man. He raped her for an entire year until she escaped and was found and returned to her drug addict parents. This experience left her a shell of a person with a severe eating disorder and other mental issues who wanted nothing more than to shrivel up and die to stop the hell that living was to her.
I never thought of this girl as anything more than a close online friend but over the course of a year getting to know each other we both fell in love with each other. Each not revealing to the other how we felt. Me in particular fighting my own feelings and constant thoughts about her with every fiber of my being. It was impossible she felt the same way about me anyway. I just had to kill those feelings. but they grew stronger anyway. She was incredibly beautiful despite her scars, inside and out. She was the most caring person I’d ever met and she understood me on a level no one else ever had. I knew this connection with her ran deeper and meant even more than the relationship I had broken off all those years ago, but yet again she too did not believe. She respected my belief but maintained that if God existed he would not have let her suffer as a child as she cried out to him and no help came. She concluded God was not real and was something only fools and privileged children believed in. She would never hold my belief against me but could not share it. She said she had too many doubts and only divine incontrovertible proof would make any difference. But then she wrote me a very long heartfelt letter explaining despite everything her feelings for me and that in her mind she understood they could never be returned but she just needed to tell me anyway. And here I was deeply grieved again that the second person in my life I had for whatever reason fallen deeply in love with, also happened to not be a Christian. I felt the same as she did but how could I tell her that if I couldn’t act on it? And with how close we were how could I lie to her and pretend I felt nothing when I felt everything so deeply even if we were a world away? I felt trapped. All I could do was pray and call out to God for an answer to this impossible situation. And then something happened. Something I never expected. He actually answered. As clear as I had ever heard God in a way and with the certainly I would place my entire faith on, I heard the words right through my heart like fire. Like lightening. “Love her.”
I still don’t know what to make of that but whatever the meaning it prompted me to tell her everything about the things I had been feeling for her. She told me no one had ever truly loved her in her life and me being in her life had stopped her from killing herself a hundred times already. We were both in tears on the phone.
I knew how against this everyone would be and how it might be completely wrong and how maybe my family and church would shun me forever but I couldn’t be apart from her another minute. I at least had to meet this person in real life myself. So I sold my car, sold most everything I owned (which wasn’t all that much) and hopped a plane to England planning to stay a few weeks in hotels until my money ran out. And so we met and even though I was convinced she would be utterly repulsed by my appearance and it all would end right there and I’d at least have some closure, she miraculously wasn’t. She accepted me for everything I was and am and every day I was there we fell more in love. She was about to be kicked out of her place and become homeless at the time and I was living out of expensive hotels sending me slowly bankrupt, so I could either leave her to the streets and return home or get all the money I was spending on hotels and had left and rent us both a place to live temporarily until we could figure something else out. So as guilty as I felt about that and “living in sin” I justified it because it felt more about survival than about her and me. But it was both in a way. We slept in the same bed but we never had sex until months later she felt so rejected by that and I was so afraid to lose her and plunge us both into another nightmare if I made her feel any more rejection .. afraid history would repeat.. so we did it, just once. The only time in my life. I stayed there with her in England for six months total and then had to return home where I have been now for a few months. In my time there we went through the best times and the worst times. I supported her through such emotional darkness I have never seen in another human being. Even with me there I had to physically prevent her from attempting to kill herself more than once. I am convinced without me she would have been dead ten times over. Thankfully at the end of our six months it was like she was a different person. She feels loved by me and I feel loved in return. It’s amazing and beautiful what we have together but I am rejected by my church and family for the decisions I have made and for what I have done. But I look back over it all knowing and having experienced this young woman’s life that hung in the balance the whole way, and seeing how changed she is now and the good and positive things that have come from me being there for her not just in her life but in mine and I find for the first time in my life despite all my crushing guilt, that yet I absolutely cannot feel regret. I feel irredeemable as a Christian man and I can no longer face my church or my family who continue to strongly feel being “unequally yoked” makes me utterly unacceptable to them. I’d feel too big of a hypocrite at this point to walk back into a church because I am choosing to continue with her. Because of our financial situation and international law and a lot of things the only way for her and me to be together now is basically to be married. It’s something we both want and are sure about and something no one else in my life will ever accept. But we need each other and we are doing it anyway.
I understand everyone is pretty much in agreement that this is sin but I am really struggling with the fact that the alternative of rejecting again someone I love so much and cutting all ties with her because of a difference of belief.. is at this point the most destructive thing I can do, not only to my own life but to hers as well. The consequences of letting this all go now I KNOW will destroy her and me both. I could try and be the good Christian as my pastor suggests, repent and never have contact with her again but I know deep down if I do that this time.. that’s it for me I’ll be finished. I won’t be able to cope. I couldn’t take it and her who I have loved with everything I have in me unconditionally, will be left alone in the dark with no family or friends left. I know how that story ends. I don’t feel that any choice is right strictly speaking at this point but this one and this path I am on, in deciding to marry her and stay and fight to be with her seems the more right of the two and the choice with the least destructive consequences. I don’t know what the answer is here and all I can do is pray that God will forgive me and one day bring her also to a knowledge of him. I hope my family and God will one day accept us both. If this relationship is wrong and as unacceptable as everyone says, then why does it feel more wrong to let it go? I genuinely feel if I had never pursued this relationship she would now be dead and I would be drinking myself into a depressive death somewhere out there having a relapse over it. Even now deep down I know I would likely give up on my life entirely without her. And she will definitely 100% give up on her life without me. I’m not saying it’s right for me to feel that way but I do, I know God should be enough and maybe he could be and maybe he could sustain me through anything and I might survive it but if I go.. if I leave her alone in the dark she definitely won’t. She’s not strong enough and I’m all she’s got. But still my family tell me if I stay with her I’m going to hell with her and if I pursue this path knowing that it is wrong I won’t be forgiven.
I’m not sure why I have written all this in the night. I’m not sure what advice I could receive that would even help. I’m a disappointment to my family and feel like an irredeemable failure as a Christian but every decision I’ve made I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. I’m not sure what that makes me now. If that means I’m a lost cause I guess I’m a lost cause. Thanks for reading this if you have. No one has really ever heard this and I needed to get it out.
- Jeremy
I committed my life to Christ here in Australia when I was about twelve years old. Since then (I’m 38 now) I’ve had all kinds of ups and downs and been in and out of church genuinely struggling. But through everything I believe in my heart God exists and he loves me. I know I am capable of an incredible and a kind of love that has an overwhelming depth to it when I allow myself to feel and express it. It’s why I have always been so careful about doing that. I have always been told never to be “unequally yoked” with non believers and so for most all of my years I remained single, no Christian women have ever been remotely interested (it’s a small town) and to be fair 98% of the Christian women are and were already taken. If they hadn’t been I’d have been too self conscious and shy to start even talking to them anyway. I’ve always been a very outwardly ugly guy, shy and nervous around women. I wouldn’t blame any woman Christian or no, for rejecting me outright for my appearance alone. And boy have they. I have been ridiculed my entire life by a hoard of people for never having had a girlfriend and while I’ve watched thousands of relationships blossom with frustrating ease over my years on this earth, that was always impossible for me and I had to learn to accept this would never happen and to let it go. And eventhough I had prayed every day for many long years that God would lead me to a companion, there had been no one and the loneliness of that was crippling and plunged me into depression time and time again. No matter how fulfilling my relationship with Christ was, my heart had always longed to have a wife who loved me unconditionally and a family of my own. And that desire has never left. For me falling in love with a woman.. any woman and them loving me back.. that situation alone arising even once in a lifetime, encompasses astronomical odds and so in my twenties in the summer of 2008 when it happened it was the best time of my life. I had never been so in love before and she loved me just as much. It was a miracle. My prayers answered in my mind. The girl however was not a committed Christian.. she was open to it in a very broad “I believe something is out there” kind of way and went to church with me sometimes but she did not believe as I did and she did not believe sex before marriage was a sin and the army of people in my general vicinity including my pastor were quick to point out I should not be “unequally yoked” with this woman and should cut all ties immediately. I loved her so much by this point and she was the only person in my life I felt ever understood me in the slightest and accepted me for who I was. Because of the guilt from my pastor and other church members and my family I began to feel extreme guilt for the love I felt for her and then one night as she talked about how she wanted to marry me and proceeded to attempt to have sex with me, with a broken heart I stopped her and I told her I couldn’t and that I felt it was wrong and we were wrong. She felt extremely rejected by this but eventually said she understood and proposed that we first get married then it would all be permissible. I told her I’m committed to my faith and could only marry a girl who was also a believer. She persisted that she didn’t know where life would lead her and if this truth of mine would be eventually revealed to her but right now she couldn’t believe because she just wasn’t 100% sure. But she was getting older and wanted to marry and start a family and didn’t want to wait. And so and it utterly broke my heart more than anything else in my life had, but I broke it off with her and let her go. Something I would come to regret deeply. She was utterly devastated and went into a deep depression and eventually turned to drugs and alcohol and hurt herself in many horrible ways until I lost track of her and never heard from her again. She may have died in her grief for all I knew. The bottom also fell out of my life when she was gone. It was like the lights went out. I had never felt such deep despair. I blamed God, I blamed myself for the drastic consequences me rejecting her had done to her life. I left town and moved to an island off the coast where I lived alone for ten very long years and severed all contact with my family and everyone I knew who was a Christian .. which was everybody. I became an alcoholic. A recluse, completely alone in my pain and tears that felt like they would never stop. I almost died of liver failure. I prayed every day for god to take this pain and grief at the loss of this girl away but it never left me and within my deep well of pain I became angry at the world and at God that what seemed like an answer to prayer became instead such a living nightmare beyond my control. But one day ten years after this relationship ended I woke up one day and I was okay. I felt numb to it all as if I could never love another human being again, but it was a numbness better than the pain. I quit drinking and took a long journey home and looked up my parents. The prodigal son returned, and having no where else to go I lived with them again at 34 years old. I began going to church again, my faith renewed. I asked for forgiveness from God for my mess of a life. He fulfilled me again but again I was still plagued with this crippling human loneliness for a human partner. A desire that it was impossible for God to fill. And again I prayed that he would provide me with someone I could share my life with.
One night that year I was awake and at my computer in a chat room and I met an English girl online who was dealing with grief over a loss. She was clearly suicidal.. I recognized all the signs.. I had been in her place myself. It was an instinct to try and help. I called her and stayed up with her all night talking her out of what she was about to do. It turned out she had attempted suicide many times. Her legs and arms full of deep cuts. Scars she couldn’t hide anymore so didn’t bother trying. She had been in and out of mental wards most of her life but was extremely intelligent and certainly not delusional. As we shared our lives with each other with words alone night after night we quickly became good friends and supported each other. She revealed to me her awful upbringing and how as a five year old child she was taken from her parents by an evil monster of a man. He raped her for an entire year until she escaped and was found and returned to her drug addict parents. This experience left her a shell of a person with a severe eating disorder and other mental issues who wanted nothing more than to shrivel up and die to stop the hell that living was to her.
I never thought of this girl as anything more than a close online friend but over the course of a year getting to know each other we both fell in love with each other. Each not revealing to the other how we felt. Me in particular fighting my own feelings and constant thoughts about her with every fiber of my being. It was impossible she felt the same way about me anyway. I just had to kill those feelings. but they grew stronger anyway. She was incredibly beautiful despite her scars, inside and out. She was the most caring person I’d ever met and she understood me on a level no one else ever had. I knew this connection with her ran deeper and meant even more than the relationship I had broken off all those years ago, but yet again she too did not believe. She respected my belief but maintained that if God existed he would not have let her suffer as a child as she cried out to him and no help came. She concluded God was not real and was something only fools and privileged children believed in. She would never hold my belief against me but could not share it. She said she had too many doubts and only divine incontrovertible proof would make any difference. But then she wrote me a very long heartfelt letter explaining despite everything her feelings for me and that in her mind she understood they could never be returned but she just needed to tell me anyway. And here I was deeply grieved again that the second person in my life I had for whatever reason fallen deeply in love with, also happened to not be a Christian. I felt the same as she did but how could I tell her that if I couldn’t act on it? And with how close we were how could I lie to her and pretend I felt nothing when I felt everything so deeply even if we were a world away? I felt trapped. All I could do was pray and call out to God for an answer to this impossible situation. And then something happened. Something I never expected. He actually answered. As clear as I had ever heard God in a way and with the certainly I would place my entire faith on, I heard the words right through my heart like fire. Like lightening. “Love her.”
I still don’t know what to make of that but whatever the meaning it prompted me to tell her everything about the things I had been feeling for her. She told me no one had ever truly loved her in her life and me being in her life had stopped her from killing herself a hundred times already. We were both in tears on the phone.
I knew how against this everyone would be and how it might be completely wrong and how maybe my family and church would shun me forever but I couldn’t be apart from her another minute. I at least had to meet this person in real life myself. So I sold my car, sold most everything I owned (which wasn’t all that much) and hopped a plane to England planning to stay a few weeks in hotels until my money ran out. And so we met and even though I was convinced she would be utterly repulsed by my appearance and it all would end right there and I’d at least have some closure, she miraculously wasn’t. She accepted me for everything I was and am and every day I was there we fell more in love. She was about to be kicked out of her place and become homeless at the time and I was living out of expensive hotels sending me slowly bankrupt, so I could either leave her to the streets and return home or get all the money I was spending on hotels and had left and rent us both a place to live temporarily until we could figure something else out. So as guilty as I felt about that and “living in sin” I justified it because it felt more about survival than about her and me. But it was both in a way. We slept in the same bed but we never had sex until months later she felt so rejected by that and I was so afraid to lose her and plunge us both into another nightmare if I made her feel any more rejection .. afraid history would repeat.. so we did it, just once. The only time in my life. I stayed there with her in England for six months total and then had to return home where I have been now for a few months. In my time there we went through the best times and the worst times. I supported her through such emotional darkness I have never seen in another human being. Even with me there I had to physically prevent her from attempting to kill herself more than once. I am convinced without me she would have been dead ten times over. Thankfully at the end of our six months it was like she was a different person. She feels loved by me and I feel loved in return. It’s amazing and beautiful what we have together but I am rejected by my church and family for the decisions I have made and for what I have done. But I look back over it all knowing and having experienced this young woman’s life that hung in the balance the whole way, and seeing how changed she is now and the good and positive things that have come from me being there for her not just in her life but in mine and I find for the first time in my life despite all my crushing guilt, that yet I absolutely cannot feel regret. I feel irredeemable as a Christian man and I can no longer face my church or my family who continue to strongly feel being “unequally yoked” makes me utterly unacceptable to them. I’d feel too big of a hypocrite at this point to walk back into a church because I am choosing to continue with her. Because of our financial situation and international law and a lot of things the only way for her and me to be together now is basically to be married. It’s something we both want and are sure about and something no one else in my life will ever accept. But we need each other and we are doing it anyway.
I understand everyone is pretty much in agreement that this is sin but I am really struggling with the fact that the alternative of rejecting again someone I love so much and cutting all ties with her because of a difference of belief.. is at this point the most destructive thing I can do, not only to my own life but to hers as well. The consequences of letting this all go now I KNOW will destroy her and me both. I could try and be the good Christian as my pastor suggests, repent and never have contact with her again but I know deep down if I do that this time.. that’s it for me I’ll be finished. I won’t be able to cope. I couldn’t take it and her who I have loved with everything I have in me unconditionally, will be left alone in the dark with no family or friends left. I know how that story ends. I don’t feel that any choice is right strictly speaking at this point but this one and this path I am on, in deciding to marry her and stay and fight to be with her seems the more right of the two and the choice with the least destructive consequences. I don’t know what the answer is here and all I can do is pray that God will forgive me and one day bring her also to a knowledge of him. I hope my family and God will one day accept us both. If this relationship is wrong and as unacceptable as everyone says, then why does it feel more wrong to let it go? I genuinely feel if I had never pursued this relationship she would now be dead and I would be drinking myself into a depressive death somewhere out there having a relapse over it. Even now deep down I know I would likely give up on my life entirely without her. And she will definitely 100% give up on her life without me. I’m not saying it’s right for me to feel that way but I do, I know God should be enough and maybe he could be and maybe he could sustain me through anything and I might survive it but if I go.. if I leave her alone in the dark she definitely won’t. She’s not strong enough and I’m all she’s got. But still my family tell me if I stay with her I’m going to hell with her and if I pursue this path knowing that it is wrong I won’t be forgiven.
I’m not sure why I have written all this in the night. I’m not sure what advice I could receive that would even help. I’m a disappointment to my family and feel like an irredeemable failure as a Christian but every decision I’ve made I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. I’m not sure what that makes me now. If that means I’m a lost cause I guess I’m a lost cause. Thanks for reading this if you have. No one has really ever heard this and I needed to get it out.
- Jeremy
