To Divorce or not to Divorce? (Personal Testimony: Part 1)

Before Going through Divorce!

I penned down my story in the process of getting healed. I hope that this story will also give you some pointers in getting HEALED the same way I did, specially after divorce.

Sometimes we think that we are the only ones suffering and that there is no life after a tragedy, but God is always there to help and to carry us through, if we ask Him.

By telling you my story, you will experience my pain and also the process of healing in the same way I experienced it.

After getting married in 1984, our marriage was normal, even boring after only seven years.

Then something remarkable happened, we got saved, and there were hope for our marriage for the first time. We got married for the wrong reasons being that she got pregnant, and we did not marry for love!

After getting saved in 1991, my wife and I drew closer to God and as a couple were closer than ever before. At that time, I loved my wife deeply. We went to church and we grew day by day in knowledge and in love for God.

Slowly we began to testify about God in our lives. We experienced the life changing Word of God as we starting to implement it in our lives.

I quit smoking and drinking and we lost almost all our friends.

We were changed and people began to see that we had joy, love, peace and that something drastic had happened in our lives. It was as if God had taken us and formed and moulded us with His own hands. We started to forgive those that had hurt us and God set us free and His Love shone through our lives.

There was such a change in us that people began to ask us what had happened to us. We started to live a new life and the things we use to do did not matter anymore.

We stopped fighting and the lies disappeared. 2 Corinthians 5:17: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have disappeared, and-look!-all things have become new! Therefore if any person is [ingrafted] in Christ (the Messiah) he is a new creation (a new creature altogether); the old [previous moral and spiritual condition] has passed away. Behold the fresh and new has come!

I felt this hunger inside me for the things of God and I read the Bible every moment I got. I was so full of the zeal of God, but did not have any wisdom. Once I got into a train and started preaching, telling the people that when smoking, that they were on their way to hell. They wanted to throw me off the train.

I had the fire, the zeal and knowledge for the Lord, but although I was radical for the Lord and the things of God, I still lacked wisdom.

I needed Jesus’s hand in my life to lead me to His wisdom. I went on Christian camps and met new Christians and they all had a part in my formation and development as I slowly started to understand the Kingdom of God. As I grew stronger in the Lord and the trials and tribulations increased, I was tested to the limits of my being.

We were serving the Lord for almost one year when things started to go wrong.

I led a person to the Lord, working and praying day and night to help him to understand the Gospel and to accept Jesus as his Saviour. His wife was not saved and later we all became close friends. Sunday’s I would drive out to his house and pick him up for church and drive him home afterward. He lived 16km from my house, yet it was a sacrifice I made with gladness. We became house friends and I thought everything was fine, till one day the Lord gave me these verses, which I did not understand at that time.

Micah 7:5-11: Don’t trust your neighbour, don’t confide in your friend. Watch your words, even with your spouse. Neighbourhoods and families are falling to pieces. The closer they are–sons, daughters, in-laws– The worse they can be. Your own family is the enemy. But me, I’m not giving up. I’m sticking around to see what GOD will do. I’m waiting for God to make things right. I’m counting on God to listen to me. Don’t, enemy, crow over me. I’m down, but I’m not out. I’m sitting in the dark right now, but GOD is my light. I can take God’s punishing rage. I deserve it–I sinned. But it’s not forever. He’s on my side and is going to get me out of this. He’ll turn on the lights and show me his ways. I’ll see the whole picture and how right he is. Enemy who kept taunting, “So where is this GOD of yours?” I’m going to see it with these, my own eyes– my enemy disgraced, trash in the gutter. Oh, that will be a day! A day for rebuilding your city, a day for stretching your arms, spreading your wings! (The Message Bible)

I started to pray that the Lord would reveal to me the meaning of these scriptures, the meaning of them in my life. The next Sunday a woman at church came to me and she handed me the same verse written on a paper. She said it was a word from God.

I was even more confused but I knew that the Lord was definitely speaking to me. Yet another person came to me and said that I must open my eyes because my friend and wife were holding hands behind my back while I was praising God.

I did not believe that my wife would dare to do something like that as she was serving the Lord.

I started to look into my married life and I saw some things that were questionable. I prayed that God would show me if my wife was unfaithful to me or not. The living God is faithful in all His ways and as I prayed, the Lord opened a way for me to see what He wanted me to see.

One night, when I was working night-shift, I phoned my friend and his phone was engaged. I then tried to phone my wife and the same there. I tried for half an hour or so and both phones were engaged. I tried to phone all our friends and family that I could think of and my wife was not on the phone with any of them. I thought that was strange. I tried again and my friend’s line was open so I immediately phoned my wife and her line was open too.

I put the phone down with a beating heart.

I was confused and pain scorched my heart as I prayed to God to give me conclusive proof. I sat and prayed for a while with a trembling heart and the Lord showed me what I must do.

I must phone my wife and then my friend and put them on conference call. I phoned my wife first and by changing my voice I said to my daughter, who picked up, to wait for a call. She went and called my wife in the time I phoned my friend.

As he answered, my wife also answered.

I put the phone on mute so that they could not hear me.

My wife was surprised that my friend phoned her, because he could not phone outside numbers from work. She said to him that he should know better, and that he was not to phone her at home. She usually phoned him at work. He said that he did not phone. It was as if the Lord blinded them at that moment and he said, “But, while we are on the phone, I want to see you. Make a plan that our families can get together”?

If it was an unsaved man “in the world” and not a child of God nor my best Friend, maybe I could have taken it better.

I went home without even touching him even though I had gone there with the idea to teach him a lesson. My wife pleaded with me not to divorce her. She said that he never had sex with her and that they were just friends. I did not believe her.

Life became dull and I dragged myself through every day.

Then one day God gave me a scripture that said that I must serve Him as if I was not married. 1 Corinthians 7:29: What I mean, my friends, is this: there is not much time left, and from now on married people should live as though they were not married.

I went on somehow and later went for counselling. I decided to give her a chance. I read somewhere in the Bible the word of God said that I must forgive seven times seventy and I did that in this case. She promised before God and the congregation, that she would never do something like that again.

I believed her.

I started to serve the Lord without her and went for a course in counselling school and became part of the prayer groups and home cells. It was hard on me because I was used to her being at my side all the time. It felt as if I were naked without her, but God prepared me for the times to come when I would be alone, times of loneliness.

Our marriage was never the same after that, I hoped that somehow it would be, but sometimes God’s plans are not our plans. It was as if she had won, had something over me and she began to treat me badly, shouting and cursing all the time.

I loved her and did not want to lose her.

Whenever she could, she would humiliate me in front of people and my life became a living hell. I started to train for and run marathons and long distance races to get out of the house and away from her (whenever I was off work).

I spent time with the Lord while running along the streets of Johannesburg.

My relationship with my dad was not as good as I would have liked it to be. He struggled with the death of my brother and soon after my brother died, his brother committed suicide.

That broke him even more. His work boarded him because of his heart condition and his leg. He also struggled to understand what was happening to me with this “Christian thing” and why I was so obsessed with God and with Jesus.

One day while I visited, we were talking about salvation and of the things of the Kingdom of God and I said to him that I am not of this world. His reaction was very strange at the time. He stormed into the house, got a Bible and he threw it at me. It hit me in my face and he chased me off his property with the words, “take your Bible and take your God and get out”.

I was shocked, devastated and very sad. Now the world and all that was still dear to me was ripped away. I was stripped to the bone, with no one left but God. My marriage was rocky, my relationship with my dad was wrecked and my trust in friends wobbly.

The only thing I had left was God, and I trusted heavily in Him for survival.

Later on I went back to my dad, expecting the worst, but we made peace. In this time my dad started to spend some quality time with me, helping me build a carport and to do things around my house. For the first time in my life, my dad was a real dad to me and I enjoyed our new found relationship tremendously.

This was only for a few months then he became sick and he started to complain about chest pains.

I took him to hospital, where they put him in I.C.U. and later moved him into a high-care ward. His complexion looked the same as normal and the doctors couldn't find the problem. They scheduled some tests and when that was negative, sent him home for the weekend.

Saturday afternoon he phoned and said that the pain was unbearable and that I must take him to hospital. I took him back and they put him back into the high-care ward. The staff had lost his file, so he sent me home to fetch the name of his prescription drugs. I walked into his room and got on my knees next to the bedside drawer to get his tablets.

I looked up into a photo of the family, myself as a child on my mother’s lap, my brother, on my dad’s lap. As I looked, the Lord told me to talk to my dad about salvation and to tell him to make peace with his Maker. It was as if God showed me that he would pass away.

When I got back to the hospital, they had stabilised my dad and he was calm. We visited for a while but I couldn’t find the boldness to talk to him about salvation. I remembered what happened earlier when he had freaked out about the subject. We left and I dropped my mother at home. We went home and as we arrived people came to visit us. While we were visiting, the phone rang. It was the hospital calling to say my dad had just died of a heart attack and that we must come to hospital.

I was devastated; not knowing whether my dad had had a chance to give his heart to Jesus before he died. I was disobedient to God and did not even try to talk to my dad. I was afraid that it was too late, that my dad would go to hell.

I couldn't forgive myself for a long, long time and I still want to weep when I think of it.

I know today that God used this also to form me and He later tested me again in that He said I must talk to somebody close to me, and I did.

My marriage had now become routine and after the death of my dad I withdrew even more.

This went on for several years as my wife and I slowly drifted further and further apart. During this time her dad was also killed in a car accident and that made her more aggressive and even more distant than before.

Continue hub (Louis Fourie's Divorce is now inevitable! (Testimony Continues 2)

I felt as if I would die there and then, but I was also calm and I felt the peace of the Lord upon me. I thanked God that He had showed me what was going on behind my back. I loved my wife with all my heart and it was as if my world came to an end.

The most hurt came from the knowledge that he was my friend in Christ and that his motive was not really Christ but lust for my wife. 1 Corinthians 6:13:Someone else will say, “Food is for the stomach, and the stomach is for food.” Yes; but God will put an end to both. The body is not to be used for sexual immorality, but to serve the Lord; and the Lord provides for the body.

I came home in a daze. I do not know how I made it through the night, except by the grace of God. My wife said to me that my friend’s wife had invited us to go and eat there.

I couldn't believe how devious and full of lies she was. We were children of God and I knew she loved the Lord also, or so it had seemed. I confronted her with the facts and I told her about my part in the phone conversation. She turned white as she realised that I knew about her secret affair with my best friend.

I told her that God showed me that she was unfaithful to me. I told her she must cancel the appointment, and that it was all over.

The next day I did not go to work, but I went to his house. It was very early on a Saturday and his wife was home. As she opened the door and saw my face she knew immediately that her husband and my wife were unfaithful.

She ran past me without a word and got into her car and drove to his workplace. I followed and when I arrived, his face was already bleeding as she was scratching and beating him with all her fury. He did not even fight back and as he saw me he also turned another shade of pale.

Proverbs 6:27-29: Can you carry fire against your chest without burning your clothes? Can you walk on hot coals without burning your feet? It is just as dangerous to sleep with another man’s wife. Whoever does it will suffer?

She was out of her mind and I could only watch.

After a while I grabbed her and she calmed down a bit, but then she began to look through his locker for things she did not recognise. She found stuff she did not buy. She threw it at him and she left because her two small daughters were still alone at home.

I looked at him and his face was smeared with blood where she had scratched him. He could not look me in the face. I thought how pathetic and ashamed he looked and I couldn't find it in my heart to do anything more to break him. Proverbs 6:32-33: But a man who commits adultery doesn't have any sense. He is just destroying himself. He will be dishonoured and beaten up; he will be permanently disgraced.