'I Do'...And You Die!
"There was a day or time in our marriage where I literally prayed that he would die because our marriage was so hard," Lysa TerKeurst admits through tears. What kind of marriage would make someone say something like this?
"I think back to when I didn't have a day-to-day walk with God," Art TerKeurst recalls. "I was just living for the moment."
"Art and I made the mistake and slept together before we got married," says Lysa. "I found out I was pregnant."
Lysa believed the only solution was to get an abortion.
"I was ashamed. I was filled with fear," Lysa explains. "I went to the abortion clinic, and they told me I was pregnant because they gave me a test but that I really shouldn't consider myself pregnant, that it was just cells dividing and they could take care of this problem quick and easy and that I'd never think about it again. I bought their horrible lie and had the abortion. And I can tell you that I have thought about it almost every day since. After the abortion I thought that God could never love me, that God could never forgive me."
Both Lisa and Art were deeply disturbed by the abortion, so they took a drastic step to deaden their emotional pain-two weeks after the abortion they got engaged.
In the aftermath of my abortion, I did something similar. My boyfriend and I chose the abortion. We had no thought of marriage. A few months after the abortion, we decided to get married. As I realized twenty years later, our wedding took place during the week our baby would have been born...a subconscious urge to memorialize what we had created together and destroyed together.
Right now I am working with a couple who married a few years after their abortion. She has been involved in post-abortion support for a long time, teaching a post-abortion Bible study. She has often said that there are stages of healing but there's always more healing and you're never really healed.
I've recently begun to wonder what that is like for her husband to hear that repeated so often. Not good, I would imagine.