AMAZING STORY
Living a Double Life Catches Up to Cheating Spouse
By Ed Heath
The 700 Club
CBN.com -“I'm laying in this very dingy, beater-type hotel and I get a call, middle of the night and it's Paige,” says Brad. “And she has just been told of my infidelity. And it-it is the-the moment that I had both feared and longed for.”
“Everyone dreams of getting married and so, as a young man, after meeting Paige and then the courtship and really giving it everything I had to win her heart, it was the moment of sorta finality for me to walk into the church and actually marry her,” says Brad. “I continued to do the adapting that I had learned to do as a child in church, which allowed me to be one person with my wife and someone else with my friends from school or my drinking buddies.”
“At about year seven of our marriage, the wheels kinda came off of this sort of fairy tale life that we've been living where I was successful, we had plenty of money, we had the right home, the right cars, and yet inside of our lives we were very distant to each other,” says Brad.” I was very skilled at lying and it was not a very large step for me to cross when it came to infidelity”
Brad continues, “I remember getting the call in the middle of the night from a headhunter in Chicago who was looking for an interim CEO for a dot-com in Wisconsin and I remembered thinking, ‘this was my ticket to get out of the marriage.’”
“I would live in Wisconsin during the week, and then every other weekend I would come home,” remembers Brad. “And we lived that way for several months. And it was in an environment where ironically the affair had been over for some time that she found out about it, and that's when the marriage blew wide apart.”
“All of my secrets had been discovered and I didn't have to pretend to anyone anymore. I was served with papers and the process of divorce began. And I really embraced, not only a new Brad, but also a new belief system about life, about God, and about the nature of things,” says Brad.
“I was required to travel significantly and began to fly several times a month and developed a pretty nasty earache,” Brad recalls. “My eardrum ruptured in a landing and a significant bacterial infection threatened my health and I found myself in a hospital and dealing with the risk of a brain abscess. So I remember lying completely still, quiet, by myself alone in this hospital and wondering if I might die.”
Brad continues, “I have great success financially and professionally, owned all the right things, drove the right cars and, I wasn't happy, and the things I had done were supposed to make me happy.”
“I remember laying there quietly and-and very cognitively knowing that I might die and I wanted to know, ‘if-if I die, what would I meet? What would I face? Where would I go?’”
Brad continues, “I said a simple prayer, in my thoughts. It was sincere and it was deep and it was true of my heart and the prayer was this, ‘if there's a God, I would really truly like to know who you are.’ Something supernatural happened to me.”
“I felt like I was either having a vision or an out-of-body experience. I found myself in a place of great darkness, a place completely isolated from the rest of the world, a place that felt without hope. And I had the awareness, as I was in this darkness that this is where I’m headed, and it scared me. And in that moment I also saw Jesus and I had this feeling of great peace, of hope, and a sense that I had a choice to make. I could continue to live my life for Brad, or I could admit and submit to God as Jesus. And I chose for Jesus,” says Brad.
“I remember getting out of the bed, putting on my street clothes and literally that moment driving from Wisconsin to Memphis, Tennessee where my wife had relocated with our kids,” says Brad. “No matter what my wife did or didn't do in response to my action, that I had to show my savior, Jesus, that I would do whatever he asked of me. And he was asking me to make things right with my family. To say to her, ‘this was on me. I made these choices and I hurt you and it was wrong and I need you to forgive me because something's different inside of me.’"
Brad continues, “As I drove, I cried. I wept tear after tear after tear. I wept more in that one drive than I had in my entire life. My wife had been a Christian and had prayed for me to find Christ. She quit praying for God to save our marriage, and she began to pray just for God to save my soul. And it was in those exact moments that she prayed those prayers that God showed up for me.”
Brad’s wife Paige remembers, “The priorities changed in my prayer life. I had gotten things, maybe, sideways in trying to pray for my marriage to be restored but that wasn’t going to happen if brad’s heart wasn’t softened; for God to really show up in his life and to be real for him for the very first time in his life.”
“Now I have a marriage that I’ve always hoped for and I have a relationship and an intimacy with my wife that I would have never dreamed possible,” says Brad.
“Brad is my greatest testimony to the verse of God speaking that we are a new creation in Christ,” says Paige.
“Jesus is the real deal and he is all about redeeming our messes,” says Brad.
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