Peculiar, isn't it?

`Once upon a time there was an unhappy couple.  She said it was because they were so mismatched.  She married beneath herself.  In actuality, they were not altogether different.  After all, the reality is that baggage attracts baggage.  One set may have  looked more like a brown paper sack and the other like fine, leather Gucci, but it's all baggage  She kept a cold heart toward him because she knew he had to be bad.  Somewhere deep inside of her it was the very thing that had first attracted her, but she would never admit to such a thing.  Yes, she knew he had to be bad. 

And just as she suspected, he was.  His sins were many and grievous—by anyone's standards.  Terrible and as broad in consequence as a thundering black horizon.  She caught him in his sin, and shame reverberated throughout the broken family.  He fell on his knees in repentance and begged God to save his life and spare his family.  He did.  Though the change in the man was obvious, some things never changed.  She held on to her cold heart and wore her unforgiveness like a corsage of dead roses.  It was her badge of honor to remind her children she would never forgive.

She said it was for their sake.  He took his punishment for years, as did the children.  If she had only known that the effects of her coldness, self-righteousness, and perpetual punishment were just as destructive to their trembling home as were his terrible sins.  One day she died.  The chains of bondage draped a body that had finally turned as cold as her heart.  The last remaining blackened petals on her corsage of dead roses fell to the floor.  She died in her bitterness.  He grieved for awhile and strangely would have had her back—if he could have. 

Then God did a most peculiar thing.  In the man's aging years—years spent feeding hungry people and ministering to any who would have him—God brought him another mate.  One whose heart was warm with affection.  God blessed the latter years of the old man's life with joy and usefulness—yes, even after grievous sins.  His wife of many years never committed any such sins, yet she drowned in the gall of her own self-righteousness—proud to the very last breath that she had never sinned against her family like he.  And he?  Well.  He lived happily ever after.

Peculiar, isn't it?" ~ Beth Moore, When Godly People Do Ungodly Things