From Bitterness to Forgiveness

For eighteen years, Judy believed she had built the God-honoring life she'd always been taught to pursue. Then her husband's confession of years of infidelity shattered not just her marriage, but her understanding of how God works in the world. What followed was a journey through the deepest valleys of betrayal and bitterness—and ultimately, a discovery of forgiveness so profound it would transform not only her own heart, but reach across the chasm of hurt to touch the very man who had wounded her. This is the story of how choosing obedience in the darkness led to a freedom more beautiful than anything Judy had ever imagined possible.

Raised in a Christian home where moral excellence was expected. Judy grew up as the daughter of a Christian college president and pastor. Her family's strong religious values shaped her understanding of life and relationships from an early age. When Judy was 15, her mother passed away, dramatically altering her family's dynamic and leaving her to navigate adolescence with a moral code that needed to become "self-fulfilling" to stay "on God's good side."

By the time she reached college, one principle remained central to Judy's faith journey: maintaining her virginity until marriage. This was a deeply held belief that this choice would "obtain the promises of God and have a marriage that was God-centered and blessed." She held fast to this conviction throughout her college years despite being "bombarded with lots of options."

Her faithfulness seemed rewarded when she married and began building the family she had always envisioned. For 18 years, Judy lived as a wife and mother, primarily focusing on raising her children while occasionally dabbling in small business ventures.

Then came the devastating revelation that shattered her world. Her husband confessed to years of unfaithfulness—a betrayal that had been ongoing throughout much of their marriage. This confession didn't come unprompted; Judy had discovered "paraphernalia" in the glove box of her husband's truck that contradicted the promises they had made to each other. When confronted, her husband not only admitted to infidelity but also confirmed struggles with homosexuality that had been hidden from her for years.

"I was going, 'Oh my gosh, God, what do I do now?'" Judy recalls of that period. The revelation threw her into a spiritual crisis, not questioning God's existence but wrestling with what felt like broken promises and confusion about the existence/hope of perfect love.

In her distress, Judy "dove into God's Word" because she "had no other place to go." Amid the turmoil of her collapsing marriage and the competing voices of well-meaning friends and family, she found that leaning solely on Scripture provided the clarity she desperately needed.

"I was just looking to survive at that point," Judy remembers. The practical challenges compounded her emotional pain. As a stay-at-home mom who hadn't worked full-time in 18 years, she suddenly faced the prospect of supporting herself. Further complicating matters, her ex-husband refused to tell their young sons the truth about the separation until he was ready.

Living in expensive Seattle, Judy knew she couldn't financially survive there after the divorce. She made the difficult decision to return to Oregon, her home state where her parents lived. Some in her church community responded harshly to news of her divorce, telling her, "I can't talk to you anymore."

During this painful transition, Judy found particular solace in Isaiah 54:5-13: "Your maker is your husband. The Lord of hosts is his name and your Redeemer is the Holy one of Israel... For a mere moment I forsake you, but with great mercies I will gather you." This eased her feelings of abandonment and reassured her that while her earthly marriage had failed, God intended "to be my everything. My husband doesn't meet all my needs. My God meets all my needs."

Another verse that sustained her was the promise that "all your children shall be taught by the Lord," which gave her peace about her sons' future despite the family upheaval. 

This chapter became the catalyst for what Judy describes as "the most important learning I have ever had in my whole life: the journey of forgiveness." Despite the comfort she found in Scripture, Judy still carried shame and feelings of incompleteness. Her conscience remained unsettled, and she recognized that at the core of her pain was not just unforgiveness but "the root of bitterness.” The bitterness impacted her ability to experience the true love of the Father she desperately needed and wanted. 

Scripture confronted her with hard truths: if she didn't forgive her "brother" (which included her ex-husband), God couldn't forgive her. Judy acknowledges, "You can't deny the truth of God, but God's truth is not for our detriment, it's for our healing."

Understanding that God loved her throughout the ordeal enabled Judy to make "a very gentle choice of obedience" to forgive. Yet she soon discovered that true forgiveness goes far deeper than verbal assent. Many people say "I forgive that person," she notes, "but it's looking at what is in the heart that becomes the truth of what forgiveness looks like."

To excavate the roots of her bitterness, Judy found herself "grappling with God." Scripture challenged her again when she encountered the command to pray for her enemies. Despite having verbally forgiven her ex-husband, she had to honestly acknowledge that in her heart, "if I was honest with God, which He's honest with me, I still knew that my ex-husband was my enemy."

 Though they exchanged children and maintained necessary communication, Judy "couldn't even look” at her ex-husband for a long time. This became a personal litmus test for her forgiveness journey: the inability to look at someone indicated to her that God's work of forgiveness wasn't yet complete in that relationship.

In obedience, Judy began to pray for her ex-husband, though she cannot pinpoint exactly when this practice began—perhaps ten years after everything started, perhaps three years before the pivotal moment that was to come. What began as difficult obedience gradually transformed. "A person can know when they've gone from just, 'Okay, I forgive you’ to truly forgiving. It’s when a person can pray for an enemy and actually intercede and cry for that enemy."

Judy's focus shifted from trying to change her ex-husband to allowing God to change her. "So that is what I have to focus on, not the other person, but me." Her prayers for her ex-husband, once forced acts of obedience, became genuine intercession.

After years of this spiritual discipline, something unexpected happened. Her ex-husband came to drop off their children, which was unusual as they typically met halfway. He said, "I need to actually come see you," and asked if they could have coffee together.

During this meeting, approximately ten years after their separation began, her ex-husband asked for her forgiveness. Judy reached across the table, deeply moved, and told him, "The forgiveness was already done a long time ago because God dealt with me and God has been having me pray for you for the last three years."

His response stunned her: "Oh, it was you." 

In that moment, Judy understood that her obedience to pray had spiritually impacted him in ways she could never have imagined. "We never know what our obedience will do," she reflects.

This breakthrough wasn't the end of Judy's journey, but a significant milestone. She could now look at her ex-husband without feeling the bitterness that had once consumed her. Though temptations to revisit old hurts occasionally arise—"Does Satan want to come around every now and then and try to remind me of the past? Absolutely"—she found herself firmly anchored in her identity in Christ and the work God had already done.

As Judy continued to heal, God revealed deeper layers of hurt that needed addressing. "God, in His loving mercy, said, 'Okay, Judy, you're not done.'" She came to understand that her feelings of shame and rejection predated her marriage, originating in her relationship with her father during childhood.

This revelation helped her recognize that she had entered marriage "searching for love from the very beginning," trying to fill a void that had been present since her youth. God approached this healing process "as an onion. It's peel after peel after peel. He doesn't cut right to the core, just pieces. But thankfully he does it layer by layer so we can get through each one."

Now remarried, Judy carries within her a transformed perspective on life and relationships. She has learned to distinguish between seeking fulfillment from human relationships and finding her completeness in God. "My husband doesn't meet all my needs. My God meets all my needs," she reminds herself and others.

Judy describes the unforgiveness and bitterness as damming up "the rivers of living water" in her spiritual life. "I know what it is to have those rivers flowing. And then I also know what it is to have them dammed up." The freedom that comes from obedience to forgive, she found, is "much more beautiful than the work that has to happen."

With each layer of forgiveness—toward her ex-husband, her father, and others—Judy experienced greater freedom. She describes waking up one day and realizing with astonishment, "Oh my gosh, God, those voices that told me I could never find true love and acceptance because of me are no longer there."  

When Judy surpassed the age of 52—the age at which her mother had passed away—she commemorated her journey with a tattoo reading "Alive in Christ," a testament to the fullness of life she had found through her path of forgiveness and healing.

"It's an ongoing daily work," Judy acknowledges, "but He had to undo the brokenness from the very core of it in order to get me to where I could be freed." Her journey has given her significant insight into "where other people get stuck," and she has witnessed firsthand how choosing obedience to forgive—even when it feels impossible—unlocks the very freedom our souls desperately need.

Judy's message is both simple and revolutionary: forgiveness is not optional for those who want to experience the abundant life God promises. It's the key that unlocks the dammed-up rivers of living water within us. "It's not just my soapbox," she declares with conviction born from experience, "but it has to be the soapbox for absolutely everybody."

In a world where bitterness and unforgiveness hold so many captive, Judy stands as living proof that no hurt is too deep, no betrayal too devastating, and no wound too old for God's healing power to reach. Her story whispers hope to every heart that has been shattered: freedom is possible, healing is real, and the choice to forgive—though costly—leads to a life more beautiful than we ever dared imagine.