I believed in you, I trusted you to be true,

I didn’t know when i looked deeply into your beautiful brown eyes,

They were telling me so many lies.

We were at a Christian festival. Our family had been involved in this annual event alongside many of our friends, colleagues and their families for numerous years.

Arriving early as always the Reverend was busy getting on with his responsibilities as normal. The children and grandchildren along with some friends gathered together for  lunch.

The Reverend joined us but he didn’t eat.

Being busy with all the little ones making sure they were fed and then with all the clearing away and tidying up, we hadn’t noticed him leave to get back to his task.

Later that afternoon he came to find me. I was alone. He sat down and said he had something to tell me. He looked ‘grey’.

I knew something was seriously wrong!

I sat down and braced myself for impact.

My husband gave me an email to read.

I stepped aside as the Rug of secrets was removed. The padlock unlocked and

the basement door had been flung open. 

It took over three decades for the breaks to be applied. The duel-controlled life was stopped at last. Their paths had converged.

The Reverend was exposed of his deceptions and the Grey one exposed of his deeds.

There was no guarantee which one of them would relinquish command to the other.

After many years of anticipating the moment,

in the space of a few hours, everything changed.

The Reverend was disqualified from his position. His credentials were under great threat, when his deep dark private behaviour was exposed in a most cruel and destructive way.

There had never been a moment where I had to consider lying for my husband.  

No one would ever have had a reason to question the Reverends morals. To everyone, all they saw was a kind, generous and thoughtful and funny man. Occasionally his choler would rise with petulance when irritated, but he loved his wife and family and cared for those fortunate as well as the less fortunate. This is the man he was. That person still breathes, but he is in chains and the Grey One still holds the key… For now…

Those chains that look so strong are weak against the will of Truth –

And the pursuit of Moral Excellence.

 I knew nothing about the circumstances of his exposure.

The very same style to what I received fifteen months prior to this one.

It was delivered by a different yet equally creative name. Which again had been chosen to conceal a true identity. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it was the same person as Colin Churchgoer.

Just as before, screen shots had been taken of explicit conversations the Grey One had been involved in over the summer of 2015, along with photos of himself, including his head and shoulders.

They were collectively emailed to newspapers and numbers of people and organisations the Reverend was well known to. So not only the newspapers as was threatened previously.

It appears to me, someone who had also been on the same sites recognised the Reverend and decided to cruelly expose him. By distributing information that explained what he was dabbling in and that he shouldn’t be allowed to continue in his career, with such questionable morals.

This was the moment I knew we would face one day. But never in my wildest dreams, would I have thought someone could be so vengeful, spiteful and merciless to my husband and especially his family.

A corrupt and unethical plot detonated the grenade that had lay on my doorstep for years and was not handled with care by the person who pulled the pin. The brutal force blasted through our lives to result in a big mess as any explosion would, and left casualties in its wake.

 In public display for all to see.

A faceless accuser, guilty of the same transgressions,

Callously brought my home to ruins.

We were blown up, desolate and in bits, also wary for what lay ahead.

I hoped with all my heart the Reverend would at last master control, but sadly the Grey One disqualified him, defending his own mastery by using shame as a knife to stab the wounds of abjection and degradation into the flesh of his rivals emotions and mind.

In his bleeding and dying shame the Reverend served the Grey One pursuits. Stuffing as much of him back into the basement that he could.

Locking him away out of view, hidden again from sight. Much remained unknown of his dark Grey identity, The Reverend was far too fragile for honesty and transparency at that time.

Such was the depravity of his morals,

relationship suicide was, he believed, his only choice.

The Reverend was beaten and crushed  in the name of his disgrace. 

I never imagined it would happen this way. The fact that it was sent while we were at the festival was intended to cause maximum embarrassment.

I cannot begin to imagine what that violent and appalling exposure did to him.

However terrible our sins –

Grace will craft Humiliation into Celebration and Holy Spirit will work His Beautiful Artistry with the ink stains of our Shame. 

Yes this day needed to come, and yes, the person was correct that the Reverend should not be allowed to continue in his role, but exposure should have been administered privately.

The greater the bomb, the more professional expertise is required from the Bomb Disposal Squad –

The Reverends grave misdeeds fell into the hands of an immature and unskilled character, who was blinkered towards disclosure. Forsaking respect and courtesy for the family community he devastated.

Unbeknown to the person whose intention it seemed, was to gain maximum scathing for the Reverend, We couldn’t have been in a more loving and caring environment. We were in a bubble of love and protection for a whole week.

It was a disgraceful way the individual chose to expose the Reverend. There was no other intention but to ruin him. He needed help, not punishment.

The intention of exposure should be to recover, not to ruin. The wellbeing of the individual should be of paramount importance.

It is never ok to destroy someone that struggles with pornography or any other addictions.

Removing the Reverend from his pastoral position was only one part of the process.

I am humbled and blessed to find I have many wonderful family and friends who have loved me and my children and cared for us sacrificially and generously for the past year and more. Not one person I counted on has let me down. I can never repay their kindnesses.

Of course there was more, so much more. I needed to give the Reverend the opportunity to bring the Grey One completely into the light himself!

There’s advice in the bible that says.

Confess your sins to each other and support each other

So that you can live together whole and healed. James 5:15 (My paraphrase)

I believed there is no healing in confessing other people’s wrongs. This will only cause more pain. (Unless the law has been broken)

Every day a life changing event that creates havoc may occur, that we won’t have foreseen or been forewarned of. We survive, just as we did the last time and we will again. We become a different person each time harrowing information or violations take us out from our blindside.

It throws our world upside down, and when we finally land, we are not the same as we were before.

The Reverend who I love and know so well, is the man who dropped everything and drove more than an hour down the motorway, phoning the police to come to my assistance as I had spun out of control at eighty miles an hour. I had gone unconscious in the spin,

I came round to find myself up against the central reservation barrier and traffic speeding past me.

The Reverend was the first person I called and he came, and I know without an atom of doubt In a similar situation, he would do exactly the same today. I can trust him 100% to be right beside me to help me if I was in such an extreme difficulty. He would never let me down when I needed him when I was in trouble of any kind.

I miss that lovely, kind, generous, caring and loving husband.

Lust, addiction, seducers, the Grey One, those dispicable websites and the other women, tricked him from me.

I tried everything to prevent us from losing him. It was a hopeless battle, because he didn’t want to be stopped.

He went fishing in a muddy stagnant lake every day and finally he got pulled in and now he’s grappling to survive in the debris.

We faced every hurdle of which there were many and jumped over them, not realising how fragile our marriage was.

The festival was over – It was time to go home.

What had been our normal for over thirty-three years was over. We had an unpredictable  process to live through to find what was unknown to us.

Our brand new normal.

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