Carnage & Grace: Confessions of an Adulterous Heart

by Tullian Tchividjian

In my season of adultery, I selfishly wanted to be known and loved and affirmed in a way that I felt I wasn’t experiencing in my own marriage at the time. It’s not that those dynamics were wholly absent, but still, I wanted more. And rather than reveling in and resting on the fact that I was already fully known, fully loved, and fully affirmed by God—thereby setting me ...

I’ll never forget driving home after our first kiss. I was simultaneously scared to death and stirred with excitement. I knew I had done something that could cost me everything—that I had crossed another line—but it also made me feel more alive.

Well, we met at a Starbucks and thankfully he didn’t kill me. But he did say plainly: “Don’t do it again.” At that point, he only knew about the one meeting. What he didn’t know was that she and I had also met three times after she got the parking ticket. He also didn’t know the physical details of our relationship, and the frequency of our communication over the previous weeks. I was hoping he’d never find out about that stuff. I assured him that I would never meet with her again, and I didn’t. We never met after that. As far as I was concerned, I had dodged another bullet, although this one had grazed me.

Fearful of what I was going to find on the other side of the phone, I called the father and found him to be surprisingly gracious. He was, of course, upset and made it very clear to me how foolish I had been. But he was rational and kind. He too only knew about the one meeting and, like her husband, knew nothing about the physical nature of our relationship and the constancy of our communication during that time. I feigned sorrow and contrition, and he bought what I was selling. Although I was in full damage control mode, here I’d dodged yet another bullet.

Skip ahead a month or so to midsummer 2014. I’d had no communication of any kind with this woman, and in my mind I had successfully appeased both the husband and the father (emphasis on in my mind). I figured this was now firmly behind me. Then I received a text out of the blue from her now-fuming father: “I know everything. I just read through every text message you exchanged with my daughter, and the two of you significantly minimized what actually happened.” My heart sank; it was jarring, like the treadmill skipped a gear or something. Those texts were a smoking gun—indisputable, damning evidence of a much more involved relationship than what anybody knew up until then. I could tell this wasn’t going away. I was on vacation with my family, and needless to say, mine was over. I subsequently received a message from our mutual friend who’d been contacted by the now-fuming father who wanted the three of us to meet in person in Orlando. I’m not sure I’ve ever been as scared as I was in that moment. We met, the three of us, and her father raked me over the coals (as he should have). The “treadmill” was now shaking violently, like a boat on stormy waves. I was losing my footing, and then he essentially pulled the power cord from the wall so that everything came to a screeching halt—he read me a letter his son-in-law had written to me. It was well written and maturely tempered, but at the same time scathing and surgical. It’s been many years since that letter was read to me, bu...

Now I felt it. Truly. I looked at my life and wondered How could I have done this? Who even am I? What have I become? I was expressly undone, and this angry preacher-father who would have been justified in showing me the back of his hand offered me a grace and forgiveness that drove me to my knees.

He accepted my apology and confession, and then asked me to leave the room so he could talk to my friend alone. After a few minutes, the father came out of the room, put his hands tenderly on my shoulders, prayed for me, and said, “This is finished. We have followed the process laid out in Matthew 18, and there is therefore no need to take this any further. It’s behind us now.” Wouldn’t that make for a cinematic conclusion, something darkly Hallmarkian? But that wasn’t the end. I thought it was. He thought it was. My mentor friend thought it was. But it wasn’t. About a month and a half later, I was at a lunch meeting and got a text from my friend saying, “Call me ASAP,” and that jarring, heart-sinking feeling hit me again. I called, and he told me that the pastor of the nearby church this woman and her husband attended, who had been counseling them, felt I needed to tell at least a couple of the elders of my church what had happened, and if I didn’t, they were going to. This felt like some perverse Groundhog Day skit. With fear and trepidation, I promptly arranged a meeting in Fort Lauderdale between the now not-so-angry father-preacher, our mutual friend, and two elders from my...

There was one crucial person, however, who did not know about any of this: my wife, Kim. For the next seven months or so I dealt with a lot of guilt, a good deal of shame, and a shitload of fear. I was terrified that this would somehow get out, and t...

Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly.

There’s a chance you might wonder if it’s possible to be self-fooled into an even deeper foolery. The answer is yes. Like a vomit-loving-dog-fool, I reverted to my folly, this time in bold. In the previous affairs I mentioned, I crossed some lines. In my final, widely known and publicized affair, I crossed them all. Whatever “rules” yet remained to be broken, I broke them. Faster, faster, the lights are turnin’ red.

I wonder sometimes if deep down that’s what I wanted to happen all along . . . to finally get caught . . . so maybe the treadmill would finally just stop . . . just dyin’ to get off.

You’d think a forty-two-year-old pastor would know better, act better, be better. But no. There was obviously a progression to my sin. It started with a woman far away, which didn’t involve anything physical and ended with a woman close to home, which was sexual. But I pause at that word progressive because the reality is it was regressive. I’d regressed into something less, someone less. That’s what sin does, it brings about a wasting.

After I completed these steps, the committee would consider what was best going forward, landing on two possible disciplinary scenarios: (1) They could suspend me and begin a process of discipline and evaluation with the hope that at some point, I could be restored and reinstated as a pastor somewhere, albeit not at Coral Ridge, or (2) They could go the more expedient route and simply strip me of my pastoral credentials—“defrock” me, and I would no longer be a minister in the Presbyterian denomination in which I was ordained. The presbytery met and decided on the second option. In light of my confession, they considered me unfit for ministry and stripped me of my credentials. They defrocked me. And in doing so, washed their hands of me and relinquished all jurisdiction over me. Because my situation was so public, a lot of people both inside and outside the religious community were watching the presbytery very closely to see what they would do, how they would handle this sensitive, high-profile situation. As you can imagine, the presbytery felt that pressure, and so a quick defrocking rather than a long, drawn-out disciplinary process was, for them, the most expedient thing to do.

There’s a narrative out there in the small pond of religious news that claims a process of discipline was presented to me by the presbytery and I ran from it—that I “fled from justice.” That made for a juicy story, but it never happened. At no point was I offered a formal process of discipline. My defrocking was the discipline.

In fact, if they had presented me with some such process, chances are good I would have jumped through any prescribed hoops in order to get some semblance of my old life back. An...

Little did I know that God had his own discipline and restoration process in store for me that would ultimately prove to be longer, wiser, more painful, more unpredictable, and infinitely more effective than anything any church or den...

It’s probably wise to pause here a minute and answer a question that’s no doubt blinking like a “check engine” light. And far from some kind of sidebar, this is core: How can a person keep relapsing into the same destructive pattern of behavior? Or, to ask the same question using religious language: How can a Christian keep on sinning in the same way? Brennan Manning responded to this question in his classic The Ragamuffin Gospel. Manning was an ex-priest, sought-after speaker, acclaimed author, plus a card-carrying alcoholic. One of his more memorable benders happened after landing at Newark airport en route to his mother’s funeral. He stopped by a liquor store on the way to his hotel. Once he checked into his hotel, he started drinking, and kept drinking and drinking until he blacked out. Yes, he missed his own mother’s funeral. How in the world could such a thing happen? Manning wrote:

It is possible because I got battered and bruised by loneliness and failure; because I got discouraged, uncertain, guilt-ridden, and took my eyes off Jesus. Because the Christ-encounter did not transfigure me into an angel. Because justification by grace through faith means I have been set in a right relationship with God, not made the equivalent of a patient etherized on a table.

In his 2011 memoir, All Is Grace, the aging Manning compressed his answer down to just three words, just as true: “These things happen.”16 My response would be slightly different than Manning’s, yet similar in spirit.

Martin Luther described the state of humanity with the Latin phrase, “homo incurvatus in se,” which means, man is curved in on himself. In other words, we are by nature self-absorbed and self-focused. We are all a barrel of selfish thoughts and desires and wants.

The history of this world and of our lives proves that we humans have a huge capacity for screwing up, a natural tendency toward self-defeating behavior, what Sigmund Freud called “Thanatos”—a universal and innate “death drive.” In one of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, “The Imp of the Perverse,” he explores our self-destructive impulses and argues that knowing something is dangerous and wrong can be “the one unconquerable force” that makes us want to do it. How screwed up is that? Echoes of the Apostle Paul’s words that “the law stirs up sin.” We make a habit of running blindfolded on the treadmill juggling knives.

In his book Unapologetic, Francis Spufford simply calls it HPtFtU—The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up: What we’re talking about here is not just our tendency to lurch and stumble and screw up by accident, our passive role as agents of entropy. It’s our active inclination to break stuff, “stuff” here including moods, promises, relationships we care about, and our own well-being and other ...

So, while repeated ruinous behavior is foolish, hurtful, and inexcusable, it shouldn’t be shocking. It shouldn’t surprise us when fallen people keep falling down, and broken people keep breaking things. We should expect sinners to sin. Hell, even Saint Paul lamented that the things he knew he shouldn’t do, he kept on doing (see Romans 7). None of this, by the way, is an excuse for doing destructive stuff. But it does explain why we foolishly keep on doing destructive stuff. Again and again and again.

My devastating actions were catastrophic for me and many others, and there’s no justification for my actions. I was responsible to make better choices, and I willfully ignored that responsibility, and people I love very much were hurt. No one wanders into these kinds of dark, compartmentalized corners because they want to hurt those they love. For example, I wasn’t thinking about how my repeated selfishness would deeply wound my kids. Who knows, maybe if I had, I would’ve saved myself and countless others a lot of heartache. Maybe. But I was thinking about me—what I wanted, not what others needed. I was popular and was lovin’ every minute of it. I lost my way, plain and simple, under the glaring lights of my success. The “Christ-encounter” didn’t make me an angel either, nor do I believe that was ever God’s intent. As with Brennan Manning and with me, and possibly with you—these things happen.

Like many of us, Brennan [Manning] knew what it felt like to stray, to slip into mires of our own making, to wish we could go home. Like many of us he knew what it felt like to think you are unworthy, that you have worn out your welcome, that there is no home left at home. But Jesus’ story of the son who insulted his father by demanding his inheritance while his father was still living, who shamed his father by blowing through that inheritance with wine and women until nothing was left, is a story of the purest grace and of a love that will never write us off.18

“When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God does not go off and leave us—he enters into our trouble and saves us.”19 So he does. Every time.

Back to my kids. Since that Friday many years ago, we’ve had a lot to work through—we’ve had the hard conversations and cried the hard tears. Thankfully, through it all we have remained undetachably close and deeply connected. I deserved to lose the love and affection of my kids forever, but their love for me has never blinked. Not even for a second. I have apologized to each of them a hundred times, and they have tenderly reminded me over and over and over again that they forgive me. I delivered pain into their lives, and they delivered pardon into mine. I wrote a book titled One Way Love, and the line below is mine. But my children are the ones who have lived it and given it. My children graced me. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable.

To be sure, I understand academically that there is a difference between guilt, shame, and regret. But from an existential standpoint, those three emotions are almost impossible to distinguish. You feel what you feel, and no amount of fine distinctions can help you not feel it. Guilt, shame, and regret all feel pretty much the same in crisis—like someone’s heavy boot is standing on your neck.

And I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t matter how many Bible verses someone points out or how many times well-meaning people tell me to “forgive myself” because God has forgiven me, I still can’t shake my insufferable sense of I-screwed-upness. Maybe I should be able to. After all, not only have my kids forgiven me, but I do believe God has forever settled all my debts and forgiven me of all my sins. I do believe that “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12 NIV). I also know that it’s not God who brings up forgiven sins. I believe that absolution is absolute and that God doesn’t keep score. I know all this in my head, but that doesn’t mean I always believe it in my heart. To be honest, more often than not, I don’t. “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24 ESV). After you’ve screwed up, at some point down the road, yes, it’s good to stop hugging the cactus. But most times, even when you do, you still feel the needles. Maybe you can relate.

Perhaps, you too have failed miserably and people that you dearly love have been deeply damaged. Maybe you committed adultery, like me. Maybe you’re an addict (alcohol, porn, drugs, shopping, social media, etc.). Maybe your kids have gone off the deep end and you blame yourself for leaving their father years ago and breaking up your home. Maybe you’ve been an emotional or physical abuser. Maybe you’ve been a workaholic and you’re just now realizing that you’ve lost years with your now adult children—years you’ll never get back. Maybe it’s just a lifetime ...

Whatever it is for you, if you struggle with guilt and shame and regret for the pain you have caused people that you love, then you know an inescapable throbbing. You may be doing something fun or productive when out of nowhere, like a tidal wave of raw emotion, it hits you. And you are transported right back to the unavoidable reality ...