Hope When Things Seem Hopeless

When Vanita Reisner found out that her husband had been unfaithful, and he said he might want out of their marriage, she had a lot of questions.

So all of those things, and is it worth it to walk away from an entire life? This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. Among the questions Vanita Reisner had to wrestle with when she learned her husband had been unfaithful was, God, how do I glorify you in the midst of all of this mess?

We'll hear how all of those questions got resolved as we talk with Vanita today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. Anybody who's ever read the first chapter of Job knows how startling a story that is. First of all, Satan appearing before God and asking for permission from God to afflict Job and God granting permission. You go, what's going on there? Oh, yes, you do. And then you see the affliction coming. And it's well, one messenger is standing there. The next messenger comes and says, oh, and here's more bad news. Oh, here's more bad news.

And oh, here's more bad news. And you get to the end of Job chapter one. And you kind of feel like this has got to be the most horrible story that's ever happened to anybody. It's hard to read Job. It's hard because of the suffering.

I've struggled with it for years to read it. We've been talking this week to somebody who I know you would not. Are you nicknaming her Job?

Well, we shouldn't do that. Vanita Reisner is joining us again on Family Life Today. Welcome back. Thank you.

You don't think of yourself in terms like Job because you read Job one and you go, I've had affliction, but not like this man. Yeah. I mean, he lost everything.

All his kids. Yeah, it's horrible. But with that said. But yeah, we've talked about affliction compared to others is pretty significant. You were misdiagnosed as a baby and the treatment led to polio in your life. You've been a quadriplegic throughout your life. You were in a body cast for a year. How many surgeries?

Twenty one before I was 13. You have then gone through miscarriages. And because, again, of a misdiagnosis, the death of a son at seven weeks old. If that was the whole story, we would go, this is more than most should have to deal with.

I want to lay down and cry with you at this point. Yeah. Surely there's not more. After the death of your son, Paul, your polio reemerged as an issue with what's called is a post polio. Yes. Post polio syndrome.

What is that? Yeah, I'd never heard of it till I was diagnosed with it or maybe I hadn't blocked it out. But basically it's happens to about 70 percent of the people who have polio. And basically what happens is your muscles start to go backwards. So all the whatever limbs were affected by polio, which for me was all four limbs, both arms and both legs. They start to go back to where they were when you first got polio. And for me, I was a quadriplegic. So the doctors basically said at that point I needed to cut out everything I was doing because the hardest thing about post polio is the more you do, the weaker you get. So they told me when I went in, I went in because I had just some pain in my arm and they said, my energy and strength is like money in a bank.

And so every time I do something, I'm making a withdrawal, but I can't make any deposits. So the more I do, the weaker I get. So I used to be an artist.

I did all kinds of things. And they told me stop right now. And I remember saying to them, what happens if I don't stop?

What happens if I just keep doing the things I'm doing? And this woman looked at me and she said, in 10 years, someone will be feeding you. I was 38 then and I thought I and I had two young kids. I can't have somebody feeding me in 10 years.

Or if I can, obviously God will give me the grace for that. But I radically had to change my life in terms of the things I was doing. And that was a change in identity for me. I feel like I was a helper.

I like to do things for people. I would take meals. And all of a sudden, that wasn't me anymore.

I couldn't take meals. I really couldn't help people physically in any way. And I really needed help from people. So that was really going to the Lord and saying, okay, help me reframe who I am. Because my identity had been built so much on helping other people, which isn't really the greatest way to build your identity. But I had built it on that.

And so it really crumbled quickly. For anybody who knows Enneagram 2, right? Yes, very much. Oh, you're the helper.

Yay for twos. I mean, I can't imagine walking out of that doctor's office. Well, I don't even know if I would. Did you walk? I did.

I walked. My sister and I went in there and I was stunned. I mean, I cried for days and days and days. And they told me I needed to start using a wheelchair. I had never used a wheelchair before that. And when they said that, that felt like failure to me at first because my parents had worked so hard that I wouldn't be in a wheelchair. And it just reframed everything for me. And I had to view, though, the things, the adaptive devices that I had as blessings.

And that took a while. But I knew if I didn't have a wheelchair to use, then maybe I wouldn't even be able to get around. And so when you need something, it is a way of looking at things differently. Which is interesting because how many years has that been now?

That was 2003. And I think if I were you, I would find myself every time I faced a choice, like, do I go get something out of the refrigerator? Do I spend this limited amount of energy that's left in my gas tank on that? How have you processed that? That's a great question. That has been very hard for me. It was hard with my kids because they're always asking, can you do this?

Can you do that? Can you go with me? And feeling like I want to go. I want to do those things.

And then there's the things for myself, you know, making my own breakfast. And Joel's amazing, my husband, because he does so much for me to make sure that I don't overuse my muscles. So he's like, if I can do it, ask me to do it. So I look like a little princess in my house because Joel is getting me everything I need because he said, I don't want you to wear out your muscles before you need to. Anybody who's been following your story, as we've talked about it this week, just heard you mention Joel, your husband. But we've talked earlier about Dave, your husband. Yes. And that's another part of your story.

You met Dave in graduate school at Stanford. Yes. He knew you had physical limitations when he married you. Yes. That was not a barrier or an obstacle for him. Along the way, your marriage, you started to recognize there were cracks in the foundation.

Yes. So six years after my post-polio diagnosis, when I was just trying to figure life out, Dave came home and said he had met someone else and he left. I had two daughters, Katie and Christy. They were nine and almost 13 at the time. And our world fell apart.

Dave ended up moving to another state where his company was and he had been working remotely. And my life just hit rock bottom, to be honest. I didn't know how I was going to make it because I was a single mom with post-polio, struggling with lots of pain because post-polio actually is fairly painful as well. And two kids who don't drive who were angry because their world had fallen apart. We were sort of the perfect little church couple and life as I knew it just unraveled.

The perfect little church couple. Yes. What happened? I mean, there had to be signs before he said, I'm out of here or did you not see anything? I didn't.

You know, and I know a lot of people say, how could you not have seen it? And we were growing distant. I knew that.

But I kept thinking, oh, it's just distance. We're fine. We're fine.

It's no big deal. And I don't know if I could have seen the signs that much earlier. I didn't see them. But as you know, you go back over life and you think, what did I miss? What did I miss? And I don't know if it was as much that I missed things as that things happened fast.

When your husband says to you, I've met somebody else, what goes on in your soul? Why was I not enough? Probably went on.

How dare you went on. How could you do this to me with all of my physical disability? How could you do this as a Christian? How can you do this to your children? So all of those things.

And is it worth it to walk away from an entire life? Did you confront him with those kinds of questions? I did. And his response was, I don't know. I don't have answers to all of those things. And we went back and forth, honestly, for a few years after he left, just trying to decide what we were going to do. And those were hard, hard years for me just trying to figure out what is God calling me to do here?

Because I wanted to be faithful to God and say, God, I'll do whatever you call me to do. And so knowing what that was took me a long time. You were in uncharted territory, something you'd never stop to think, I might be here someday. What will I do when I get there? You're trying to figure out how to survive in a country where you don't know how to live.

That is exactly right. And it's funny that you use that terminology because I remember one time, this was after a few years after he left and just saying, God, are we going to get back together? Like, what am I supposed to do here? And I read Jeremiah 29, not the I know the plans I have for you, which is a wonderful passage. But before that, when Jeremiah says you need to live in this new country, like plant gardens, get married, like this is where you're living. This is your new home.

Yes. And in some ways, I think that's sort of a message, ironically, for us in COVID. You know, it's like, what do we do? How do we live in this place where we don't know what's going to happen?

And for me, the Lord was like, plant gardens. This is your home right now. Like, don't be looking to if this changes, this is what I'm going to do. But how am I going to live here now? And that really helped me say, OK, I've got to assume we're going to be here.

And I need to to form my life because I feel like my life was on hold. Just thinking, oh, we're going to get back together. We're going to be this happy family. It's going to be fine.

And realizing it may or may not happen, but I need to live in this new country. Did you have that attitude after you had written your husband's mistress a letter? I had that attitude after. Yeah.

What did that letter say? Are you still fighting? That's a little personal. You're digging in here.

I'm going woman to woman. I would have written a letter, too. Yeah. Well, it was funny that you mentioned that, Ian. So I wrote her a letter.

For people to know, it was not my idea. It was really from a book, Crazy Love by Frances Chan. And I read a quote that I felt like God was using to talk to me to say, write her a letter.

And honestly, I said out loud, are you asking me to do that? That seems crazy. I remember saying it, going to bed thinking, this is not something that I am signing up for. So as somebody else. Sounds like crazy love, doesn't it? Yeah, it does.

Exactly. That's why I was perfect for that. And I just got up in the middle of the night, finally could not sleep.

It was like an elephant was on my chest. And I, I wanted to write one kind of a letter, but God did not want that kind of a letter written. So it was a letter just sharing with her the gospel saying, God has done so much for me. And I feel called to write that to you. And it may sound like I'm a nice person, but this was God's letter to her. This was not my letter.

That is remarkable. I wouldn't have written it. I mean, honestly, I'm really not that nice, but God is extravagantly good. And so I wrote it just sort of pouring out what the gospel was. And the most amazing thing was God changed me. I sent the letter thinking, OK, my first thought, once I had felt really great about myself having written it, I thought, God is going to use this to bring my husband back. Like, she's going to say, this woman is incredible.

And, you know, say, don't, I don't want to be with your husband right now. And so that's why I thought it was going to be some great little neat story. God's going to use it to bring him back. Yes, there was going to be a bow on that story. But there was not a bow.

And he didn't come back. I didn't really hear from her about the letter. I knew she had gotten it. But God changed me because I was praying for her because I had written to her what it meant to know Christ and how that radically changes you. And I just started praying for her every day. And it's hard to pray for someone every day and to be really angry at them. And so God just started to melt away all of these feelings of resentment and anger really way before we had even decided where we were going, my ex-husband and I.

So I was still wondering if he was going to come back. And yet I was not angry at her. Hearing that is so supernatural because in your book, and I found this interesting, you say the unfaithfulness of your husband was harder and more hurtful than all the pain you had gone through. Losing a child, your polio. That's how deep that pain was. And anybody that's experienced that knows that. And then you get to a place where you're a blessing to a woman that doesn't deserve it.

That's super natural. That can't be done in your own strength. Well, I'm still stuck on the it's hard to pray for someone every day and remain mad at them.

I'm thinking of marriages. I'm thinking of the times I was so mad at Dave. I didn't pray for him because I was so mad at him. And yet had I prayed and I started to pray for him, it really supernaturally changes your heart. It does.

It really does. Because I think unforgiveness and bitterness, what we do is we just stack offenses on top of each other. And so we replay them over and over.

They did this and they did this and they took this. I am good at that. I am great at it. And for all the things that I don't bring to God, I still do it. I mean, I don't want anyone to hear this thinking I'm some saint because I am not. I mean, if you cut me off in traffic, I am thinking mean thoughts about you even today. So it is a thing that if you give it to God, he changes you.

It's not that you're this amazing person because I still hold grudges and get annoyed and do all of those things. But yet I felt that God just called me to do this and God called me to pray. And God took all of that away. What did Dave say to the girls, to his daughters? What did you say to your daughters about what daddy was doing?

Dave told them he was super confused about what was going on in his life and didn't really have a lot of answers for them. And I just told them to pray. I was saying before that I wish I had talked to them a little bit more about my own pain because I just sort of put up a wall about my own pain and just sort of listened to them or tried to talk to them. But we did say a lot that God is going to use this. I remember Laura's story song Blessings was out around that time and just saying, you know, we don't know how God is going to use this in our life, but we're going to trust that God is going to use it for good. But it was hard because the girls would pray every night for a long time, bring daddy back.

And that's kind of gut wrenching when you hear your daughters pray something and you're praying it too. And then God says no. There was a day when Dave came back?

Yes. So he wanted to reconcile for a while. And we went back and forth. And I think he genuinely wanted that. But at the same time, I felt like he at the time, I felt like he wasn't willing to let go of everything. And I really needed a lot of proof, like I need to see repentance. I need to see these things.

And I didn't see them. And I really went to God with that and said, you tell me what to do. And I felt really clear that God was like, you don't need to do this because you think this is what a good Christian woman would do. And honestly, that was part of my view was I need to stay in this because Christian women stay in marriages no matter what. And I felt like God gave me the freedom to say, what is right here? Where have you been wronged and what are the lines you can draw? And so I took a lot of courage, honestly, for me to just draw the line and say, if I don't see this and this and this, then I can't take you back. And it was complicated because the other woman was pregnant with his child.

Yes, she was. That made it very complicated. No matter what happened in this situation, it wasn't going to be pretty. I just want to step in here because I want to commend your thinking and your processing before the Lord. The most loving thing you can do for someone in a situation like you are in is not necessarily to say, welcome back home, but to say, I want to be an ally in dealing with the sin patterns in your life that have emerged and have become clear. And so there are boundaries here for your good, not just because you have to jump over hoops in order to earn the privilege of moving back in with me, but because you need to be a different person before the Lord for this to work.

And Bob, some people are going to hear you and think, what? Wait, you're supposed to be pro-marriage. And I am pro-marriage. And I'm saying to put these kinds of restrictions in place is the most loving thing you can be doing for this spouse who is breaking the covenant, who is not loving you well, to say, I want you to be the husband and the man God has called you to be. Therefore, I'm going to say, until you're ready to really deal with this stuff, we're keeping this up.

Maybe as a motivation for your husband to finally deal with this stuff. That's exactly what I felt like the Lord was saying is, you know, if it's too easy, then there doesn't need to be real repentance. Somebody doesn't need to go to God because we can do a lot in our own strength. But to really change, we can't do that without Jesus. And this was not you saying you've got to do this to prove to me this or to work. You've got to jump through these hoops. This is you saying this is the man God says you need to be.

So I want to be your ally and helping you be that man. And did Dave respond to that at all? I think he tried.

He wanted to, but he wasn't able to. And I remember our pastor, I got our church really involved in terms of our pastor because I felt like I needed counsel. I could not go through this alone. And I needed wisdom. And I had a counselor, a Christian counselor as well. And I remember one thing that Tom, our pastor, said is repentance has fruit and it's fruit you're going to see. And so he just kept saying to me, you don't want to settle for something that's not repentance. And I think a lot of people do because they want something so much and people have good intentions. But a lot of us have good intentions. But we need to see that God is really doing a work.

And I don't want to say that God has not changed him because he is a believer and I do see that there's change in his life. But I didn't feel like God was calling me back into that marriage then and didn't really see the fruit that I felt I needed to see. Were there ever moments of weakness where, I mean, it sounds right now like you were strong the whole time through. But I'm just asking, you know, where there's an evening where I think, you know what, I could lower the bar, bring him home.

It'd be better for the girls. Or were you pretty fought right through the whole thing? Yeah, I'm like jealous. And no, I was not strong the whole thing. I was I was so torn because I loved our family and I'm so for family. And so it was hard.

I wanted us back together again. And so there were a lot of times where I would say, I want this. And I would call like my pastor or my sister and say, like, help me process this, because I think we can't sometimes process those things ourselves. And so I would go to the Bible. I would journal. I would call people because there were times when I thought that would be easier. And yet inside, I knew that wasn't what God wanted.

That wasn't the highest that God had for me. Yeah. And it's so critical what you're saying. There's a listener listening right now that's wrestling with something and they might be thinking I can do this on my own. They can't. You can't. You need the body of Christ.

That's what the body of Christ can do. You need a friend or two to give you wise counsel. And you're you modeled that. But I just want to advocate for anybody right now. Make that phone call.

Yeah. You need help. I've always in talking with people who have said, you know, do you think I have biblical grounds for divorce in this situation? I have said, do the elders in your church think you have biblical grounds? Have they walked through this? Do they know the inside of your story? This is not do I meet the criteria?

Can I check this box off that gives me the grounds? This is people walking the journey with you who are stepping in and saying you have the right motivation. You're doing this right before the Lord with the right reasons and the appropriate circumstances. Here's what I've said. I've said that's not your call to make. That is the spiritual people around you, the godly counselors around you speaking into your life. I'm not saying that you don't have a voice in this. I'm just saying you don't make this determination about what steps you should be taking to try to heal a broken marriage on your own. This is what the body of Christ is for.

I think our feelings run so high. I know when I'm trying to make a decision and I'm hearing from God. I'm trusting what I'm hearing, but because my emotions are running so high in those matters, it is always good to get wise counsel.

Oh, I totally agree. It was actually neat because our pastor came to me one day and he said, I want you to know you have the full support of everybody on the elder board if you want to file for divorce. I ended up not being the one who filed.

Dave ended up being the one who filed. But at the same time, I didn't want to do anything that wasn't in accordance with what God had for me. And I knew I had biblical grounds, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's what God is calling you to do. And so you really need to seek the Lord on it. And that was a really good process for me not to just go with my first reaction, but to really get wise counsel and hear from God through the word. And I'm very thankful I was able to go through it that way. I know telling this story here, telling this story in your book, you had to have a lot of prayer just to say, I'm going to write a book and share all of this. I mean, your girls are still living all of this.

Your your ex-husband is still living all of this. Why did you decide to tell this story as publicly as you've told it? I decided because I wanted people to see sort of the inner workings of someone who has failed and yet loved God through it and what it looks like to authentically walk through suffering.

Because I feel like there's a lot of Christians that haven't, it's all good sort of veneer over everything that they say. And you don't really have practical help when you're in the midst of the trenches. Like my child has died. I've got a debilitating disease. I'm walking through a separation or divorce.

Like, how do I, what do I do? And in the book, I really try to show what I did poorly and what I wish I had done differently and what God guided me to do well and what God showed me and the things I learned. And it's really hard to do that in a book that's sort of about doctrine, whereas a memoir, there's a way to, it's sort of a narrative theology.

Like I can teach you things out of the Bible and things that I've learned in the ways that God has been faithful and invite you into the journey with me. It's a beautiful theology of suffering in a narrative form. You're right. And it's so readable and it models a biblical viewpoint of how to suffer well.

Yeah. In fact, we want to make your book available to Family Life Today listeners who are going through whatever challenges they may be going through, whether it's health related, as you write about in the book, or whether it's the loss of a child or a marriage that takes a turn. You have lived through these things.

You have processed these things biblically. You've written about them in your book, Walking Through Fire, and so we're making that book available to any Family Life Today listener who can make a donation to help support the ongoing work of this ministry. Your support of Family Life makes this kind of conversation happen, and you help us distribute it to more people more often through your financial support. That's what you're investing in, the lives, the marriages, the families of hundreds of thousands of people every day who are receiving practical biblical help and hope for their marriage and their family through the Ministry of Family Life Today. Thank you for your support, whether you're a monthly legacy partner or you make a one-time donation today to help with the ongoing work of this ministry. Be sure to ask for your copy of Vanita Reisner's book, Walking Through Fire, when you get in touch with us. You can donate online at familylifetoday.com, or if it's easier, call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY, 1-800-358-6329, that's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY.

Again, when you make your donation, be sure to ask for your copy of the book, Walking Through Fire by Vanita Reisner. Now, tomorrow, we're going to get to a part of your story that, well, it's the happy part of your story. I was going to say it's the Hallmark Channel part of your story, but there's no Hallmark movie that rivals the story you're going to share with us tomorrow. I hope our listeners can tune in for a remarkable love story tomorrow. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with some help today from Bruce Goff and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for joining us. Hope to see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.