By Shauna Shanks

Editor’s Note: Wrecked by the news from her husband of an affair and a request for a divorce, Shauna Shanks shares the beginnings of her courageous journey to save her marriage in this except from her new book, A Fierce Love.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
1 CORINTHIANS 13:13

Finally, in desperation, I pleaded with God, “Please just give me one thing I can focus on! Just one word. Too many thoughts are ransacking my brain and I need to be calm and sleep.” I had to get up with the kids in just a few short hours and I knew if I didn’t sleep I would be exhausted all the next day. Maybe if I could focus on one word my mind would stop racing. “Give me something, God, anything.”

God gave me two words.

Endure. Hope.

Immediately my mind went to 1 Corinthians 13, The Love Chapter. I never would have gone there on my own. It sounded too cliché to me, too recitable. It’s the chapter that is always read during wedding ceremonies. It seemed very common and overused. I grew up a church kid. Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, Wednesday nights, and any time the doors were open, my family was there. Us kids were even in Bible clubs where we were given prizes for memorizing popular Bible verses. So when I say I knew those verses, I knew those verses. I know how to love, for goodness’ sake. That’s too simple. Elementary.

Nevertheless, I was grateful for those words and for something to focus my attention toward. Immediately, I looked up the word endure. To endure means to suffer patiently. Deep breath. Relief.

Okay. I can do that. It doesn’t sound fun, though. Especially since historically, “patiently” in God-years can mean forty years wandering around in the desert! Still, at least it’s clear direction. It’s something to do. I am thankful for that. I can wait. I can endure.

It’s the hoping that will be the challenge. Hope. Hope is believing for a desired outcome. This outcome over which I have no control. Micah has made up his mind about me. I have been cut out. Like a dog that feels the hard blow of his owner’s boot. It is setting in. I am being tossed aside and thrown away. “I am leaving you,” he said. “I don’t love you,” he stated.

What if I hope and it never comes to pass? To keep hoping means to stay vulnerable. It keeps my heart soft when I’d rather it be hard and scab over. Then you can move on. I’d rather it heal and not be this raw, open, gaping wound.

Hope. Such a daunting thing to do when faced with such bleakness. I will work on that one, I vowed. After all, I only had two things to work on.

An amazing thing had happened, but in the trenches of my despair, I didn’t recognize the miracle. I was so desperate to have something to hold onto that I reacted to the words he spoke, but I failed to pause and rejoice in the simple fact that God was speaking. It was amazing. But what was truly a wonder, and what hadn’t happened much of my whole adult life, was that God was speaking, and I heard him.

I had been notorious for doing things and making decisions on my own and then asking God to bless those decisions. I didn’t understand people who prayed and asked God for direction and then felt confident they had heard him. But my ability to hear God began that night without my even knowing it. In the desperate days and weeks ahead, I would come to depend on these words as the source of my life. God would continue to give me clear direction and never leave me alone.

I made a decision that first night not to love based on feelings. Feelings, as I had learned, can change with the wind, with the seasons. But love. It perseveres.

I was to continue to love Micah, taking any love I had been receiving from him out of the equation. That love had been replaced by betrayal, harsh and damaging words, and emotional abandonment. When faced with those things, God took me back to 1 Corinthians 13. There it is. Do this.

God’s love is described in those verses, and he instructed me to love his way, not any way I was used to, and not based on feelings. There in those verses were written instructions that I could refer back to over and over again. I paused at every word and reflected on what it would look like for me if lived out this love as described.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no records of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails” (1 Cor. 13:4–8).

I replayed all the words I had read over and over in my mind. It is not jealous. Or rude. It is not provoked. It doesn’t take delight in wrongdoing but rejoices when the truth is spoken. It protects. Love bears all things, believes all things. Endures all things. Love never fails. It Does. Not. Fail.

Only because of the state I was in did I begin to understand the enormity of the challenge in these Scriptures. To fully absorb God’s message, I read the chapter over and over in every version I could find, including the Amplified Bible, “Love (God’s love in us) does not insist on its own rights or its own way, for it is not self-seeking; it is not touchy or fretful or resentful; it takes no account of the evil done to it [it pays no attention to a suffered wrong]. . . . Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything [without weakening]. . . . Love never fails [never fades out or becomes obsolete or comes to an end] (1 Cor. 13:5, 7–8 AMPC).

My goodness, this love is beautiful. It is perfect. Is it possible? It must be, because God said it. And he had it written down. And he spoke it to me. I clung to these words. I wanted my husband back. God’s way seemed like the way to go for me. The only way.

I was soon to discover that 1 Corinthians 13 was more than beautiful poetry.

________

Taken from A Fierce Love: One Woman’s Courageous Journey to Save Her Marriage by Shauna Shanks. Click here to learn more about this title.

A Fierce Love is the story of a train wreck and reaching out to God not in the calm but in the chaos and finding hope for the future.

Wrecked with news of her husband’s affair and his request for a divorce, Shauna Shanks finds herself urgently faced with a decision. Does she give up and divorce her husband and move on, or does she try to fight for her marriage? The former choice seems to contradict God’s plan for how to love, such as “love never gives up,” “love is patient,” and “love is kind.”

Taking God at His word and assuming the love chapter was really meant to be followed literally word by word, she not only finds herself falling in love with her spouse again, but also falling in love with Jesus, which changes everything.

This book is not air-brushed. It was written in the midst of the author’s deepest trauma, and she purposefully did not edit out her mistakes and failures during that season. This book will resonate with those of you who do not feel like the picture-perfect Christian woman with the fairytale life and marriage.

Shauna Shanks is a wife, mother, and entrepreneur. She started Smallfolk, a health food café, out of her passion for health and fitness. She graduated from Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas, with a focus on world missions. Shauna and her husband, Micah, who is a police officer, have been married for more than a decade, and they live with their three boys on an Ohio farm.