"Do you remember what you said to me when I first started talking about God?" Mark asked the other day, "You said, 'I am willing to try to work through this sex addiction crap, but if you ever become a Christian, I swear, I will leave you!'"

"Really? I said that?!"

"Yes, you did."

"That's completely insane, and exactly like something I would say," I laughed.

When I first started recovery, God was scary to me. God meant the stern guy with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God meant anger and smiting and judgment. God meant the Christian church of my youth, the one that hadn't worked for me, the one with the one-size-fits-all "right" answer for everyone, the one I felt I had been burned and betrayed and disrespected by even more than my husband. God didn't seem like a path to recovery and healing, God seemed like a wedge that could force us apart. I remember looking desperately for some non-12-Step recovery programs, something we could attend without having to bring God into our lives.

I knew that the church and I weren't getting back together, so I was terrified that if Mark's path did lead him there, he was going to leave me, looking like a fool for having tried to work on our marriage. I had a fabulous fear scenario mapped out in my mind where he would join a big church community and ask me to join him, knowing I would say no, in the same way he used to ask me to go out with him on nights he knew I was busy and to cover up the fact that he had already scheduled a rendezvous with someone else. He would spend his Sundays away from me and have horrible affairs with women in the church until he eventually left me for some codependent Christian woman who was really into Christian sex addicts. Then his whole church would piously mock me and say I deserved to have my marriage fall apart for being such a heathen and it wouldn't have happened if I had worked harder and done better to join the right religion. Yep, the mention of the word "God" (of all things) would have my vivid, fear-based imagination straight at affairs, abandonment and widespread mockery in seconds flat.

At the time, I couldn't envision a world where we could have different spiritual beliefs and still respect each other. So to counteract this, in those first months of recovery, I alternately threatened to divorce him if he found the wrong kind of God and then dragged him off in a panic to meditation centers and temples, hoping I could get him to latch onto some other religion, hoping I could convert him before he got a chance to try to convert me.

The meditation centers never did stick for Mark, although they did (as I suspected they would) for me. Six years into this journey, I've found that those fears never played out. Mark and I don't seem to have exactly the same vision of God or the same ways of connecting, but we do respect each other's spiritual beliefs, and we've each seen the healing that our respective spiritual paths have brought us. I've slowly reclaimed the word God for myself and lost the fear that used to haunt it. I can laugh at the idea that I was so scared of that dreaded three-letter word that I would rather have run away from my marriage than endured it. And I can laugh with joy when Mark says "God is good" right out loud, in the middle of a tense moment, and I find it delicious and intimate and healing.

I've got plans for tomorrow that are going to keep me away from the computer, and I knew I wanted to squeeze in one last blog post today. So first thing in the morning I began the day right: by panicking because I wasn't sure what I was going to write about. I didn't have an idea! Ack! What if I sat down and couldn't think of anything? Well, you can see (tongue firmly planted in cheek here) how very catastrophic that would be. There I was with the threat of writer's block looming in front of me ominously (and let me tell you, it really knows how to loom: casting a long shadow with its big claws and pointy teeth), when I remembered something I once heard from the very wise Karen Maezen Miller: that the answer will always be there when we need it; we just have to learn to trust that. I see it as a variation on my favorite recovery slogan (and the one I most often need to remember): Let go and let God.

So, given that I had no idea what to write about and I was supposed to trust this (grr, stupid!) process, I decided not sit down at my usual writing time and I went out and ran errands instead. And as I ran errands, I got this weird throbbing headache. Now, I'm an old hand at headaches. I'm prone to both migraines and sinus headaches, so I'm no stranger to pain in my head. But that pain is old and familiar. This pain was new and different. I'd be walking along, feeling ok and then throb throb! Pain just above my left ear for a few seconds. Then nothing for a few minutes. Then throb throb again.

Given the great mental state in which I started the day, my mind went immediately to the next reasonable thought: I'm going to die. I mean, this could be the first sign of an aneurysm or a stroke. After all, I once had a coworker, a mother to young children, who was perfectly fine one moment, complained of a headache a few minutes later, then walked into a meeting and collapsed, dead of a brain aneurysm. It's the kind of thing that is both horribly tragic and completely terrifying. So I walked around thinking, "Could these throbs be the early warning sign of the same thing in me? Could I do something different right now and change things... control the outcome?"

But I caught myself right there: wanting to control the things I can't. I was feeling nervous and anxious about a whole host of things and had fallen down lately on taking care of myself. So for the second time today I was, in a major way, not letting go and trusting things to work out, but instead trying to figure out a way to approach my discomfort that was going to guarantee the outcome I wanted. So I realized that I had a headache. It wasn't particularly bad or painful, just unfamiliar. It wasn't worth consulting a doctor, because right at that moment, I had to admit, it didn't seem at all serious. The next right thing to do was to wait. If it got more alarming, I'd see a doctor. And maybe, as for my coworker, that moment would be too late. But I can't control that.

As I realized this, I began to relax, and as I relaxed, the little throbs subsided and I realized I had something to write about today too. Well, what do you know? The answer really is there when I need it, if I can just let go of my control freaking and trust that.

Image credit: Photo by Torbein on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

Many years ago, when I was in college, I had a conversation about God (no trust me, Misery Marketing, I'm going somewhere with this) with a friend who was an evangelical Christian. I was delighted to get a chance to ask him my big question: Why? Why did he believe in God?

I think I was expecting some great revelation, some light shining out of the sky, some secret proof that no one else had yet been able to give me. Instead I got an answer along the lines of, "Because I just do. During my years growing up and going to church, I have come to feel Him in my life."

And for years I carried that around with me, puzzling evidence that religion made no sense and there was no good reason to believe in God. Years later, I shared my confusion around this with someone else, who told me, "Your friend has faith. That's what faith is." Oh. I had heard about faith every Sunday of my childhood, yet took me nearly 30 years on this planet to see that belief in God isn't about some secret certainty, some hidden fact, it's a belief. It's faith.

I had another conversation about God a few years ago with a friend, a scientist who identifies herself as atheist. I identified myself as agnostic, and I had to admit to her that I didn't understand atheism. One of the reasons I identified as agnostic was because the existence of God cannot be scientifically disproven. How could she definitively embrace atheism when proof of God's non-existence was impossible?

And she gave me an answer very similar to that of my evangelical Christian friend: "I may not be able to disprove God's existence, but I just don't believe that's the way the universe actually works. I believe there is no God as strongly as someone who believes in God believes."

In fact, I had to admit that my agnosticism wasn't completely the product of scientific rationality either, because agreed with her: I couldn't believe that the God of my childhood was how the universe worked either.

All of us -- Christian, atheist, agnostic -- were taking our life experiences and all the data we'd gathered about the universe, and we were crunching those numbers in our heads. We were getting as close as we could to an answer, making the most sense we could based on the evidence we had, and then we were, each and every one of us, taking a leap of faith.

And that's what my husband's addiction is to me. It's a belief. I've taken all the evidence from all the experiences I've had in my life -- from everything I know of myself and my husband, from every interaction I've ever had with anyone on this planet, from all the research and learning I've done, from all my spiritual searchings -- and I've drawn the best conclusion from all of the forty years of experience and knowledge that I possibly can. I found that compulsive behavior is what makes the most sense to me in explaining the most data. And then I take a leap of faith. It's in that leap of faith that doubt lies.

When it comes to God I have to admit that there is a possibility that God is actually a man up in the sky with a flowing white beard who does things like prohibit the eating of meat on Fridays. That vision of the universe doesn't make a lot of sense to me personally, it doesn't feel quite right to me, it doesn't work as well for me and with my life experiences as my vision of my God does, but it could be true. Some part of me always wonders if I'm wrong and am going to end up hanging with Satan having my flesh burned by fire for the rest of eternity because I've had an abortion or engaged in pre-marital sex or eaten shellfish. But I can't live my life in that nebulous region of "what if." I have to live my life with my God and my understanding of the universe, on this side of that leap of faith.

It's the same thing for addiction. There is no certainty and no way to attain certainty either way. Maybe my husband is making choices about what he's doing. I have to admit that that's possible. I have to admit that the way I used to see the universe didn't fit, that I've had to change, that I've been wrong before. I have to admit that sometimes I wonder if my husband is an evil person or doesn't love me, just as I wonder if there is a Hell and if I'm going there. But it doesn't fit the data I have nearly as well. It doesn't fit well with what I know. It feels wrong to me.

At some point, whether I'm going to believe that he (and others) are acting compulsively or believe that he (and others) are choosing to act hurtfully, I'm going to have to make a leap of faith in order to live my life. I can't be (no one can) one hundred percent certain, but where I am now is working for me better than where I used to be five or ten years ago. So, I'm going to keep on believing with (oh, let's say) somewhere between 95 and 99% of me, and trust that if my leap of faith was ill advised, I'll find out when I hit the eternal rocks beneath.