This hit home. Thought I’d repeat it.

Adultery

Adultery is the most selfish, destructive and hateful thing a person can do.

It’s funny what you don’t know going in.

Or what you choose to ignore.

And it’s tragic that you don’t realize until it’s too late, until what’s done is done, how utterly wasted a life can be. How hopeless hopeless can become. How the promise and joy of life can slip like water through guilty hands.

Hell is merely realizing what you’ve done.

Mostly to others, but ultimately to yourself.

Hell is the flash of memory, snippets and snapshots of a happy spouse, a newlywed or new mother, pleased and pledged her future and hopes tied to you. Her whole life in all its stages gambled on you. The very nature, substance and quality of her life, through all its years, depending on a promise you have casually or repeatedly broken.

How you can take an hour or a decade of selfishness and condemn an innocent person to a lifetime of loneliness and disappointment.

How you can steal someone’s dream and leave it tattered and stained, unrecognizable and unsalvageable. And not just any someone. The one person who has given you more than any other. The only one who truly understands you and cares about you, and who proved it by giving herself to you. By having faith in you and supporting you. By taking your name and taking your fate.

That’s the one you destroy.

It’s an emotional murder. The snuffing out of a life that should have been lived. Not the stopping of a heart, but the breaking of a heart. Taking the “happily” out of “happily ever after.” It’s an emotional murder.

And that’s the hell.

For you because you deserve it, and for her because she doesn’t.

Then there are the children.

Innocents whose lives are forever and unfairly changed. Who have a mommy and a daddy one day, but not the next. At least not in a real way. Not in the way they are supposed to. No Christmases and family reunions and weddings and graduations, no family nights around the dinner table or the TV, it’s all just shattered and broken.

You’d kill someone who hurt your children a fraction of how badly you’ve hurt them, and yet you’ve done it, and they tell you it’s OK but you know it’s not and you’ve done it and you can’t run away from it and Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.

And children cry.

When they are young, and decades later when they are old.

The family died, and daddy did it.

That’s the hell.

Realizing that.

Realizing that you did that to them. That you have returned hate for love, betrayal for trust, evil for good.

You have broken the only promise you really had to keep. And in the world of cause and effect they reap the harvest you have sown.

Adultery isn’t something you do with another person, it is something you do to your family. To the hopes and lives of the only people who will ever really matter to you.

It is a blind and hateful selfishness, a universe out of kilter, an arrogance of priority and interest. You are all that matters, nothing else counts, and you have everything backwards.

And it seals you off until you are alone and they don’t have you even if you are in their midst. Ultimately you rot so much that it collapses, the marriage and the family, and out you spin, not realizing a fraction of what you’ve done and who you’ve hurt and what you’ve lost.

But it comes eventually. In the dark of the night, in the realizations of the soul, in the honesty of humility.

And you can’t think about what you’ve lost, because you’re too ashamed of what you’ve taken. Ashamed and anguished and wrong.

And that is hell. The realization of what you’ve done. Of who you’ve hurt. Of the damage you’ve caused. Of the fact it’ll never go away.

That is the lake of fire and brimstone.

You realize that life was a test.

And you failed.

You failed your family.

Adultery brings nothing but sorrow and pain. The likes of which words cannot communicate and imagination cannot conjure.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery” was not a restriction, it was a warning.

Which only fools fail to heed.

– by Bob Lonsberry © 2004