During this week 13 years ago, the darkness was so dark that no glimpse of light was to be found.

During this week 13 years ago, the pain was so real that it was difficult to breathe.

During this week 13 years ago, we both desperately wanted the hurt to disappear.

During this week 13 years ago, the truth about the affair was no longer hidden behind closed doors.

Our marriage was over 13 years ago this week.

We were married young. I was 22, Shayla was 19 when we said I do in a small church in Ulysses, Kansas. Some people talk about love at first sight but for us it was love at our first interaction.

We just meshed from our first conversation. Being together was easy. It was effortless. We were inseparable. The excitement of being together never wore off.

We began dating on Halloween and were engaged just over eight months later on July 3rd. We planned a wedding in five months and were married the week before Christmas. Only 412 days passed between our first date and the day we walked down the aisle as Mr. and Mrs. Bryan Moffitt.

Nobody ever celebrates their wedding with intentions of it falling apart within a few years.

We were no different. We loved each other more than anyone else and assumed that would be enough to keep us together.

Unfortunately, we were wrong.

When something is renovated, it’s stripped down to the foundation only to be rebuilt with reinforced support and infrastructure. When an abandoned part of downtown is revitalized, bulldozers come in and tear down the old, worn down buildings to create something new…a renovated place.

When a house is renovated, it must get messy before it can become beautiful.

Our marriage was no different.

Our marriage had to be torn down in order to have what we have today.

As 2005 came to a close, we celebrated our sixth anniversary. I had spent a week away on business and the stress that travel caused in our marriage had escalated to anger for both of us.

We had plans to be with family for a week at Shayla’s parents’ house to celebrate Christmas. The trip normally takes eight and a half hours but due to a Kansas snowstorm, it took 12 hours. It was horrific. Not because of the snowstorm, but because of the complete silence. We drove for 11 ½ hours without saying one single word to each other.

Silence. Complete silence. Painful silence. Angry silence. Lonely silence.

The drinking had become too much for Shayla. She would spend most nights while I was away with minimal sleep wondering if I was safe in my hotel room. The freedom of traveling had become an obsession for me. I would spend most evenings drinking, drowning the reality of who I was and who I had become.

It was constant discontent that was impossible to outrun or hide from.

As the snow drifted across the intersection, we stopped at a red light in Ulysses, Kansas. We were merely one mile from the small church where we had committed our lives to each other just six years earlier. As the light turned green, the first words of the trip were spoken. The words that would change our marriage forever.

I don’t love you.

I don’t want to be married to you.

I want out.

There are few words that could cut through the heart of a wife like those 15 words I told Shayla.

The final 30 minutes of our drive would be in silence once again. We had to act like nothing was said and spend a week with family. Both of our hearts were shattered. We had already passed the point of no return.

It was the beginning of the end for us.

We spent the next four months living under the same roof but in different bedrooms. The goal was to make life miserable for the other person. It’s impossible to clearly articulate how nasty we were to each other.

It was downright disgusting and complete disrespect for each other.

We lived like this until we received news that a loved one had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. This earth-shattering news woke us up and we made the decision to get back together. However, instead of working through the pain that brought us to this point, we swept the hurt under the rug and began to march through life again.

Everything was going okay for a few months…or at least it seemed like it from the outside.

I would continue to travel for work without much communication when I was away from home. Shayla would act like it didn’t bother her when she couldn’t reach me late into the evenings. We would come back together after a few days of being apart and ignore the nagging tension that never seemed to go away.

On October 2, thirteen years ago, Shayla made a phone call that no woman should ever have to make.

She talked to the woman that I was having an affair with.

The fear that Shayla hoped to avoid had become a reality.

As she opened the door into the house from the garage, I knew that she knew. I could tell by the pain and anger in her eyes. The double life that I had been living finally caught up with me. There was no more running. There was no more hiding.

The truth was going to destroy our marriage.

I couldn’t believe that my actions had created this moment and Shayla couldn’t believe that the person she loved the most in this world could cause the intense pain she felt.

Before Shayla left for what we thought would be the final time, she said this to me, I will help you get help. Not as your wife but as your friend. But you have got to get help.

She slammed the door that I thought would never be opened again.

The help would come just a few hours later.

I began to drink in the early afternoon and continued through the evening. It was the only way I knew how to cope with the pain that I caused and the pain that I was feeling. While numbing every emotion I was feeling with alcohol, my phone rang.

The person calling was Ted. Shayla’s dad.

Because of the pain that I had caused Shayla and obviously her parents, I had no intention of taking the call.

Ted left a message that would change the course of generations. This is what it said.

Bryan, you broke by heart and you broke my daughter's heart. But you are my son and I love you. If you ever need anything in life, I will be here for you.

The voicemail ended and so did my fear that no one cared about me. The fear that had haunted me for as long as I could remember. I had spent my entire life living as a façade, always making sure those around me were okay while being broken and damaged on the inside.

There was no more hiding. I had been caught but somehow Shayla’s dad could look past the pain to provide love to me before it was too late.

Love’s renovation was taking place.

The next morning, I woke up with a hangover and a sense of loneliness that I had never felt. This was the moment that I had secretly wished for over the past twelve months.

An empty house. Life on my own. No one to answer to. Everything I wanted was finally true.

However, the feeling of emptiness paralyzed me. I only had one person to turn to…Shayla’s dad. I couldn’t shake the voicemail from the evening before. I called Ted back without any idea how the phone conversation was going to go. I wasn’t the type to show any sign of vulnerability. But this was the beginning of something new.

“Hi Dad. I got your voicemail from last night. I’m sorry,” I said as my voice cracked.

Those were the only words I could get out before the emotion become too great to hold back the tears.

Embarrassment.

Shame.

Guilt.

I had let Ted down. I broke the promise I made to him as he gave his daughter away to me on that chilly December afternoon nearly seven years earlier in that small church in western Kansas.

“Bryan, I am going to be in Kansas City this weekend to move Shayla out of the house. If you are willing, I would like to spend some time with you while I am there,” Ted said with his own sense of desperation. He wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do but it was the only thing that he knew to do.

I agreed to meet him because I didn’t have anyone else to turn to.

Ted was watching his son (in-law) self-destruct before his eyes and he wasn’t going to let him go down without a fight.

“Do you have a Bible close?” Ted asked as we continued to talk on the phone for over two hours.

I grabbed the only Bible in the house. It was sitting on the bottom shelf of the nightstand with dust covering the outside and pages stuck together from the lack of use.

“Turn to Psalm 52,” Ted said in a hopeful tone.

I read Psalm 52 and it meant nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. The words might as well have been written in another language.

Ted meant to say Psalm 51 which is a story about King David having an affair with Bathsheba. He meant to have me read that story so I could understand that it would look like to ask for forgiveness.

But he said Psalm 52. After I finished reading Psalm 52, my eyes immediately went to the opposite page.

I began to read Psalm 55 and with each word, they spoke directly to my heart. It was as if I was reading my life’s story unfold on the page.

“Dad, Psalm 55 is exactly how I feel,” I said with a small glimmer of hope in my voice.

I am convinced that it was the only time dad has ever misquoted scripture. As I look back on that day, I know that God had him give me the wrong scripture so my attention could be drawn to the opposite page.

Ted loved me when no one else did.

Renovate is derived from the Latin verb novare which means to make new.

Our marriage was renovated. It was made new.

Quite often, we get asked these two questions.

Shayla, what did you do to change Bryan?

Bryan, how did you get Shayla to forgive you?

When people ask, it’s because they are either going through something similar or have gone through something similar.

They want to know how to heal. They want the secret sauce to be able to move on from the pain in their own marriage.

The answer is always the same.

JESUS.

I couldn’t shake the last words that Shayla said before she left the house. She said that I needed to get help. The first four verses of Psalm 55 became my cry out for help and my prayer.

1 Listen to my prayer, O God, do not ignore my plea; 2 hear me and answer me. My thoughts trouble me and I am distraught 3 because of what my enemy is saying, because of the threats of the wicked; for they bring down suffering on me and assail me in their anger. 4 My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen on me.

As I read verse four for the first time 13 years ago, it was exactly how I was feeling.

My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen on me.

My heart was in anguish. The fear of death consumed my thoughts.

But within a few days, everything changed.

I did get help. I got help from the creator of the universe. Jesus pulled me out of the pit of despair.

Just a few days after dad and I spoke on the phone, we got together on that Sunday night. It was on that evening that I finally stopped running. I surrendered my life to Jesus. I acknowledged that I was a sinner, asked for forgiveness and invited Jesus to be my Lord and Savior. A weight was lifted off of my shoulders that is unexplainable. I could breathe for the first time.

October 8, 2006 was the day that everything started over for me.

I was born again. I was made new.

When something is being renovated, it’s a process. It takes patience. It doesn’t happen overnight. There are no short cuts. But when the project is completed, it’s well worth the work it took to get there.

October 2, 2006 was the breaking point in our marriage. It was the day that the marriage that we knew was over. It had to die for something new to be born.

We were separated for nearly two months. Throughout those two months, we were in counseling sessions multiple times each week. I would go by myself to work through the pain I was in and the pain that I caused. Shayla would go by herself to work through the anger and hurt that she was experiencing. We would go together to work through healing and learn what it would take to reconcile our marriage.

Quite often, we wondered if it was worth the time and effort we were putting into a marriage that was devastated by infidelity. We would make progress one week only to experience extreme setbacks the following week.

But we persevered. We hung onto hope. We rebuilt and placed our marriage on the cross of Jesus Christ. He was going to be our new foundation.

While I had to surrender my life to Jesus in order for healing to take place, Shayla had to repurpose her life and learn what it meant to follow Jesus for healing to take place.

Our focus was no longer on the imperfections of each other but on the perfection of Jesus.

Love’s renovation began to work on both of our hearts.

We spent 2007 learning what it meant to have a Christ-centered marriage. In January of 2008, I surrendered my 10-year addiction to alcohol and have been completely sober ever since.

In March of 2009, we welcomed the birth of our first child, Addyson. Each and every day since, she has been a reminder of the grace and forgiveness possible through Jesus. In June of 2012, our family was complete when our son, Cayson, was born. He was born on Shayla’s dad’s birthday. What a great reminder he is of the beauty of love.

We have been given so much more than we ever could have imagined, anticipated or hoped for.

Renovated love.

In the summer of 2014, God began to reveal that we needed to use our story to give others hope and to lead people into a powerful relationship with Jesus. We spent the next few months planning and creating a ministry for the broken so they could see and experience hope. The majority of marriages fail when a spouse steps out and trust is broken. We are unlike the majority of marriages, so we wanted others to see a couple that made it through the storm.

Our desire is to see a husband and wife experience marriage the way that God intended marriage to be. A marriage that is thriving.

After months of preparing, Anguished Hearts was born and Psalm 55:4 was the inspiration for the name. We picked October 2, 2015 as our launch date. We were going to reclaim October 2 as a day of celebration of what God has done rather than look at October 2 as a day of pain. From 2007 through 2014, October 2 was always a day that we dreaded to see show up on the calendar. It reminded us of the pain of a broken marriage. Now October 2 was going to represent a renovated marriage.

What the enemy intended for evil, God restored for His glory.

This week we celebrated on October 2.

Renovated love.

Our prayer is that our story encourages you in your own story.

Our prayer is that our story gives you an abundance of hope and purpose.

Whatever you are going through and whatever you have experienced, please know that healing is possible.

Our home church, Life.Church, recently released an incredible worship album, God So Good. One song in particular has touched me. To God Be The Glory has become my anthem the last couple of weeks. Verse two brings me to my knees every time I hear it. You can check out the video and read all of the lyrics at the end of this post.

The deaf can hear
The broken live again
The blind can see
The sinner is a friend
And love’s renovation
will testify to all You’ve done
Our hearts redeemed
When Jesus rose again
and all will know
Your kingdom knows no end
And every tribe and nation
Will testify to all You’ve done

Only by the blood of Jesus can I now hear. Only by the blood of Jesus can I now live. Only by the blood of Jesus can I now see. Only by the blood of Jesus can I be a friend of His.

Only by the blood of Jesus can our love be renovated.

It’s because of that truth that we will testify all He has done for us. It’s our life calling, and we have no intentions of stopping anytime soon.

Happy Anguished Hearts Anniversary from us to you.

Thank you for supporting us and being a part of our community the past four years. We are just getting started.

To God Be The Glory.

Bryan

STAY CONNECTED WITH US!

To God Be The Glory

VERSE 1

The universe is held within Your hands
And all the earth bows down at Your command
The wonder of creation
Will testify to all You’ve done
From age to age Your promises have stood
You reign as King just like You said You would
And every generation
Will testify to all You’ve done

CHORUS

To God be the glory
To God be the glory
You have done great things
You will never change
To God be the glory

VERSE 2