Day 41: Ps. 41:5, “My enemies speak evil against me, ‘When will he die, and his name perish?’”
We’re going to go through almost the entirety of Psalm 41 in this chapter: it’s so smart on the subjects of betrayal and social isolation—and on the Heavenly perspective on these devastating attacks on humanity. Here the Psalmist gets straight to the core of the experience of narcissistic discard: the feeling of erasure. Your betraying husband is doing exactly what you feared the most in your marriage, probably in your whole life: he’s trying desperately to forget you exist. Because if he can just erase you, he can erase what he’s done. So, he is refusing to talk about or even acknowledge the pain he’s putting you through. He is taking his mistress to all the places that were special to you, where you and he made sacred memories together. He is buying her the gifts he used to buy you. He is parading her in front of mutual friends as if they are just supposed to act like he just screwed another woman’s head onto your body; nothing to see here, folks! He is Photoshopping you out of his life and her into it. This is utterly devastating, sister–believe me, I know it. And I also know your only chance of surviving it is to utterly reject it for the lie it is. You are not interchangeable, or replaceable, or worthless. You haven’t vanished, and you’re not going to. These are all merely self-serving lies that let your husband do the horrible things that he’s doing to you–because if he thought about what he was really doing, he couldn’t live with himself (or his mistress). Re-read the verses in the “Coping” Chapter about your identity in Christ. Double and triple down on every promise. You are an eternal, precious, beloved child, a queen in the kingdom of Heaven. Who are you going to believe, then, when they tell you who you are? Your King and Father, or a man whose “breath is in his nostrils” (Is. 2:22), who can’t even tell real from fake in love and life?
The Rookery 