Michelle Padgett Asks How Can I Forgive You?

How can I forgive you… for all the lies from the very beginning? Everything about you was a mask, a script, a show by an actor who played the role of love while rehearsing the lines of betrayal behind the scenes.

How can I forgive you… for crossing my boundaries of purity, professing to me a love that should have been protected and not violated? You didn’t honour me like you promised; you used me to feed your ego and your lusts and called it affection.

How can I forgive you… for pretending we were one under God when your heart was divided between manipulation, lies, and deceit? You made a sacred marriage covenant out of convenience, without being fully committed.

How can I forgive you… for using my kindness as a weakness, sex as a weapon, and love on a leash? My heart was toyed with, just another victim of your evil romance con game. You spoke promises in the daylight and betrayed me in the dark. You talked to other women behind my back while calling me your wife. You took my money, pawned my trust, and still expected my loyalty for life.

How can I forgive you… for making me pay to build your future and your dream, while you smirked and smiled in my face and said, “Mich, we’re an unbreakable team”?

How can I forgive you… for twisting intimacy into power, dominance, and control? For giving me silence when I needed safety? For blaming me for things you could never find, accusing me of a “disease of deception” because of the guilty conscience of your own mind? How can I forgive you for the threats, for the bruises words can leave? You broke more than objects— that monster inside you shattered my peace.

How can I forgive you… for being ashamed of me in public but claiming me in private? You strutted around like a single man while I prayed behind the scenes as your faithful wife. You belittled me, betrayed me, and left me stranded in a foreign country in the cold. You shacked up with some whore in the comfort of the home where I paid all the bills.

How can I forgive you… for calling the police on me, for twisting the truth to make me look unstable, for deceiving a judge, neighbours, and church family, trying to turn everyone against me?

How can I forgive you… for stealing my belongings, my dignity, my safety too—just so you could please or impress other women and make them admire you? While I was left alone and cold, fighting for my life, you were sleeping around, financing your lifestyle of sin, spreading rumours and that famous, “God said you’re my wife.”

How can I forgive you… for trying to destroy me—my reputation, my ministry, my business, and everything built on truth and faith? You cursed me and hurt me deeply, and you refused any accountability. Not once did you say, “I’m sorry.” Not once did you offer your hand or heart in true repentance.

And yet, here I am. Still breathing, believing, and bleeding. Forced to start all over again. Learning that forgiveness isn’t making excuses for your behaviour or saying the way you treated me was okay. It is me saying I will not let the bitter roots of unforgiveness poison me each day or stop me from fulfilling my life’s purpose. I was blindsided and broken on a rollercoaster of emotions, dropped and covered in a heap of burning ashes—but now choosing to rise.

Bleeding, shattered, and still loving. Crying, yet still praying. Realising that forgiveness is power and mercy wrapped in grace.

So how can I forgive you?

By walking through this thing called love.

By forgiving, not because you deserve it, but because I deserve to live and breathe again.

Daily, I may walk with a limp, with scars, still very wounded.

But I will survive… and begin to thrive… by speaking truth and choosing forgiveness, through the strength of God’s never-ending love.