The American Dream Couldn’t Save My Marriage
I know about Camel, Marlboro, and Newport from working the counter at a gas station convenience store in Boston. It was my first job in America as a 23-year-old immigrant from Ethiopia. I also learned to pump gas and check the oil in that full-service station before I ever owned a car. Many people passed me by as they traveled up and down the eastern seaboard, but I wasn’t going anywhere without my legal papers. So I am grateful to the Reverend Michael E. Haynes, who helped me procure a student visa. I am grateful to this country which granted me asylum and opened the door for my permanent residence status. I received many opportunities through which I was able to continue my education, find a better job, and travel freely without fear. When I purchased my first home, I felt I had accomplished the American dream.
This and lots of other things ended up going right for me before I had to realize how wrong I had been.
Village Hospitality
Growing up, my family in Ethiopia had been very poor, but the challenges of poverty taught me to be a survivor as I was expected to contribute to my family’s well-being from an early age. We lived on the outskirts of the capital, Addis Ababa, in a village where the main roads had not yet reached. So as a child of eight or nine years old, I would listen for the delivery trucks to honk their horns. My friends and I would then run to the edge of the village, carry heavy crates of Coca-Cola bottles on our heads, and deliver them to the village shops to earn five cents a case. The first time I tried to carry one, I dropped all twenty-four Coca-Cola bottles and broke quite a few. In order to provide for my family, I also polished shoes for local businessmen, cared for the sheep and goats on our family farm, and climbed trees to collect firewood for my mother.
Our family’s poverty and lack of connections made it extremely unlikely that I would ever make it to America on my own. Even now, I am amazed that I am living in this country with all its privileges and opportunities. In the past, I considered my journey to America as a lucky strike and nothing more. But now, I see God’s providence in all of it (Acts 17:26). The Lord prompted a generous man, Dr. Ralph Wolf, as an instrument of his grace to open endless avenues which would not have been available had I remained in Ethiopia.
Tech Support
At the forefront of these many blessings was meeting my wife. We met while I was working in Boston for an IT company—she needed help setting up her computer and I was just the right man for the job. We spoke the same dialect, shared a similar culture, and strongly desired the well-being of the Ethiopian people.
Over the years, however, tribal animosities have escalated in our homeland, causing many to lose their lives, their generational wealth, and daily peace of mind. My people can no longer move about freely and work in certain parts of the country. Neighbors have grown suspicious of one another and even churches have become victims of such ethnic division that they do not speak about the peace of Christ (Rom. 5:1). Our hearts ache over the tribalism among our people because we know that the sinful pride at the root of this problem goes much deeper than our skin color.
In Ethiopia, all of us are black. So our struggle arises not from racial strife or the merits of our melanin, but from our sinful hearts (Jer. 13:23). The final solution, therefore, cannot merely be political action or social justice, but only the grace of Christ which guards us from following our own selfish desires (Eph. 2:1–3).
As unified as my wife and I were in our love for the Ethiopian people and our concern for the struggles they were going through, I wasn’t able to see that our marriage was crumbling because of my own sin.
Saving Grace
I was baptized in an Ethiopian evangelical church. Yet still, I had no idea what it truly meant to be a Christian. I never took the initiative to study God’s Word for myself, and I loved my sin so much that I turned away from God. I didn’t think that he could change my life. Yet one day, I came home from work and found my wife had left me. She and our two young boys were gone without a warning or even a note. I was unable to connect with them or to find out where they were. A few days later, though, I was called into court and served with a restraining order. According to the law, I was forbidden from seeing or speaking with my wife and children for an entire year.
I was so broken by the shock that I began to pray as an act of desperation. I had nowhere else to turn, but to the God in whom I had once professed my faith. Then, as I prayed, the Lord confronted me about my rejection of his love and my selfishness as a husband and a father. I realized what a fool I’d been, trying to provide security for my family through human means. Yet in my pride, I had torn apart my family.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t work. I cried for over a week as I begged the Lord to forgive me. Then in that empty home, I received God’s grace and a renewed desire in my heart to study his Word. I went to Panera Bread every day and read my Bible for hours at a time. When I couldn’t sleep, I downloaded more than 3,000 sermons from Pastor John MacArthur in California and listened to them all night. God used my brokenness to make me a different person and a follower of Jesus as I surrendered my life to Christ.
My wife, meanwhile, had taken our boys to North Carolina, where she lived for ten months with the help of some friends. She made no contact with me, but the Lord was graciously working to change her heart as well. She providentially spoke with an Ethiopian marriage counselor in Minnesota who counseled her by phone about our marriage. He then contacted our pastor in Boston to help the two of us reconcile.
Ten months after my wife had left me for good, I drove down to North Carolina to see her again with our two boys. The counselor met us there to help make peace and bring healing to our marriage. Then my wife and I mutually agreed to break the restraining order and we all drove back home together as a reunited family.
By the works of the law, there is no reason my wife and I should still be married today. Though we had come from the same tribe with a similar cultural background, we still managed to grievously sin against each other. Yet by the grace of God, we are still together and, to our surprise, preparing to plant a church in our homeland. God, by his grace, used friends in our Ethiopian evangelical community, an American pastor in California I had never met, and the invisible hand of his divine grace to restore what we could not.
Habtamu Sisay serves as a Greenhouse church planting resident at New Life Church. He and his wife, Yewbdar, are natives of Ethiopia who desire to plant a church in their home country.
(This article has been adapted from a collection of stories prepared by Tom Sugimura, a frequent contributor to GCD.)