How did you learn your husband’s sexual addiction had led him to molest the neighbor’s daughter?
We were on vacation, and the neighbor watching our house called to say he’d picked up a phone message from a detective wanting to speak to my husband. I thought it was so strange, and when I mentioned this to my husband, his face went white.
The day we got back from vacation, the detective called. “Mrs. Morgenthaler, we have reason to believe that your husband has been involved in a molestation case with the girl who lives next door. She told her school counselor a few weeks ago. He needs to turn himself in.”
I hung up the phone and went to the garage (it was kind of his haven) to tell him the police wanted him.
He minimized his behavior. “Well, something might have happened, but we were just playing together and she must have misunderstood,” he said.
Perhaps out of my own denial, I decided to believe him.
Were there any clues through the years that something was wrong?
I met my former husband in high school. We were married right after my senior year of college. He had a conversion experience in his last year in college, and he said God was calling him to seminary.
We were both in our late twenties when he accepted his first church position. We had a young son, and soon afterward our daughter was born.
I certainly had no idea that he had developed a secret addiction to pornography (he’d been introduced by a relative at the age of 12 or 13). I did know early on in our marriage that something was not quite right. Our relationship was strained and distant. He worked long hours, which is not unusual in the ministry. However, after a few years, both I and the office staff began having problems finding him during the day. Later I would wake up the middle of the night, and he would be gone. Sometimes he was in the garage or on the back porch.
What was happening during this time in the church?
The cracks started to show. After six years at his first congregation, he started a mission church, and I was the worship coordinator.
He visited several megachurches and became consumed with the dream of building a large church. He pressed this model on people, leading to conflict after conflict.
At first he’d gotten a lot of kudos for being a personal, compassionate pastor. He was the one that people could call on—a people pleaser, and he got much of his identity from being the man who would be there for people, day or night.
But a distance grew between him and the congregation—absences, forgotten appointments, capriciousness on decisions, increasing focus on power and control, inability to follow through. An addiction takes time and energy. It consumes big chunks of brain power. It’s a vicious circle: as more things went wrong in the ministry, he slipped deeper into his addictive cycle.
What about your marriage?
My life became all about rescuing him from himself and holding our family life together. I became a co-dependent. I tried to hide his behavior while suffering (with our children) its daily consequences. I just kept the plates twirling.
What happened when you found the pornography?
When I found him with the first magazines, ten years into our marriage, I was—I was incredulous. It was decimating to me as a woman, as his wife, to think for the first time that I wasn’t enough. It wasn’t till years later that I learned his addiction had nothing to do with me. It had to do with an untreated behavioral disorder he’d developed long before we met.
Was pornography a “gateway drug” for him? The first step on the downward slope?
Yes. Three years after his conviction I finally learned his whole sexual history: from print to peeping to sexual encounters with adults to exposing himself in public places.
Then finally, he had repeated sexual contact with my daughter’s best friend, a girl who was retarded. Over a two-year period, while I was away from the house, he fondled her approximately fifty times.
Then the detective called.
I hired a high-priced attorney to make sure he didn’t get arrested. At first I thought he was innocent. Protecting him and proving his innocence was my goal. I didn’t want to subject my children to the shame.
He had left the church a few months earlier, and we were starting our own business.
A year after the start of the investigation, he was convicted and put on probation. But while he wasn’t molesting anyone else, via polygraph tests, he admitted developing a fantasy life about our daughter. She was 13 at the time.
Finally he reoffended by exposing himself in a public place. He was sentenced to a year in jail and eight years in a halfway house and an intensive sex-offender program.
How was your spiritual life during that time?
Oh, it hit some real lows. I kept asking the “God, are you still there? Do you still love me?” questions. I remember sitting in the waiting room at the jail, watching all these women I had so little in common with, except our offender husbands and boyfriends, and wondering, God, where are you?
The lowest moment was the day probation officers had me read his sexual history from about age eight. His history included things I had never known—affairs, risky behavior. It was like reading about a stranger. Nothing about our marriage relationship had been true.
That night I called a suicide hotline. I had sent my daughter up the street to a friend’s house, because the next day I was ready to commit suicide. I didn’t, because of God’s still small voice drawing me and helping me to see that, though I felt I was nothing, I was all these children had. If I couldn’t save myself for myself, God had given me these beautiful children, and that was a calling. God drew me out of that horrible dark place with that calling.
While I felt God was near, I didn’t necessarily know that he loved me.
When did you regain the sense of God’s love?
I filed for divorce after my husband was released from jail and began his time in the halfway house (2000). My children and I began the long journey into hope. We had the ability to choose a new kind of future. My son had been strong through it all. He graduated from college in 2002 and has established himself as a film editor. My daughter had some rough years, but by God’s grace, her life turned around. She is graduating college next spring, and she is engaged to a wonderful young man.
God has blessed us in so many ways, and all of our needs have been met. Every one of them. God has redeemed the years the locusts had eaten.
How has this experience changed your ministry—your view of yourself and of God?
No question, I was humbled and leveled. I have often wondered why people, especially those between 18 and 30, are so drawn to who I am and what I do. It can’t be explained by my views about worship, leadership, or the church.
I’ve come to believe that they’re drawn by God’s humbling process in my life. My vulnerability has been pretty clear.
How has this it affected your view of worship?
At its foundation, worship is real people meeting a real God, not a patty-cake rehearsal. Where are the psalms of lament, of confession? Is it more than “nice”?
I have experienced God’s presence through what seemed like hell, like darkness that was outside of God’s reach. But like the psalmist in Psalm 139, I’ve learned God is there. Always. Life happens, and come what may, God is in the midst of it.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.
