In processing all has has occurred in and around my life in the past several years, I've been thinking lately about the term "in good faith". What is normally understood by the phrase is "honesty; a sincere intention to deal fairly with others". As defined in legal dictionaries, "good faith is an abstract and comprehensive term that encompasses a sincere belief or motive without any malice or the desire to defraud others. It derives from the translation of the Latin term bona fide and courts use the two terms interchangeably."
One legal dictionary was particularly helpful to me in that it added:
"Effort made, information given, or transaction done, honestly and without a deliberate intention to defraud the other party. However, good faith does not necessarily mean 'without negligence'." (Italics mine.)
What am I understanding through this, that I did not see before?
One of the enduring pains of the breakup of my first marriage and the lack of understanding or support by my local church, was how almost all people instinctively leapt to P's defense, believing he was acting in good faith. Sometimes I felt that in their minds, good faith excused almost anything, including directly contradictory behavior. And I realize now that part of the reason I was seen as the baddie in all this is that I had stopped believing in P's "good faith" years before, at least in regard to me and to our relationship. So in their minds, I was acting in bad faith by not supporting what they saw as P's good faith in seeking counseling, which I knew he only entered after he realized he was in love with someone else. In other words, to my mind, I was never worth that effort, but she was.
P does have a way of being apparently completely open and honest in the moment, which is admittedly very disarming and appealing and for heaven's sake, you want to believe him. I did for many years. In that moment, as far as he is aware, he IS being honest. There's just a whole lot going on under the surface that will most likely torpedo that good intention as soon as it touches certain core issues. The problem in our marriage was that these fleeting revelations P genuinely had never translated into habitual supporting actions, in fact, often quite the reverse; and when one challenged that fact, one was somehow made to feel one had misinterpreted everything which had gone before. Not even written accounts of previous conversations or agreements could shake his viewpoint.
How can one continue to believe in the good faith of someone who can genuinely believe his re-write of history to his own advantage?
Since reading the book "Why Does He DO That?", I've gained a much greater understanding of P's protective, narcissistic mindset, the fruits of which I had experienced for years but the cause of which I had not been able/willing to identify. Years of painful experience, including attempts at counseling, had continually confirmed that when push came to shove, P seemed constitutionally unable (and certainly unwilling) to place anyone or anything, but most especially me and my needs, above his overriding felt need to protect himself. (This wouldn't have been so bad but for his retaliatory lashing out and making this fact my problem.)
But because I genuinely believed marriage was for life, and so much of our marriage did work, and we had a good family life, eventually I concluded he had an emotional disability I just had to live with; so I adjusted my hopes way downward, stopped challenging him, and tried to simply keep the peace at my own expense. That sounds so martyrdomish, but I really didn't experience it that way, and it was not particularly noble. I figured it this way: if he were a paraplegic, we would find ways to work around it; so if he is crippled emotionally (and the more I found out about his childhood, the more I understood that!), even if he couldn't see or admit he was the problem, I could still work around it.
Which I did, with varying degrees of success, until I found out he really could love someone above himself after all.
It just wasn't me.
So in one sense, I understand that people around him read his late efforts toward inner healing as being in good faith. And I can understand them thinking I was cynical for not believing that. (Though even the fact I was proven right in the end doesn't yet seem to have entered their minds.) They read it correctly in a sense, because having developed such strong compartmentalization capabilities, as far as he was aware of his own motives P genuinely had no "desire to defraud others". So the fact that he repeatedly did do so may fall under the category of that last definition quote: "However, good faith does not necessarily mean 'without negligence'."
Yes, P repeatedly neglected our marriage and my needs within it, whenever those conflicted with his primary need of self-protection and the need to be in control. The fact that we had adjusted the marriage to work in spite of that doesn't change the fact itself. And when push came to shove P, through his choices, also effectively betrayed his church and the people who had most tried to help him. But before those actions became visible, what the church people and I were seeing differently was perhaps more along these lines: they were seeing what appeared to be P's genuine good faith, and my disbelief in that, without being aware (as I was) of the negligence that had been going on a long, long time.
In law, one can be prosecuted for provable negligence even if one did act in demonstrable good faith. So my sense of injustice finds corroboration here. (The same can be said for the financial disaster, which had very similar dynamics.) However, I personally have made the choice to live under grace and not under law, and to extend grace and not law. All this knowledge really does for me now is help me understand what came about and how, not open a new court case against anybody! But this understanding that good faith does not exclude the possibility of negligence was helpful.
After all, don't we all know this about ourselves? We can have the very best intentions (as far as we know) and still act with disastrous consequences. We can do the best we can with what we know, and find out that neither our effort nor our knowledge was sufficient. We can put forth all the faith and hope we can muster and find it was misplaced.
Acting in good faith is good, but not always good enough. The Cross has to cover our negligence too, or we are hopelessly doomed.
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift! - 2 Cor.9:15
