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A Resource by Mark D. Roberts |
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How Does God Guide
Us? Divine Guidance. Spiritual Guidance. Guidance by the Holy
Spirit. How Does the Holy Spirit Guide Us?
How Does God Guide Us?
Section 1
by Rev. Dr. Mark D. Roberts
Copyright © 2007 by Mark D. Roberts
Note: You may download this resource at no cost, for personal use or for use in a Christian ministry, as long as you are not publishing it for sale. All I ask is that you give credit where credit is due. For all other uses, please contact me at mark@markdroberts.com . Thank you.
How Does God Guide Us? Introduction 
Part 1 of series: How Does God Guide Us? 
Posted for Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Recently I've been thinking about how God guides us. I've been motivated, in part, by some challenges facing the leaders of my church and me. As we seek to move forward in ministry, we're seeking to discern God's guidance, and often this isn't easy. I've also found myself in pastoral conversations with people who are asking me how they can know God's will for their lives. They aren't looking for easy answers, but for direction so they can follow Jesus more faithfully.
Of course the question of how God guides us isn't a new one for me as a pastor, or simply as a Christian. Ever since I first put my faith in Jesus Christ over 40 years ago, I've been more or less eager to do what God wants me to do . . . if I only knew what He wants! As hard as obedience can be at times, I've found that discerning God's will can be even harder.
I think back to the summer of my sixteenth year. My parents really wanted me to go to Malibu Club, a Young Life camp in Canada. I didn't want to go, partly because I didn't know anybody and felt pretty shy, and partly because I just wanted to hang out at home with nothing to do. But my parents were persistent, reminding me of the exceptional beauty of Malibu, which stands guard over a salt-water inlet on the Canadian coast a few hours north of Vancouver. As a lover of natural beauty, especially mountains, I must admit I was tempted. But still I didn't want to go.
Finally I decided to see if I could determine God's will for whether I should go to camp or not. After praying for a while, I didn't have any divine revelations. So I decided to do the only sensible thing. I told the Lord that I would go to camp if He wanted me to go, and that I would let the Bible give me His answer. So, picking up my Bible and closing my eyes, I let the Scripture fall open, and then put my finger on a passage. "God," I prayed, "if this passage tells me to go to camp, I'll do it. Otherwise, I'm staying home." I opened my eyes, looked down, and read: |
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Princess Louisa Inlet of British Columbia, with Malibu Club in the bottom center. This just may be the most beautiful place I have ever been. |
By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance,
O God of our salvation;
you are the hope of all the ends of the earth
and of the farthest seas.
By your strength you established the mountains;
you are girded with might.
You silence the roaring of the seas,
the roaring of their waves,
the tumult of the peoples.
Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs;
you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.
(Psalm 65:5-8)
As I read about the farthest seas and the mountains, and about "earth's farthest bounds," I felt sure I had received God's answer. So I went to camp, and, to this day, it remains one of the highlights of my life.
Though I can't prove it, I still believe that God used my silly little divination game to get me to Malibu. In His grace, He determined to go along with my immature discernment scheme. But I do not believe that the "close-your-eyes-and-flip-to-a-Bible-passage" approach to spiritual guidance is God's recommended approach. In fact, I don't think I've ever used this mode of discernment ever again, for good reason.
Yet this still leaves us with the question: How does God guide us? In this blog series, I want to propose several answers to this question. Indeed, I believe that God guides us in a variety of ways, besides the "flip-to-a-Bible-passage" method.
If you're new to my blog, I should briefly explain my assumptions as I begin this series. I am a Christian who finds a theological home in the Reformed/evangelical tradition, though I've learned much from other Christian traditions as well. I believe, above all, that God has given us the Bible as our supreme guide in matters theological and practical. Thus I might be tempted to answer the "How does God guide us" question with a simple "Through the Bible." But this answer is too simple, since the Bible itself reveals a large number of ways through which God guides His people. So, as this series unfolds, You find that I turn to Scripture again and again for direction.
I should also mention that some of what you'll read in this blog series appeared in similar form in my book, After "I Believe." If you've read that book, you might recognize a few of my main points and illustrations. But I don't apologize for using an edited and expanded version of my earlier work. My guess is that less than 10% of my current blog readers have read After "I Believe." Moreover, the book is out of print today, so it seems right to make some of its insights available online.
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Spirit Guide Silliness
Part 2 of the series: How Does God Guide Us?
Posted for Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Spiritual guidance is a marketable commodity these days. If you're willing to fork over a few bucks–sometimes, a few hundred–you can receive personal guidance from people who claim to have a special channel to "the spirit world." Many of these gurus hock their supernatural wares at expensive conferences and workshops. Others have turned to the Internet. Yes, you can visit websites where, for a fee, you will receive personalized guidance that purportedly comes from some immaterial being. This "spirit guide" may be an angel, or a departed loved one, or a person who lived thousands of years ago. (I'm not going to put up any links because I don't want to encourage use of such websites. But if you're curious, you can find them easily through Google.)
| Your spirit guide could even be the spirit of a plastic doll! Some years ago, Barbara Bell, an architectural illustrator from northern California (where else?), operated the world's only Barbie channeling service. For only $3.00, Bell summoned up the spirit of Barbie to solve the problems of those seeking her advice. "I appreciate and understand Barbie," Bell explains. "She has been forced to be shallow all these years, but underneath she's a profound person." And to think I never realized there was anything underneath her slick plastic exterior! (Little known fact: Barbie's last name is "Roberts." Truly, according to Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler. So Barbie must be one of my distant cousins.) |
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Barbie dolls come in many different forms. But as a spirit guide? Hmmmm. |
All of this talk about spiritual guidance from angels, dead people, and even dolls ought to give us pause as we consider the topic of spiritual guidance. Just because somebody claims to be guided by some supernatural being, even if this being is God, we ought not to believe the claim. Spirit guide silliness should make us careful, even if we're Christians who believe that God actually can and does offer supernatural guidance.
Sadly, however, some Christians have been caught in the current of spiritual silliness, claiming to be led by the Holy Spirit into all sorts of nonsense. I know a man who once claimed that God told him to have an adulterous affair with the wife of one of his best friends. Yikes!
Attributing one's peculiar behavior to God is nothing new. It's been going on for centuries. Over thirty years ago, for example, I found myself in Mrs. Poole's Sunday school class. She was a fine teacher, well-prepared, biblically-literate, and interesting even to a sixth-grade boy. Mrs. Poole's Bible lessons were almost always succinct and compelling. Almost always, I say, because every now and then Mrs. Poole would claim that the Holy Spirit led her to depart from her notes and launch into the stratosphere of more direct revelation. As she spoke under the impetus of the Spirit, I was struck by how had she was to follow and, frankly, how boring. If I took Mrs. Poole at her word, then I could only conclude that she was a much better a teacher than the Holy Spirit! Whereas she was succinct, the Spirit was long-winded. Whereas Mrs. Poole had a way of speaking right to the hearts of sixth-graders, the Holy Spirit could hardly keep our attention. Even then I suspected what I now believe to be the truth: Mrs. Poole was confused about the Spirit's guidance. Her ramblings may have contained grains of genuine inspiration, but they issued more from her exuberant imagination than from the Spirit of God. Though I can't claim to be the final authority on such matters, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Spirit actually inspired Mrs. Poole's careful preparation of lessons more than her spontaneous sermons.
These days religious people are claiming divine inspiration for all sorts of behaviors that are, not only nonsensical, but downright horrible. The most obvious case is that of Muslim extremists who kill innocent victims in the name of Allah, something that is contrary to the beliefs of most of the Islamic world. Christian extremism of this sort rears its ugly head every now and then, especially in some conflict-ridden sections of Africa. These examples have led some people to conclude that all spiritual guidance is nonsense, and even that the idea of God is both wrongheaded and dangerous.
I don't agree with this conclusion, of course. But I do take seriously the tendency for people, even good intentioned ones, to misconstrue God's direction. It's especially tempting for all of us to project our own desires onto God, reading them back as confirmation of what we ourselves want. So, we must approach this subject with due caution. At the same time, let's not shrink back from one of the most precious aspects of the Christian life: divine guidance through the Holy Spirit.
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Guidance from the Holy Spirit
Part 3 of the series: How Does God Guide Us?
Posted for Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Bible reveals that the God guides His people. Scripture abounds with examples. Some are dramatic, as in the Book of Exodus. There, not only does God direct Moses by speaking through a burning bush that is not consumed, but also God guides Pharaoh to release his Israelite slaves by sending catastrophic plagues upon the whole nation of Egypt. Sometimes God's guidance is ironic, as when God guides Balaam through his donkey or Jonah through a giant fish (Numbers 22; Jonah 1-2). Often the Lord directs His people through the messages of the prophets.
In the New Testament, divine guidance comes through the agency of the Holy Spirit. In Luke 4:1 we read that "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan River. He was led by the Spirit to go out into the wilderness." Throughout the Book of Acts the Holy Spirit guides Jesus's followers by filling them, speaking to them, moving them around, giving them visions, and endowing them with spiritual powers (Acts 4:31; 8:29, 39; 10:9-16, 44-45).
The examples in Acts of spiritual guidance among the earliest Christians illustrates Paul's counsel in Galatians 5:25: "If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit." When we put our faith in Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes to live within us. Moreover, we live in the Spirit, since the same Spirit who gave us new life in Christ continues to transform us. When we become children of God through faith in Christ, we are then ready to be led by the Spirit and not by our sinful nature (Rom 8:12-14). True spiritual guidance is Spirit-inspired. It comes, neither from an angelic guide, nor from a departed relative, nor even from the spirit of Barbie, but from the very Spirit of God.
People in my branch of Christianity, the Reformed/Evangelical branch, sometimes get "weirded out" by too much talk of the Holy Spirit. Many of us have known other Christians who claimed to experience all sorts of questionable things under the inspiration of the Spirit. Some of these oddities appear in Scripture, such as speaking in tongues, and cannot therefore be easily dismissed. Others have been even more troubling. A few years ago, for example, some Christians claimed that the Spirit inspired them to do things in worship services like laugh hysterically or bark like dogs. These bizarre behaviors got quite a bit of press in some Christian circles, thus leading to the "weirding out" I mentioned earlier. |
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El Greco, "The Pentecost," 1596-1600.
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It's been tempting, therefore, for some Christians to greatly limit the role of the Holy Spirit in guiding us today. I've heard fellow Christians for whom I have great respect argue that the only way the Spirit guides us today is through the biblical interpretation. Everything besides Bible study, Bible teaching, and preaching is suspect, and likely to be some sort of spiritual counterfeit.
This reaction to the excesses of some Christians seems to me an over-reaction, even though I can surely understand it. If we take Scripture seriously, however, then we have to acknowledge that the Spirit does more than interpret Scripture for us, even though I believe this particular work of the Spirit is both wonderful and essential, and it's the way I tend most frequently to receive God's guidance. Yet I don't believe it's wise to limit the way in which the Spirit guides us so as to rule out of bounds that which we find taught or exemplified in Scripture.
In my next post I'll examine one kind of spiritual guidance that is common both in Scripture and, I believe, in our experience.
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Guidance Through Circumstances (Section A)
Part 4 of the series: How Does God Guide Us?
Posted for Friday, January 19, 2007
As I continue my series on spiritual guidance, I'm beginning with this post to address specific ways we are guided by the Spirit of God. Today I begin by noting how the Spirit guides through circumstances.
In Acts 16 the Apostle Paul and his colleague Silas are in Philippi, where they share the good news of Jesus with a man and his family (Acts 16:16-34). The whole household believes the message and all members are immediately baptized. How did Paul and Silas get to home of this man and his family? Not through inner spiritual guidance. Not through dreams or angelic visions. But through circumstances, rather odd circumstances at that. The man was a jailer who had been assigned to guard two prisoners, Paul and Silas.
The two missionaries got in trouble with the authorities when they cast an evil spirit out of a girl who had been used to make money for her opportunistic masters. Her spiritual freedom took away their source of income, so they grabbed Paul and Silas and accused them before the civic leaders of Philippi: "They are teaching the people to do things that are against Roman customs." The officials had the Christians beaten and thrown into prison, where they met the jailer, who had no idea what was about to happen to him and his family.
Around midnight, when the two prisoners should have been licking their wounds and bemoaning their fate, Paul and Silas were praying and praising God. All of a sudden a great earthquake shook the prison, knocking the chains off the prisoners. The poor jailer, supposing that his prisoners had escaped, was about to fall on his sword when Paul shouted: "Don't do it! We are all here!" In shock, the jailer fell instead at the feet of the missionaries. He then took them to his home, where they proceeded to convert him and his entire family. |
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An actual remnant of a jail in ancient Philippi. Some think this was the very jail in which Paul and Silas were incarcerated, though there is no way to prove it one way or the other. ( Picture link.)
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Given the whole tenor of Acts of the Apostles, we are surely meant to believe that the visit of Paul and Silas to the jailer's home was no mere coincidence. Though not identified explicitly in this passage, the Holy Spirit is directing the action of Acts 16, just as the Spirit oversees the mission of Christ throughout Acts. The Spirit gets Paul and Silas into the jailer's home by manipulating circumstances, some of which were obviously miraculous, others of which appeared on the surface to be both ordinary and distressing.
The Bible is full of stories in which God's guidance comes, not by word or vision, but through circumstances. Such stories also fill most Christian communities where people seek God's direction. We often don't realize the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit until we look back in retrospect. But later on we see how God wove events together to accomplish his will in our lives.
Of course the skeptic would deny that God was involved with such things. "Mere coincidence!" would be the claim. But sometimes the coincidences are so astounding that I find it very, very hard to believe anything other than that some Supreme Being is guiding events. In my next post in this series I share one of my own experiences about which I'm convinced God was guiding me.
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Guidance Through Circumstances (Section B)
Part 5 of the series: How Does God Guide Us?
Posted for Monday, January 22, 2007
In my last post I explained that God guides us, in part, through circumstances. In this post I want to tell a story from my own life in which I experienced this sort of guidance. I've told this story before, so if it's familiar to you, feel free to skip down to my concluding paragraphs.
When I was a sophomore in college, I wanted to share my Christian faith with others. But, as an introverted person, I wasn't likely to walk up to a stranger or even a friend and get into a conversation about God. So I decided to pray and ask God to help me.
One brisk Saturday evening in October, I decided to go down to Harvard Square–which was always bustling with people–and see if I could share my faith with somebody. The Square was filled with students from all over the Boston area, and it seemed a likely place for God to drop a seeker into my lap. I prayed earnestly for God to guide me to someone with whom I could talk openly about Christianity. "Lord," I prayed, "you know I'm pretty shy about this. So it would be great if you'd work a little miracle here, and find me somebody with whom I could share. And if you could make it obvious, that would be really helpful." With this prayer in my heart, I set off for the Square.
I wandered around for a while, wondering where "my person" was. "Lord," I kept on praying, "please bring me somebody who wants to learn about You." Still nothing happened. After a half hour or so I began to feel both discouraged and silly. It almost seemed as if God was having a good laugh at my expense.
Just then, two young women approached me. "We're going to a party at Dunster House," they explained, "but we don't know how to get there. Could you help us?"
"Sure," I said. "Glad to." Meanwhile I thought to myself, "This is great. Not only has God brought these people into my life so I can talk to them about my faith, but they happen to be two attractive women. God, you've outdone yourself this time!" Dunster House was about a ten minute's walk from Harvard Square, so I figured this would be plenty of time to engage these women in a conversation about God.
| On the walk down to Dunster, I kept bringing up subjects that I felt sure would lead to a productive dialogue. "I'm majoring in philosophy," I said, "Are you interested in philosophy?" They weren't. "Sometimes I wonder why we're here on this earth? Do you every think about this?" They didn't. Basically, all they wanted to do that night was to party at Dunster House, not to reflect on the meaning of life with their overly-eager tour guide. For ten minutes I tried everything I could think of to get these women to talk about God. Nothing doing. Of the thousands of students in Cambridge that night, they were the least interested in God. |
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Dunster House at night |
When we got to Dunster House, I walked them to the door. They thanked me and left. I felt like a complete idiot. "Okay, God," I prayed, "I get the point. You've probably had a good chuckle over my silliness. Well, that's enough. I'm going home. This was a stupid idea." I left the entrance to Dunster House and headed back to my dorm.
Just then I passed a student I recognized as being a friend of a friend, somebody I had met briefly during my freshman year. He said "Hi" so I returned the greeting as we went off in opposite directions. All of a sudden he stopped, turned around, and called to me, "Hey, are you Mark Roberts?"
"Yes," I said, surprised that he knew my name.
"Well, I'm Matt. I'm a friend of your roommate Bob."
"Oh, yeah. Hello, Matt," I said.
"I've been wanting to talk to you," Matt said.
"Me?" I asked incredulously. "Why me?"
"Because I hear you're a Christian. I need to talk to you about God."
And so began a conversation that lasted well into the night. That conversation turned into a weekly Bible study, as Matt and I looked into the gospels to find out about Jesus. When we finished, Matt wasn't ready to give his life to Christ. But he was closer than he had been on that strange night when we met on the walk outside of Dunster House. End of story.
Now I suppose a skeptic could always say that my meeting with Matt was just an accident. But it seems to me much more likely that God used the rather strange circumstances of that evening to guide me–and to guide Matt –so that God's work would be done in our lives. I could tell a dozen more stories like this, hundreds if I drew from the experiences of people in my church. There is no doubt in my mind that the guidance of the Holy Spirit often comes through the circumstances of our lives.
But there is a downside to this kind of guidance. How can we be sure that our interpretation of our circumstances is correct? Suppose I had been so convinced that God wanted me to share my faith with the two young women on their way to the party that I managed to worm my way into the festivities, spending the whole night beating my head against the rock of their disinterest, and thereby missing that providential meeting with Matt. Spiritual guidance through circumstances is great, but it's usually ambiguous. What will help us sort out the circumstances of our lives so as to discern God's guidance with confidence?
I'll tackle this question in the next post in this series.
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Guidance Through Scripture (Section A)
Part 6 of the series: How Does God Guide Us?
Posted for Tuesday, January 23, 2007
In my last two posts I explained that God can guide us through shaping the circumstances of our lives. But I admitted that this sort of guidance is often ambiguous. Circumstances may appear to point in more than one direction at the same time. Or different circumstances might seem to contradict each other. So we need to be able to weigh the events of our lives to determine with greater precision how God may be guiding us.
I would suggest that Scripture often serves in this crucial role. Now before I go further, I should mention that I am a Reformed evangelical Protestant with a strong commitment to the authority of Scripture. I believe that the Bible is God's Word given to us in human words that are, like Christ Himself, both divine and human in a mysterious way. I don't have time here to explain in detail what I mean by this or even to defend it. But I should fess up so as to make sense of what I'm about to say about Scripture.
There are people, including some Christians, who look to the Bible for guidance even though they don't believe it's inspired by God in an usual way. They view Christian Scripture as a source of wisdom similar to other sources, like the plays of Shakespeare or Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Without denigrating the wisdom found in such writings, I believe that the Bible is uniquely inspired and, therefore, authoritative.
How Does the Bible Guide Us?
The Bible provides a reliable yardstick by which to measure our claims to be guided by the Holy Spirit through circumstance or feeling. If, for example, you think that the Spirit is leading you to do something the Bible prohibits, you can be sure that your spiritual lenses have become foggy. Throughout history people have committed blatant sins under the claim God's guidance. But since the Spirit inspired the writers of Scripture, that same Spirit can be guaranteed not to lead us to contradict the plain direction of Scripture.
| Many years ago a good friend of mine became intimately involved with the wife of another man. This friend, I'll call him Bill, claimed that God had brought him and this woman together to deliver her from a terrible marriage. I think Bill actually believed this, and that God intended for him and the woman someday to be married. Unfortunately, Bill's defense of adultery contradicted the clear teaching of Scripture in many places, including such "minor" passages as the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. No matter how much circumstances seemed to weigh in Bill's favor, and no matter how much his feelings led him towards adultery, he was misconstruing God's guidance. According to Scripture, adultery is wrong, plain and simple. |
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Mt. Sinai, where God revealed the Ten Commandments
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There is a positive side to scriptural discernment of circumstantial guidance. If events in your life seem to point in you in a certain direction, you can be more confident about that direction if it leads you to do that which Scripture strongly affirms. There's no guarantee, of course. If you find a plane ticket to Indonesia you probably shouldn't interpret that as proof that God wants you to evangelize in that country, even though sharing the gospel is consistent with God's Word. It's much more likely that God wants you to turn in the ticket so the rightful owner can use it. But if, on the other hand, events in your life give you an opportunity to share your faith with your neighbor, the fact that Scripture teaches you to do this very thing makes the probability of divine guidance in that direction more likely.
The Bible gives us much more than the ability to evaluate the spiritual significance of circumstances. It is the primary source for divine guidance in our life. Period. The Spirit who inspired the biblical writers also works in our hearts to help us understand what God wants to say to us through the Bible. One of the chief functions of Scripture is to reveal God's will for our lives.
Often when folks say "I am seeking God's will for my life" they refer to God's specific will, whether to marry a certain individual, or to take a job offer, or to go on a mission trip. But the Bible usually refers to God's will in a more general sense, as that which we all should do with our lives. For example, Paul writes: "For this is God's will, that you be fully set apart from this world to live for him, that you keep away from sexual immorality" (1 Thessalonians 4:3, my translation). If you are tempted with sexual sin, you really don't have to spend too much time wondering which partner God wants you to fornicate with. Scripture has made God's will abundantly clear: don't do it!
In another place Paul writes, "No matter what happens, always be thankful, for this is God's will for you who belong to Christ Jesus" (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Through this verse, the Spirit of God is guiding all of us to be thankful in prayer. Given the fact that there are thousands of imperatives in the Bible–thousands of actions God wants us to do–we can't read too far without encountering divine guidance for our lives.
If we take Scripture seriously, therefore, we can know that it's God's will for us to worship Him, praise His name, give thanks for His gifts, pray for His help, love God and our neighbors and our enemies, feed the poor, seek justice for the oppressed, invite the homeless into our homes, be faithful to our spouses, tell others about Jesus, gather with other Christians on a regular basis for fellowship, and so on and so on.
I realize that what I've just said may not satisfy the person who is asking: "But is it God's will for me to do this particular thing?" I do in fact believe that sometimes we receive more specific guidance through Scripture, and I'll say more about this in my next post. But I also believe that if we do the things that are clearly commended in Scripture, our minds and hearts will be shaped by the Spirit so that we are more apt to correctly discern God's specific will in specific situations.
Next time I'll explain further how God can guide us in such situations through Scripture.
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Guidance Through Scripture (Section B)
Part 7 of the series: How Does God Guide Us?
Posted for Wednesday, January 24, 2007
In my last post I began to discuss different ways God guides us through Scripture. I focused especially on the sort of general guidance for our lives that is present throughout the Bible. From Scripture we know that we should love God, love our neighbors, love our enemies, etc. etc. etc.
But what about when we're facing decisions in which general biblical teaching doesn't seem to make a difference? The clear call to love my neighbor, for example, doesn't tall me exactly how to do this, or exactly which neighbors of the hundreds in my life deserve the bulk of my time and attention.
The Holy Spirit can also give quite specific direction as we encounter the text of the Scripture, taking that which is true for all Christians and applying it to our particular lives and situations. This sort of thing happens all the time in personal Bible study, and in group studies, and when God's Word is preached. This is one major reason, by the way, that I am a preacher. I've seen God change lives through the power of His proclaimed Word.
For example, several years ago in a sermon I mentioned an Old Testament passage in which the Lord says, "I hate divorce" (Malachi 2:16). I connected this passage to the teaching of Jesus on marriage, calling my congregation to a new commitment to marriage. As I greeted folks after service, I heard the usual collection of "Nice sermon, pastor" comments. |
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Talk about preaching that connects with people's lives! Billy Graham has been used by God to communicate with millions upon millions. In the picture above, he's speaking in Trafalgar Square in London in 1954. ( Picture from the Billy Graham Center of Wheaton College.) |
The next morning I received an altogether different kind of response. A man I'll call Jeff called me at church. He had been in worship the day before and had a desperate need to speak with me. He didn't want to elaborate, but said it had to do with my sermon. I rearranged my schedule so I could visit with him over his lunch hour.
"Your sermon really upset me," Jeff began.
Oh no, not a great start to this conversation, I thought quietly as I steeled myself for his criticism.
"What you said about marriage and divorce has completely messed me up," he continued. He then told me his story. A couple years ago, he had begun an affair with a coworker. When his wife discovered his unfaithfulness, Jeff left his wife a |
