Affairs


The young Mum was shocked by a phone call that came out of the blue.  The woman caller said to her, “I have reason to believe you may be my sister by another mother.”  In denial about that possibility she protested the caller must have rung the wrong number.  But the caller was persistent and began describing her Dad in some detail, then pleaded for them to meet over coffee in town to talk further.  By the time Shelly (not her real name) came to talk to me she was in quite a state – not wanting to believe what she’d heard but finding certain pieces of life’s jig-saw puzzle suddenly coming together.  Her father had a demanding job with a big company.  For most of her life he’d been absent at weekends.  He had a shack somewhere out in bush and everyone knew he was a keen fisherman and hunter.  He claimed that his stressful job required him to have weekends alone to hunt and fish so as to enable him to cope with his work.  I met Shelley again after the coffee with her half-sister and she told me about her Dad’s other family somewhere “out in the sticks”.

It’s mind-boggling to think Shelley’s Dad managed to play this game for some seventeen years without getting caught.  I helped Shelley navigate this horrible crisis of a two-timing Dad and a mother who was blissfully unaware that the fish and the ‘Roo Steaks’ her husband brought home from his weekends away, had been bought in a shop.

I thought of Shelley’s story again recently when I read about Philip Yancey’s fall from grace.  You may have heard of Yancey, the American author, best known for his book, “What’s so Amazing about Grace?”  His books have sold more than 16 million copies in English and have been translated into forty languages.  That made Yancey one of the best known contemporary Christian authors.

In January 2026 Yancey, who has been married to his wife, Janet, for 55 years, admitted to an eight yearlong affair with another woman.  He has now stepped back from writing and speaking engagements, stating that he’s remorseful and seeks to rebuild trust.  His wife, Janet, spoke of her sadness but also her determination to honour her marriage vows.

I don’t need to spell out to you the devastation caused to the families involved.  Not only have two marriages in each case been affected and two lots of children and grandchildren devastated.  It’s bad enough when someone, in a moment of weakness, engages in an adulterous one-night stand.  It’s infinitely worse when the affair was carried on for eight years, in Yancey’s case, and twice that long in the case of Shelley’s Dad.  However, what makes Yancey’s case more tragic is that while Shelley’s Dad rarely bothered with Church – except perhaps for a Christmas or Easter worship service, Yancey was not only a Christian and church-goer, he was a prominent Christian author and speaker.  He wrote so beautifully about grace – yet didn’t manage to live by grace.  This affair had ramifications not only for the families but also for the Christian Church.  More than that, it brought dishonour on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by undermining Christian credibility.

Should things like this shock and horrify us?  Yes and no!  No, in the sense that Yancey too is a sinner saved by the grace he spoke about so eloquently.  He’s in the same league as the Bible heroes whom the Bible generally picture with all their foibles and failings –think only of King David and his sexual abuse of Bathsheba.  Just like you and me, Philip Yancey is not yet perfect… he’s still a work in progress.  And just like all the rest of us who trust in Jesus for salvation, our only righteousness is the righteousness of Christ, reckoned to our account as we trust in Him.

But… yes, we should be horrified because of what it does to our Christian witness.  Some years ago, during the national enquiry into institutional child abuse, one of my daughters was asked at Uni about her parents.  She mentioned that her dad was a Christian Pastor.  One of her fellow students who had been following the enquiry responded by asking, “So, he’s a paedophile, is he?”  Sad; but it makes us aware that the sins I’ve been talking about are not only acts of disobedience against the God who loves us, they also tarnish our witness to a watching world.

John Westendorp
2MaxFM 8/3/2026 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dads

Image
  Recently two young men I know were both unexpectedly taken from this life.   Both had taken their roles as husbands and fathers seriously.   Both had young children still in primary school.   To say that their departures left a huge gap in their respective families would be a massive understatement.   It traumatised not only their immediate families.   Their wider families too were devastated by the loss of a brother, an uncle, a son.   So were the churches in which they had been seriously involved. My heart goes out to their widows.   Being a single mum is not for the faint-hearted – as some of you well know from experience.   I sympathise too with these children who will grow up without a Dad at home.   In such situations it’s always a blessing when an uncle or Granddad or some other significant male steps into the breach.   Of course what helps too is that in both instances this happened in Christian families and Christian ...
Read more

Work

Image
  Two recent experiences with tradesmen brought home two valuable lessons when it comes to our work ethic. Our kitchen sink had become blocked – again.   It was only a little over a year since that had previously happened.   I found myself wondering whether we had a structural problem with our plumbing that caused frequent blockages or whether the previous plumber had not done a very good job in clearing on the previous ocassion.   This plumber asked me, “John, do you want a cheap quick fix or do you want to try and deal with the cause of the problem – which will take a little longer and cost you a little more?”   That was a no brainer for me.   I wasn’t looking forward to annual visits from a plumber, just to keep our kitchen wastewater flowing into the sewers.   So we bit the bullet.   I found it absolutely staggering to see the gunk that our plumber pulled out of our wastewater drain.   Obviously the previous plumber had merely poked...
Read more

Lament...?!?

Image
You don’t need to read much of the Bible’s Psalms to appreciate the raw emotions portrayed by its song-writers.   There’s the whole gamut of emotions – from ecstatic joy, wonder and praise right through to profound sadness, grief and despair. For the former you only have to read the final Psalm which has a whole orchestra, complete with bells and whistles, to express the glorious praises of our God.   The final words from the Psalms are pertinent: “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.   Hallelujah.” For the latter, just begin with Psalm 3.   King David, persecuted by his own son, Absalom, laments: “Lord, how my foes increase!   There are many who attack me.”   Or what about the terrible sadness of Psalm 22?   It begins with words Jesus took on His lips as He suffered hellish agony on the cross, ”My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Speaking to one of my daughters recently, we agreed that these days we don’t do laments very well. ...
Read more