Lessons Learned from a Side Chick: A Journey to Love

By Lindsay Enita

As a child, Lindsay McGhee saw the wrong kinds of love demonstrated, causing her to form an unrealistic idea of what marriage should be. Having married young and not understanding God's agenda and intention for marriage, Lindsay was caught off guard when the door opened for the side chick to step in and claim the spot she once held in her husband's heart.

Lessons Learned from a Side Chick is Lindsay's truth about how she learned to love God, herself, and others after experiencing one of the darkest points in her life: her husband's infidelity, her subsequent emotional affair, and the healing she would undergo when God told her to let everything go to learn how to love and be loved by Him.

Lindsay's lessons will help you guard your marriage, let love win, and...keep the side chick from winning!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662470660

Book preview

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Lessons Learned from a Side Chick

A Journey to Love

Lindsay Enita

Copyright © 2022 Lindsay Enita

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-7064-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-7066-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

God

Lesson 1

WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW COST ME

Lesson 2

FOCUSED ON THE WRONG THING

Lesson 3

Pursuing God to Save My Marriage

Self

Lesson 4

LOVING GOD AND MYSELF BEFORE OTHERS

Lesson 5

GIVING THE WRONG KIND OF LOVE

Lesson 6

SEEING MYSELF AND OWNING MY DECISIONS

Others

Lesson 7

HOW THE SIDE PIECE KEEPS WINNING

Lesson 8

Reasons They Choose the Side Piece

Lesson 9

LOVE IS THE GREATEST WEAPON

Appendix

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS TO LOVE ON, ENCOURAGE, AND ELEVATE YOUR SPOUSE

About the Author

Introduction

Lessons Learned from a Side Chick is truly that—lessons I learned about loving God, loving myself, and loving other people from being on both sides of the side chick coin.

Honestly, this book initially came from a place of ugliness. While separated from my then husband, a not so heavenly thought came to me. I thought, I should write a book called 10 Lessons My Husband's Side Chick Taught Me.

I know. I know. That was not God at all. I'm really clear about that. And I'm okay with it because I understand where I was. I was not in a healed place. I was still in a hurt place. When I shared the title with a friend, they responded, Wow, that would be a great book! I did not act on it then, but I never forgot its potential.

As I healed over the years, the book concept kept ringing in my head and in my heart. I knew I was not the only one who has ever gone through infidelity and divorce. I knew other people would go through it as well. So I began pondering what I could do.

I initially created a workbook for this content because the focus of my business was on healthy relationships. The focus was geared toward what women miss with their men that side chicks see and exploit. These were truly the lessons I had learned as a wife and an inadvertent side chick. While it went over well, I felt in my heart there was more to share.

The intent was to help women see blind spots and offer biblical and practical suggestions to close any gaps from outside distractions. Just like this book, it was chock-full of transparency and real talk. When you have been through something like this, the last thing you'd want to hear are flowery words that try to make you feel bad for wanting to rip someone's head off. (Too real?)

To be very clear, I am going to tell the truth, and it will not be pretty. But I believe in ownership. I'm going to tell it, and I'm going to tell it truthfully because so many times, people won't. We seem to have a fear of owning where we are and where our marriage really is. Because of this lack of ownership, we go around trying to live out a fantasy in our head while the reality of our situation is not even close to good.

So who is this book for? It is for anyone and everyone who wants to receive love and give love freely in their lives. That means it is for men and women. People want to be loved and want to love someone. Now don't run ahead thinking this book applies only to romantic relationships. It does not, although we will discuss love in the context of marriage. We must understand that love has universal application, especially when it is God's love.

Do I tell stuff? I do. However, this is not just me trying to tell all my business. I don't have to do that. What I do have to do is use my life as a tool to help other people so that they don't have to go through what I went through.

One of the goals of this book is to allow you into my life, my heart, and my mind to share with you what I learned as I allowed God to heal me and teach me who He says I am. I did not know how critical that was until I found myself a divorced, jobless, single mother of three small kids. Life was throwing all the biggest blows to me at once. But God!

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's get into it! This book is broken into three parts: God, Self, and Others. This simple but powerful perspective shift helped me heal and understand the power of God in my life and how my relationship with Him affects every other relationship in my life.

Developing a true relationship with God changed everything, and my life has never been the same. There are some rough days, and there are some amazing days. But because I now know who He says I am, everyday has beauty and meaning.

I've told you all about the book, but you still have no idea who I am and what qualifies me to share these lessons. So let me formally introduce myself. My name is Lindsay Enita, and God has mandated and anointed me to

preach the God of love and reconciliation;

teach people how to spiritually fend for their families in a practical way;

reintroduce the world to true love, which is God; and

proclaim His restoration power to win back the hearts and minds of people and nations.

This is me not just sharing my pain but also showing you my healing and all that is possible with God. I share my faults and flaws to show how God uses them. I shared my mandate with you because I did not know who I was, and it affected the way I loved and the way I showed up in the world. You, too, have a mandate—a charge given by God of who you be (as my mentor, Dr. Eboni L. Truss, says). Not knowing who you are may be hindering your life and relationships as well.

I'm going to take you on a journey from hurt to healing so you'll know if it was possible for me, it is possible for you too.

While I would never wish the pain of having to endure an affair and eventual divorce on anyone, I am so grateful for the journey because it taught me unique lessons both natural and spiritual. These lessons stretched me and grew my capacity to love God, love myself, and love others…including my future husband. (Yes, these lessons opened up my heart to love again!)

I hope you glean from my journey lessons that will help you do the same.

Part 1

God

Lesson 1

WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW COST ME

Once upon a time, there were two young and ambitious teens who fell in love and wanted to live happily ever after. They planned a beautiful life full of adventure and success to include healthy kids, wonderful careers, and plenty of traveling—nothing out of the ordinary, the typical stuff people dream of. The problem is that no one taught them how to live happily ever after, so they made it up as they went along. Sound familiar?

Though there were plenty of people around us who were married for decades, any information as to how to make it work was scarce. In fact, they gave us anecdotes and old wives' tales and sent us on our way. The only thing we knew was that we did not want to end up divorced like either of our parents. We had goals but no execution plans.

I'll even go as far to say that we had no idea what marriage really was. We knew we loved each other and thought that would be enough. Boy, were we wrong! In all our attempts to gain wisdom from the elders in our lives, no one ever talked to us about God wanting anything from our marriage other than for us to stay faithful to each other.

We did not know any better, so we just went with what we knew, which was absolutely nothing!

I did not learn that God had expectations and desires for marriage beyond fidelity until after things ended between us. I learned from countless hours spent with God over several years that He had deep feelings about and expectations for marriage. It was a little too late for this marriage, but I was willing to learn because I knew I wanted to marry again. What I learned has blown my mind, and I hope it brings you clarity and confidence.

One of the biggest lessons that I learned is God's true heart for marriage. As a twenty-three-year-old nerd entering marriage, I did my research about marriage. I asked questions of the elders, read books, and went to marital counseling all in hopes of understanding how to do this right. Because we wanted kids, our goal was to work on us so we could avoid going through what we actually ended up going through.

We put in a lot of time getting to know each other. We put in a lot of time praying