“Please come,” he said. “Everyone is bringing their families. I’ll be the only one there without my wife and kids.”

I seriously couldn’t believe his nerve. Every week without fail, I asked him to come to church with us. Every. Single. Sunday, I fumed as I got the kids ready for church by myself, and often made the same plea: “Please come. Everyone else has their husband with them. It’s hard taking 4 kids to church by myself, and I feel like I’m the only one there without my husband.” So often, I was left to do it alone. I could see the pity in people’s eyes as they watched me straggle in with three babies that were two years old or younger, and while I was incredibly grateful that so many friends stepped up to help me make it through the three-hour block, I frequently felt like the church project…the poor “Sunday widow” with a million kids and no husband to help her with them.

Because I pleaded for him to come with me on a weekly basis, and I knew that he understood how important going to church as a family was for me, it completely infuriated me when, on that beautiful summer Sunday, he had the nerve to ask me to go with him and his friends to the BEACH of all places — and of course he wanted to go during the time that our church services were held. I remember feeling so angry, and thinking to myself, “He wants me to throw away eternal blessings for a freaking day at the beach?! How selfish can he be?!” I relented and went to the beach, but I was a miserable cow — angry, hurt, sullen, self-righteous — and none of us had a particularly enjoyable time as a result.

Looking back, I am, of course, horribly mortified by both my thought process and my behavior that day. I’ve contemplated that particular Sunday a lot over the past few years, wondering to myself why I acted like that, and why I was so angry that my husband wanted to take his family on a fun trip to the beach. And, as I’ve pondered this, I’ve come to realize that, as backwards and crazy as it seems to me now, at the time I truly thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was not only justified in acting like an angry troll, I was SUPPOSED to act like one. And I’ve realized that there is a name for this bizzare behavior: I was being a Jerk for Jesus.

Being a Jerk for Jesus…what exactly does that mean? To me, it means that in my pursuit of righteousness, I lost the love and compassion and kindness that Jesus embodied. I cared so much about being right and doing the “right” thing, that I forgot to be loving and do the right thing for the situation.

We have an interesting phenomenon in the Christian community that seems to happen rather frequently. Often, we choose to be “right” at the expense of kindness and empathy. I see it in our slut-shaming modesty rhetoric. I see it in the way we frequently treat our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. And, closer to home, I now see that I was often a Jerk for Jesus in my marriage.

Why was I like that? Why, on that warm, sunny Sunday, couldn’t I have just gone to the beach and enjoyed myself and spent some quality time with my little family? After a lot of soul searching and meditation, I feel like the reason I was so wretchedly obnoxious at the beach is because all my life I had been taught to settle for nothing less than the ideal, active, church-attending family, and I was super frustrated that, despite my best efforts, we just weren’t. I had been trying desperately to follow the commandment that my family should actively attend all of our church meetings, and, frankly, I was pissed that my husband was keeping me from having the perfect, church-attending family I had always envisioned. I had learned that being righteous was the most important thing I could do, and I felt great pressure to strive for a righteous family at any cost. This way of thinking leaves no room for empathy — it didn’t matter to me in the slightest that my husband was having issues with the church. I didn’t care that he was struggling. I couldn’t appreciate and respect his journey because it meant that I couldn’t get to where I thought I needed to go in my own journey. In short, in trying to bulldoze my way to heaven, I selfishly became a Jerk for Jesus. All I saw was that as a family we weren’t doing what we were supposed to be doing, and I blamed both him and myself for that shortcoming. I blamed him for being what I self-righteously perceived to be the “weak link” in our family, and I blamed myself for not being able to fix the situation with sheer determination and will power. Every Sunday that I missed, I felt like a failure — like I had failed in my duties as a wife and mother because I wasn’t strong enough to drag everyone kicking and screaming along with me down the straight and narrow road back to God.

The problem with the idea that there is only one way to have a perfect Mormon family is that there are so many families that no longer fit the “perfect Mormon” stereotype. For a long time, I tried desperately to squeeze my atypical family into the typical Mormon box, and we just plain didn’t fit. It was a nightmare. As I sit here on the other side of divorce, I can see how damaging it was to expect my family to be something that we weren’t. And, what’s more, I recognize that I completely missed the beauty of what our family could have been, had I been willing to let go of seeking after the ideal in favor of growing what I had. I don’t know that anything could have saved my marriage, but I do recognize my part in its demise, and I deeply regret my contribution to its death. I wanted a rose garden, but I had been given orchids, and, unfortunately, because they weren’t roses, all I saw when I looked at my garden was a bunch of weeds.

If I could go back and do things over again, I would go to the beach and have the time of my life with my sweet family on that day. I would spend the day building relationships instead of sulking because I didn’t get to go to church. I would let my husband know that I valued him just as much as I valued the church, and I would show my kids that sometimes God shows us love by sending cool ocean breezes, and we show our gratitude to God by enjoying the wonders of the outdoors. And, mostly, I would honor Jesus by being Christlike instead of by being a jerk.

Have you ever been a Jerk for Jesus? Or have you been the recipient of jerky behavior in the name of Christianity? I’d love to hear your story…let’s commisserate and then talk about how we can do better!