Lydia Meredith has opened up in an interview with Rolling Out about how her life was affected when her husband, Reverend Dennis A. Meredith, came out as gay.
The two divorced in 2008 after they struggled over his infidelity while they were married, but they have remained on good terms. However, she admitted that it took her years to recover after her husband left her to be with a man.
“I want to share some topics that I feel need to be addressed for women who find themselves in situations like I found myself in and to help them and to show them they can get through it,” said Meredith, who recently penned a memoir called The Gay Preacher’s Wife: How My Gay Husband Deconstructed My Life and Reconstructed My Faith.
She went on to admit that she missed the warning signs, saying, “Yes, I miss[ed] them. I am not a tracker. There are some women who are investigators, who will pick up the phone if their [mate] is not home at a certain time and if they are not calling. That’s a problem. I am a professional woman working as a senior engineer for a Fortune 500 company. I was living my life, married with three children.”
Her husband now leads a congregation of over a thousand members, many of whom are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.
“The church needs a new kind of ministry – one steeped in the ministry started by Jesus – free of bias, discrimination, hate or prejudice,” she said.