I do not believe in divorce. I am a divorced man. The irony is not wasted on me.
Thank God for my divorce?
I've heard people use that phrase in so many ways. Often the connotation is "thank God I'm finally rid of that person, 'cause I really can't stand them."
I am not happy to be rid of my wife. I miss her very much. I think our relationship was highly successful and we're just getting to the good parts. Crazy as it may sound, divorce is one of the best things that ever happened to us. Let me tell you why.
I knew our marriage wasn't working. It wasn't all the way broken, just cracked, so I would invest only enough energy to patch it up so we could limp along another mile. We would maintain it enough to survive until the next winter. I knew that we could be more, but how to get there? At that time there were precious few examples in my life of a thriving marriage.
Thriving has always been far more attractive to me than surviving. If we're simply trying to survive marriage, or for that matter, survive life, I think it's time to make a choice. One option is to let go. The other is to grab hold with both hands and create what you envision. It's like Andy Dufresne says in Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living, or get busy dying."
My choice was to go along, to remain passive. Just so we're clear, when there are options and one is to live, the other may cast various shades of passive complacency, but it is nevertheless a choice to die, slowly. Over against vibrant marriage, the default choice is slow death, the hope that our bodies will give out before our marriages do, at which point we can consider that a successful marriage.
Really?
About one year into marriage I realized it takes more than just love to make things work. I'd actually just read something by M. Scott Peck that left me knowing I needed to understand commitment on a deeper level.
I didn't know what needed to change. I also didn't want to find out, because that would require work. I was in love, but lazy. What I did know was that change is difficult and painful. I was afraid to face the pain of becoming the man I could be, so I just let things lie. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
When I asked God how to engage my wife in real, unfeigned love, the response was, "your relationship is based on lies; we'll have to take it apart and put it back together the right way."
I really like something Professor Henry Foster shared with me. In a discussion about business paradigms, he said, "If it ain't broke, break it!"
I think that is what God did for me. He broke my marriage to save me from surviving it, and for this I am grateful.
1 comment:
When we ask God to make us into the person He wants us to be, He doesn't play around. "Be ready for pain" is what He's told me, but I have to trust that I will walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but He is with me. Often that is all I know to be true.
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