Divorce

Excerpt from “Grief is Holy: A Practical Guide to Grieving with God”:

I am not yet married, but I imagine that when you stand at the altar promising your life to someone and vowing til death do you part, you don’t synonymously carry a picture that a year or 10 or 20 or 52 years down the road, they will decide they don’t want to be married anymore. I don’t imagine you stand there, looking in their eyes, picturing the family that you’ll have, and think about how you can’t wait until he comes downstairs one morning and tells you he’s not in love with you anymore. It wasn’t the plan at the altar for her to pull away six years into the marriage and find safety with another man.

And yet statistics show that marriages, for a variety of different reasons, are increasingly ending in divorce. It’s a loss that involves the other person still alive, and a choice that brought the separation.

I am sure the intention of “til death do us part” is referring to physical death, but in marriage that ends in divorce, something died before the individuals did.

That’s a heavy backpack.

Will the children be okay? Will you be okay?

The Bible says in Malachi 2:14 that when a man divorces his wife, he overwhelms her with cruelty. That word for cruelty references violence, damage, or injustice. I think divorce has that power, whoever (husband or wife) made the choice to initiate it. The ripping apart of what had been joined together as one is bound to do damage. The grief of figuring out how to navigate life after you joined yourself together with someone can create an overwhelmingly dark cloud that can be hard to move out from under.