The Devastation of Divorce

It seems like everywhere I turn lately, I am confronted with yet another story of the dissolution of yet another marriage. Even with this all around me, I was still absolutely stunned when I sat in a room full of 5 other women, and out of the 6 of us, I was the only one who was not divorced, about to be divorced, or beginning the process of a divorce.

It literally tore my heart out to hear the stories that these women were telling. One had been divorced for a few years, and you could see that the weight of her situation was still crushing her spirit, although she seemed to be doing her best to move past something that she evidently had no say in in the first place. Another, just beginning the process, was still in the "deer caught in the headlights" phase...she was just doing her best to move through it one step at at a time, trying to figure out how she was going to support herself and her children so that they did not have to uproot their lives from the only home they had ever known. One was almost at the end of the process, and was dealing mostly with things such as who was going to be responsible for what debt, and where would she find a safe place for a single mom with a young son to make their home. Her friend and co-worker was somewhere in the middle of her own, talking about their grown children, and how this had been a long time coming...they just weren't the same people any longer. And the very last one remained mostly silent on the details of her pain....evidently not yet in the place where she was comfortable sharing it with others.

I just sat there, not knowing what to say. I believe that most likely my silence and the wedding ring on my finger betrayed my status as a member of the club they were not going to be a part of anymore. I found myself speechless..as rare as that may be....I just didn't know what to say. I felt that if I opened my mouth, I would inevitably say the wrong thing. And even as I sit here typing, I still don't even know how to put words on the screen that accurately describe how it made me feel to be the only person in the room at that point not having my life changed by circumstances out of my control...circumstances that I wished were not happening....circumstances that were breaking my heart.

I am not going to turn this into a diatribe on the decision that a couple makes when one or both of them wants to end their marriage. Mostly because nothing good would come out of that. And possibly because I am aware just how hard marriage can be. But I am also grateful that I am just as aware of what a blessing it is to have a healthy marriage...not a perfect one, not one that never has it's share of strain or difficulty, but one where the amazing seasons well outweigh the hard ones..and one where both of us are equally as committed to the "forever"..not because we have to be, but because we want to be.

But mostly because I realize that the success of our marriage is directly related to the third person in our marriage...adding God to our marriage adds His love, His magnificence, His splendor. Without His blessings bestowed upon us, I could be just as likely to become the 6th person in the room with my heart in pieces....