Divorce is a death – a death you live to tell about. In many ways I feel that physical death is kinder than the death of a marriage. Most of the time, when a person physically dies, it wasn’t intentional. It is the result of an accident, the breakdown of a body, the Murphy’s Law of Life – when the worst thing that can happen, does. Then the living get to grieve, and miss, and remember, and learn to keep on living.
Divorce is an intentional death. For me, divorce was the death of the life I knew. In one legal action, all of the things I’d known, believed, and worked for my entire adulthood were swept away. My future plans were rubbish. The family I had labored for, sacrificed for, and shed innumerable tears for was obliterated. And not from some mishap of circumstance, but through the intentional acts of the one person I trusted and believed in – the man who had stood behind an alter with me in front of all our friends and family and vowed to love of protect me all the days of my life.
Divorce is the story about how God broke my heart – and how I survived it with my faith irrevocably altered, but richer and more mature. Yet, it is kind of bittersweet because I have lost the childlike fervor I once had – the unquestioning trust. I lost it when Jesus let me die like Lazarus. When I called to Him in my sickness, He tarried and let me enter the tomb of betrayal, and shame, and loneliness, and dishonor alone.
Many people who know me now say that my ex-husband did me a favor. They are correct. I am happier now than I have ever been. I am more healthy now that the gangrenous marriage I was nursing for so long has been amputated. But to have a resurrection, first you must die.
So much of me died in the divorce that I scarcely recognize the person I am becoming. For lack of a better term, this is the autobiography of my death and resurrection. This is my Lazarus story.
ReLoriMichelle 