Divorce and the end of the Story

 Pretty down today. Another couple getting divorced at 60. After a lifetime of marriage. Just counting the poeple I know, and their families, these stories are getting more frequent, at least in my hearing. It hurts too much. Christian families too. Who made it decades together, before deciding now was the moment to call it quits.

How did we get here?

Our narrative is wrong.

The idea that suffering (and sin in our spouse) is a reason to end it. Somehow, by divorcing (even at 60) is standing up for yourself. Standing up for your grandchildren. Standing up for women or something. Somehow the divorce is making sure that everything wrong that the spouse has done is not forgotten Refusing to be codependent, not putting up with it. Now, somehow sticking it to the man. Somehow standing up for truth. Setting the record right, in a walk out protest.

And its basically setting off a bomb in our families, grown children's marriages shaken or broken or never started. Even the “thriving, stable” kids are coping, having trouble sleeping at night. Joy robbed from beautiful days of young motherhood, brooding about the emotional angst in their birth family. Sides taken for and against. What should be a fortress, torn apart in civil war. Separation is just that---a separation. A vacuum felt even in a grey-haired child's soul.

So much is lost. So much is destroyed

Our meta-narrative we chart reality onto, is all twisted up and backwards.

This divorce and remarriage archetype is but one finger of the hand. The hand is wrong. A world based in what ought to be, and not what is.

 That by protest, that by breaking what is left, we will somehow make the world anew, into what ought to be. Insisting on living in a world where power is never abused, where love is always healthy, where relatives only ever speak kind nontoxic words, where everything is as it should be. But this world exists only inside our own heads. Because the family reunions are shattered and never happen, people being cut off for mental health reasons. We aren't creating a better world. We are destroying what scraps of this one that we have left.

What is the narrative, the pattern that was given to us by a strange middle-eastern God, demanding absolute purity, demanding exactly how the world should be?

We failed. We broke the rules, broke the contract, trashed the place, ran up debts, and cheated on Him.

And He didn't cut us off.

He came anyway.

And then we killed Him.

Through suffering, through pain, through torture, comes the triumphant ending of the story. Through the crucifixion, through the dark night of doubt on saturday with a dead God, then comes Sunday morning. He comes, scarred and alive, to tell His bride that her debt is paid.

That is the pattern given to us.

Where did we go wrong? Where did we lose it? Despite You showing it to us, again and again and again?

God, come and save Your Bride. We are bat-shit crazy.

I'm still waiting for the end of the story, God. Where you come, and save us, Your bat-shit crazy narcissistic Bride. And somehow, make us, bright and clean, pure, holy and without blemish.

God, you've got Your work cut out for you.

Come, and save us. We are Yours. All the hot mess of us. Save us.

Books about Reality: How to write Reality?

I perused a library, its young adult section brimming with books. Books set in the past and future, but mostly set in fictional universes in which our hero discovers she/he is the Chosen with great powers and given some important purpose.

(Here is ChatGPT's cover to a "YA novel in a medieval fantasy world with a teen who is the Chosen One)

In that they are not wrong. In fact, the cliche works because there is so much truth in it. It resonates with some part of the unjaded little souls because the resonant frequency programmed into them senses some truth.

Each of us is breathed in by the Breath of God, created for a mission and a calling, sent forth into a world at war between Evil and Good. Evil beyond our comprehension and Good beyond our wildest imagining.

But what struck me was how young a lot of the authors looked in their back-jacket pictures. It may be simply photoshop or judicious use of sunscreen, but a lot of those authors looked to be in their twenties. In your twenties, writing books that teens read that will shape their understanding of the structure of reality. 

As far as the book-jackets could show, these young authors didn't seem to be war veterans, or peace-keepers from soup kitchens, coming out of the trenches of war or humanitarian aid, with lots to tell of what they had seen. A lot of them seemed like just young people themselves who gathered their ideas about the world from other young adult novels they had spent the last decade reading.

The serpent is eating its tail. 

The AI is creating answers based on its own answers. 

The computer program is stuck in a loop, recursively spitting out its cyclic version of reality.

George R. Martin, comic book nerd and draft dodger, tells other comic book nerds what true gritty war is like, from a lifetime of consuming novels and comic books.  

In contrast, by the time J.R.R Tolkien wrote The Hobbit he had fought in a world war, grieved his best friends, convinced his teenage crush to marry him, held down a job interacting with other humans, raised 4 kids, and then was sending The Hobbit in chapters to encourage his son fighting another world war. 

He had seen a lot. He had experienced a lot. He had interacted with others who had experienced a lot.

He'd lived. 

(It's possible George R Martin maybe based his stories on actual stories of his fellow men who did go and fight in wars that he didn't believe in. I don't know, I haven't read his novels. I know he did consume a vast amount of fiction & comics, by his own account. But if I had a choice of hearing about war from the minstrel, or the soldier, I'd rather pick the soldier. Guns Up or something by a man of George's generation who actually fought)

When people write to escape their lives, their works by definition are all conjecture. The brain must draw on something.

The Bronte sisters, stuck on the moor in a small village, consuming a lot of gothic novels, wrote of what they didn't know. Thus we have fantastical stories woven mostly of threads from other gothic novels, forgettable works like Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" which felt like sticking my head into an AI simulator or a surreal nightmare. A simulator in which an introverted pastor's daughter wrote what she thought it might be like to be embroiled in a tormented paranormal gothic romance.

And then we have her sister Charlotte's more enduring "Jane Eyre" in which she blends a lot more of her own experience into the gothic nightmare. Now we have a very real childhood friendship as one of them dies of consumption (her sister),  the warm mission-minded family with the driven Greek-studying boy in love with the idea of India, the gossipy maid, the real people woven into the strange nightmare. And thus, Jane Eyre has just enough realism in it to maybe make the gothic nightmare worth it. 

Then there is Jane Austen, another nerdy pastor's daughter, who in her own words "writes on 2 inches of ivory." She knew she was limited to write what she knew, and she did it so well that those people she knew still come to life in her pages. You can even chart the same characters, as she looks back on them with older eyes, change and morph throughout her novels. I found her "Pride and Prejuidice" penned at 21, to have the flattest characters. Her later books, reincarnations of those same characters become every more deeper. She finally forgives Mrs. Bennet and gives her a whole book as the protoganist (Emma). 

L. M. Montgomery's genius was writing her own village church people....Anne of Green Gables, Rilla of  Ingleside...all the side characters, all the real people she wove into her stories....now, nearly 200 years later I can love her nosy neighbor, and laugh and cry over the struggles of this small town in the throes of being the homefront in WWI. The most forgettable of her stories are the ones I suspect she strayed most from her lived experience "Anne's House of Dreams", where as the romantic writer proposes to the girl with the floorlength hair of swirling gold, it feels like we really have wandered into one of Anne's dreams. Give me Ken and Rilla's awkward date on the porch while Old Susan crashes the party and starts sharing embarrassing stories of them as children. One of those scenes felt so much realer, because I would bet $100, it was.

Can young people write good books, my son asks? Is it required to actually live everything you write about? No. Tolkien didn't become king, or destroy a ring of power. 

But on some level the stories (and people) we write must come from somewhere. 

1. Your life of the life of someone you know [primary]
2. The life of someone else who wrote about it [secondary]
3. The novel of someone you hope got it from reality, or at least, another novel based in reality.

Obviously, even 1 & 2 have some level of distortion, in that we are interpreting reality all the time, trying to make sense of it. That's what writing is.

Books about reality

In no particular order

Autobiographies---Primary Sources

• The Word Came with Power
• Search for the Source by Neil T. Anderson
• ?Mission Possible by Marilyn Lazlo
• Guns Up, Johnnie M Clark
• ??Korean War book
• ?book by Amy Carmichal? Mimosa?
• The Cross and the Switchblade
• Through the Valley of the Kwai
• Guadalcanal Diary
• Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Farmer Boy
• Caddie Woodlawn
• First 2 Ralph Moody Books [Little Britches, Man of the Family]
• Water by the Inch
• Cheaper by the Dozen
• The Hiding Place
• ?Surviving the Angel of Death by Eva Moses Kor
• ?Leap into Darkness, by Leo Bretholz
• ?Diary of Anne Frank
• With God in Solitary Confinement/In God’s Underground/With Christ in the communist prisons
• Pastor’s Wife
• Between Hammer and Sickle by Mihai Wurmbrand
• If Prison Walls Could Speak
• ?Gulag Archipelago
• Son of Hamas
• Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus
• ??Unbroken, Louis Zamperini
• Joker One 
• Guns Up by Johnnie M. Clark
• The Search for the Source by Neil Andersen
• Yoneko, rice child, daughter of happiness by Yoneko Tahara
• ????Daylight must come.
• ????The insanity of God

Biographies

• Joan of Arc: Her Story by Regine Pernoud
• Kit Carson by Ralph Moody
• ?Christopher coulubus by Fernando Aresto
• ?Mary Lincoln by Ruth Painter Randall
• ?William Wilberforce, by Eric Metaxes
• William Wilberforce by Belmonte
• ???TO the golden shore, [adoniram Judson] by Courtney Anderson
• Never Say Die (Gladys Aylward) by Cyril Davies
• Sundar Singh by Cyril Davies
• Vanya: A True Story by Myrna Grant
• Rees Howells Intercessor
• ?[something about Francis Xavier]
• ?[Something about John Donne]
• ?Wounded Tiger by

Epics & Legends & Ballads

• Illiad & Odyssey
• Beowulf
• Song of Roland
• Silmarillion
• The Lord of the Rings
• George MacDonald The Golden Key
• Fairy tales (Lang, irish one, etc)
• ???Viking Sagas???
• Demon Lover, Wanderer, [Medieval Ballads]
• Ballad of the White Horse

Novels

• All the Trailblazer books (Dave and Neta Jackson) especially “Bandit of Asheley Downs” and “Listen for the Whippoorwill” and “Captured by the River Rats”
• God King by Joanne Williamson
• The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff
• Narnia Books CS Lewis
• CS Lewis’ space trilogy
• Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis
• The Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• Roll of Thunder, Hear my cry
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Tell me a riddle, by Tillie Olsen
• Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries, Four Faultess Felons, Man Who Was Thursday
• George MacDonald something
• Bronze Bow by Elisabeth George Speare
• Rolf and the Viking Bow by Allen French
• Cry the Beloved Country
• Crime and Punishment
• Number the Stars 
• Allegiance & Choices of One by Timothy Zahn [Star Wars]
• [The Giver]
• Anne of Green Gables series by L. M. Montgomery
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma etc by Jane Austen
• Enemy Brothers by Constance Savery
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Mark Twain's Joan of Arc
• ?Jane Eyre? mixed feelings on this. It's a Christian response to a gothic novel, but it's still a gothic novel....my favorite characters die
• ???Starship Troopers
• ????something by Isaac Asimov?
• The Eight Arrow
• Strangers and Sojourners & Plague Journal by Michael D. O'Brien
• Sophia House by Michael D. O'Brien
• 
  

MORE BOOK RECCOMENDATIONS from a friend. ( I haven't read all of these yet)

For kids and teens to read:

Peter Rabbit

Charlotte's Web

Trumpet of the Swan

Tom Sawyer

Little Women

Little Men (others if desired, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins, and Old Fashioned Girl are among the next best) 

Alice in Wonderland 

Through the Looking Glass

Mrs. Frisby and Rats of Nihm 

Treasures of the Snow, other St. John

Peter Pan

The Secret Garden

The Little Princess

Treasure Island, other Stevenson

Mother Goose

Aesop's Fables 

Heidi

Robin Hood, Arthur, myths, fairy tales

Sherlock Holmes

Father Brown

Caddie Woodlawn

(Black Beauty)

(Black Stallion) 

The Princess and the Goblin 

The Princess and Curdie 

Narnia

Hobbit/LotR

Wind in the Willows 

Old Yeller

Where the Red Fern Grows

Little House on the Prairie 

Phantom Tollbooth 

Just So Stories or other Kipling

Winnie the Pooh

Sarah, Plain and Tall 

Skylark (other sequels, too, if interested)

Little Britches 

The Great Brain

Penderwicks and sequels

Anything by Robert McCloskey 

Dr. Doolittle?

(Pinocchio)

The Railway Children, other Nesbit 

Pollyanna

Witch of Blackbird Pond

Cheaper by the Dozen

Boxcar Children, first 19 only

Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys? At least one each

Sadako and the 1000 Cranes

Frindle, other by Clements if desired

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Anne of Green Gables, sequels and others if interested

Christmas Carol

Scarlet Pimpernel

All of a Kind Family

Brighto of the Grand Canyon, other Henry if interested

Captain's Courageous

Johnny Tremain

The Bible

The Westing Game

Little Pilgrim's Progress by Taylor

Original American Girl books

Chronicles of Prydain

The Little Engine that Could 

Velveteen Rabbit

Wizard of Oz

101 Dalmatians 

Mary Poppins

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Carry on Mr Bowditch

My Side of the Mountain

Call of the Wild

White Fang 

Incredible Journey

Tale of Despereaux

Jules Verne

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Understood Betsy

Older kids (~10+):

Huckleberry Finn 

Jane Eyre

Watership Down

Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Other C.S. Lewis

Cry, the Beloved Country

Any Jane Austen

Tale of Two Cities 

Anne Frank

Ender's Game

Pilgrim's Progress 

Agatha Christie

Dorothy Sayers

Robinson Crusoe

Swiss Family Robinson

To Kill a Mockingbird

Three Musketeers 

Count of Monte Cristo

Crime and Punishment

Frankenstein

Shakespeare

Gulliver's Travels

Importance of Being Earnest, other Wilde

The Giver and sequels

1984

(Animal Farm) 

Brave New World

Lord of the Flies

The Great Gatsby

(Grapes of Wrath) 

Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Scarlet Letter

(North and South) I've read another by her that was good.

Cranford

Pygmalion (My Fair Lady)

(Last of the Mohicans)

00000000000000

recommended by random ppl on the internet

Gay girl good God (Jackie Hill Perry)

Prison saved my life (Louis Dooley and Heidi Gruber O'Very

The Insanity of God (Nik Rripken)

Patrick of Ireland (Michael AG Haykin)

?????https://www.kevinhalloran.net/best-christian-biographies/  literally googled this, have no idea who this guy is

Our New Era---trying to transform our family culture *be* the Morning People

I want to do more than keep my kids alive.....I want to teach the kids how to actually live.

I told the kids this was our new era. We are going to run a clean household, and actually invite their friends over (after me promising 'when the house is clean...' for the last decade)

Each Tuesday in Lent, I will expand on one of these points, which I will hyperlink here.

 OUR NEW ERA

God our strength : put on your own oxygen mask!

Make prayer, worship, and Bible-study the rhythm of our lives

1.      Morning Prayer 

2.      CircleTime Intercessory Prayer

3.      Worship

4.      Bible at night with Daddy (focus, absorb, discuss)

5.      Life Skills

a.      Bible Study

b.     Intercessory Prayer

Now that your oxygen mask is on....

Outward Focus: Be a blessing to others

1.      Intercessory Prayer [Think of others]

a.      VOM prayerlist

b.     Prayercards of others in our lives

c.      Circle Time Prayer style [draw cards out of the deck]

2.      Social Skills [Kindness] Teach it to them rooted in scripture, in real life stories

a.      Think of Others before yourself

b.     Spread Kindness with your mouth

c.      Seek to find why God brings ppl into your life (humility, openness to listening etc)

d.     Christian boundaries, etc.

3.      Functional Sanity---the car needs to run, to be able to go anywhere

a.      Food

b.     Chores

c.      Laundry

d.     Homeschool Basics

4.      (Be a net plus on the world)

a.      Project sanity/youre ok….especially of the little ones!!!

                                                              i.      Appearance---grooming: hair, smell, clean face

                                                            ii.      Appearance—clothing [nice enough or looks on purpose]

                                                          iii.      House---like the family that hosted the dance---their home was amazing. It exuded little house in the prairie vibes. Or medieval cottage vibes. Because everything was clean, organized, and beautiful even if it wasn't fancy/expensive/fixed. FUNCTIONALITY and USEFULNESS and BEAUTY

                                                          iv.      Outside of House---even more important

b.     Try to bring more food to events than we take

c.      Give generously

5.      Joyful Charity

a.      Go with them to Donate to Foodbanks, buy socks, etc

b.     Visiting those in Prison//for kids: Visit hose home-bound, older people, nursing homes, hospitals, and in hospice

c.      Packs for Homeless people, Feed my starving children, etc

d.     Help them donate money to cool charities (like buy a goat, etc), where they get to put money toward it, by doing various chores for us, etc. So they are working to help others.

Changing our Family Culture

 I want to change our family culture closer to our original vision, of making Rivendell.

Family culture matters, routines and prayers matter. To put a rhythm to our lives, that can give something to fill up the kids hearts, to show them what is important. Habit shapes souls, because it is a continual time-offering of our lives, and our souls exist in time.

 Josh has already drastically changed our family culture the last year, by taking on the McCheyne Bible reading plan every evening as a family. And sticking to it, even when we come home 9:30 pm exhausted from a social event. He is stubborn, in the best way possible.

Josh has also changed our family culture the last few years, with the whole concept of "Family Fun Time" and the creation of the "Family Fun Time Wheel". He urges the kids to finish their after-dinner chores in time, that we take an hour to do something fun as a family. There's a wheel he had me make, with 6 different options to choose from, so that even when we are brain-dead at the end of the day, the options are clearly laid out for us.

[Image of the family fun time wheel]

We also got a little closer to our dream, last year, with our 4 weekend camping trips and 2 water wheel hikes. With the Family Fun Time the kids look forward too every evening, and the nightly Bible time with prayertime, as the girls dance to "He is Lord" at the end, there is a rhythm to our lives.

Five things I want my kids to have interwoven throughout their lives.

Prayer [The God who is here]

Joy [Singing, always singing]

Adventure [camping trips, attitude toward life, challenges unlocked etc]

Love [Kind, gentle to one another, forgiving one another]

The Holy [to see Him, to really see Him. The pillar of fire and cloud, come down to us]

To know God....

This morning I awoke early, was thinking, half asleep. Had a dream in which I wanted a baby so badly, I was afraid I would steal my sisters' new baby.

I thought about life. About how lately I've been empty inside, struggling with something. Tup tup pe, is how the Koreans call it. All the emotions jammed up inside, you're not even sure what's in there.

Computer games have these images in them. No wonder people play them. That makes me feel like I can almost feel the thing I am missing but forgot what it was, till I forget the feeling of missing it. And then a cool trailer, a sunrise to music and a purpose....then For one second, suddenly realizing that I am not alive, but used to be....Why does it take stories to make me feel this way? Epic trailers with epic music, and epic tragedies or triumphs...I start to feel like I can feel again for a moment....but why do I not see it in my real life all around  me? Why is it this pixelated image from a virtual world, not the sunsets I see with my own eyes? Why this numbness only stories can cut through? 

I've been struggling with a sense of missing something. Perhaps mid-life crisis. Perhaps a missing uterus. Perhaps missing my two little boys. And knowing a chapter of my life is over.

I've been missing that something a lot. 

Sometimes it felt like I was missing feelings. Or feeling alive. Like I was watching my own life distantly, through glass. Not really feeling. Not really seeing. The little ones are growing up all around me, I'm surrounded by life....and yet somehow I've felt so checked out this last year. As if I'm not really living my own life. It is my own fault too. I have avoided doing real things, interacting with my real children, to spend many hours on the internet, browsing youtube. Or immersed in my own fiction,  writing a star wars story. Why is it like I am chasing filling, or feelings, in an alternate world. Or really, inside my own head. Hours talking to my own brain. 

Am I processing life? Or escaping it, in concentrically smaller circles of insanity?

I know I process when I write. I partly write to think. But I know I also write looking for something. Is this the definition of insanity? Endlessly talking to my own self, for hours and hours of my life...when there are other humans all around me, who would love my attention? Often they are in their own little worlds and stories, interacting with eachother. But they would want me to be with them. They often ask for it.

How long have I been stuck in my own head? Searching for something, feeling empty, like I had swallowed so much air my throat hurt.

And it made sense, somehow, half asleep in the dawn light, that I was trying to fill the God-shaped emptiness inside of myself, with other things. Cramming in other shaped things. It didn't fit. 

I need to focus on reaching outside of myself....to the Creator who made me. Get out of these concentric circles in my own mind. And look at Him.

Perhaps that is what worship means.

To just look at Him. And see Him. Really see Him.

*****************************************8

Practical steps:

1. Actually go outside at 6 when I wake up, and pray at the prayergarden where my little boys are buried. And pray. And see what He says.....Ask Him who He is. I can show up. And see what He does.
2. Read the Bible. In as many different translations as I can. This year, perhaps NASB. Next year, KJV. The year after that ESV. Mix it up with reading it and listening to it. Somehow different hings jump out at me then.
3. Do devotion time with the kids. 5-5-5
1. Five minutes of listening to NKJV dramatized audioBible on youtube
2. Five minutes of silent journaling, silent prayer
3. Five minutes of Korean Style Prayer [Everyone outloud and praying]

More Thoughts on Marriage

Thinking about what marriage is.

God knew from the start what a marriage would be. And He still guided people to get married when he knew there would be deep betrayal. The marriage does not retroactively become a 'mistake'. None of it was wasted. He has not forgotten, not overlooked, not neglected, not been sloppy.

God promised “I will also hold you by the hand and watch over you”

It is, was, and will be, true.

Maybe God's purpose for us marrying someone, wasn't as happy as we thought. Maybe it was to carry a cross of horrible illness with someone, watching dementia claim their mind, or to spend the next 40 years caring for a blind bomb-shredded limbless brain-damaged hero-husband who marched off young, strong, and intelligent, to war. Or carry the cross of shame of imprisonment with someone, visiting them in their prison. Or to fight for someone's soul—even if prayer is all we can do as we wait—and they run off in self-destruction.

God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts, his ways than our ways.

In the end, none of it will have been wasted. God holds our hand, bottles every tear, hears every prayer. What He knew our marriage would be on our wedding day, may not have been as happy and wonderful as we had thought—but He will make it beautiful, far more beautiful than we can imagine this side of the Jordan. Because He will be with us every step, every second, every moment, holding our hand, giving us strength.

And He never wastes anything.

Marriage---What Is It?

Marriage---what are we signing up for?

Is marriage about rights----love me/be faithful to me/have a godly home/provide for me, or is it more like a binding oath to a kind of “war buddy”, that lasts as long as you are alive, to help the other person be sanctified, become more like Christ, enter the new Jerusalem---no matter what happens?

We get married expecting it means children, buying a home, retiring together, studying Bible together, reading stories together, going on family camping trips, kissing etc, and being old people going on daily walks together with an umbrella.

I know that is what I expected.

But there are lots of wonderful people I know/know of, whose lives didn't turn out that way.

Because there are lots of other things we don't expect. We don't expect our smart, emotionally supportive, fun-to-talk-to husband to go through a brain trauma that renders him a needy child. Or a freak accident to a 27 yr old man at work that renders the marriage a chaste one for the next 40 years. Or to be young, and suddenly, widowed and alone, raising kids without their father.

God knew on our wedding day what we were signing up for. We did not. We can't know. But He knew all along. He knew from the first date. And He holds us. “I will also hold you by the hand and watch over you” (Isaiah 42:16)

We don't get married expecting to have to turn our husband/wife into the law, and visit him in jail the rest of our lives. Or visit him on death row. Or every day raising the kids alone, and each day, faithfully praying for someone who has abandoned you for another(s).

But is that what is being asked of us? To not stand on our rights, but to carry the cross?

Parenting, what are we signing up for? If your kid did the unspeakable things, would you still love them? Would you cut ties and find another kid? Or would you visit them on death row, praying for them every day?

What is being asked of us?

I think that is at the crux of what so much of this argument about marriage comes down to. What do we see it as? What is it?