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.