I’m so glad to be able to bring you a guest post from my friend Wes Jackson today. Wes has been a friend of mine since Middle School and brings transparency and wisdom to this sensitive topic. I’m sure you will benefit from navigating his experience of divorce and I encourage you to share it with friends who would profit from his insight as well.
Grace and peace,
John
The End
It was Halloween Day, 2017, when my ex-wife told me she wanted a divorce. This announcement didn’t come completely out of the blue. We were ten days out from our last big fight, and it was only eight days since she sat me down to let me know that she wanted to stay together through the holidays for our kids’ sake and then separate in the new year.
We had been married for about eight and a half years and they were very difficult years together. We had tried Christian counseling. We’d met and prayed with our pastor. I thought we’d tried about everything possible and maybe separation wouldn’t be such a bad idea. We could give each other some space so things could cool down while we continued to meet with our Christian counselor with the hope of reconciling the marriage.
When her desire for a separation changed to a desire for a divorce, everything became much more difficult.
What followed was six to eight months with attorneys and paperwork and appearances in the Arizona Family Court system. During this time, I made three separate overtures to try and reconcile the marriage, but all of them were refused. My wife made it very clear that she was done with the marriage and had moved on.
While I can honestly say that I didn’t want to divorce my wife, I can’t say that I should have been surprised that she wanted to divorce me. I have to be honest about my failings as a husband during the marriage. In my own postmortem (more on postmortems later), God revealed to me that my temper and failure to control my tongue had eroded the love and trust in my marriage. I also failed to be the spiritual head of the household. By avoiding difficult conversations, I allowed the infection of sin to fester under the surface of the marriage.
If the scenario I just shared sounds relatable to you, please know that you’re not alone. In a recent study of divorce statistics by Stanford University, Michael Rosenfield found that sixty-nine percent of divorces are initiated by the wife.[i] The research found that one of the common factors was that the women in the study expressed more dissatisfaction about the state of the marriage than the men did.
In an article titled Four Critical Insights on Divorce and its Effects on Men, Christian writer Chris Bolinger explains, “In many cases, a wife’s request or demand for a divorce comes as a surprise or even a shock to her husband. He knew that there were challenges and even conflicts in the marriage – and they may have gone to counseling together – but he was generally content and figured that they would work through their issues and stay married.” [ii]
This isn’t to say that women are to blame for more divorces, only that they tend to initiate divorce more often than men do. If Christian men are supposed to be the spiritual heads of their households, we need to take responsibility for our part in a failing or failed marriage.
That being said, my conviction is that there are a lot of men out there who are struggling in the aftermath of a divorce that wasn’t their idea or what they wanted. That’s where I was that October and the months that followed. Feeling isolated and shell-shocked, I wished that there was a Christian man who had been through similar circumstances to come alongside me and provide some much-needed encouragement and advice. This article contains the advice and encouragement I would have passed along to myself two years ago.
Here’s what I learned, and I pray that it might be of some help to you or a brother you might know who is struggling with divorce.
Stay with The Flock and The Good Shepherd
The very best thing I did the week my ex told me she wanted to separate was joining a men’s Bible study group at church. I had seen the announcement in the church bulletin for a group that was meeting at 6:30am on Thursday and decided to give it a try. It was early in the morning, and it would be a little tight getting to work on time, but I knew I desperately needed help in the form of prayer and encouragement, and I could certainly use the wisdom and experience of my brothers in the Lord.
The first morning I attended, at the end of the study, I shared what was going on and was able to open up about some of the hurt and anxiety I was going through with my failing marriage. Over the course of the next few months, these men prayed for me, encouraged me, and followed up with me if I went MIA for a week or two to make sure I was okay. I can’t tell you how much this meant during some really difficult days and some dark nights of the soul.
This group also got me into the Word and I received some instruction I sorely needed at that point in my life. One significant lesson I learned on Thursday morning came from a well-worn Psalm.
In Psalm 23 we’re compared to sheep, and God is the good shepherd. Where are we the safest? In the middle of that flock, right? Under the care and protection of our shepherd. Where are we most vulnerable? Far from the flock and away from the protection of the shepherd.
Where do you think Satan wants you to be?
Let me share this with you. If your inclination during the divorce is to isolate yourself and grieve in private, I completely understand that. That’s been my default too. And I can tell you that when I was going through my divorce, the last place I wanted to be was at church in a sea of smiling couples and happy families. I felt like I had a big D printed on my Oxford shirt as I sat alone in church on Sunday morning.
It was some comfort when I learned that what I was experiencing is not uncommon for men going through a divorce. Chris Bolinger writes that divorced men often feel stigmatized at church and many leave the church and even their faith entirely.
While these feelings are common, and your inclination may be to avoid church completely, ask yourself, where does Satan want you to be? In the safety of the flock? Or alone in the field, easy pickings? My advice to you is to fight against the urge to stop going to church. I know it’s hard. Please trust me, I know. But you have to fight against it.
During the divorce, I felt much more comfortable in my men’s Bible study group than the Sunday service. I didn’t feel like the odd man out at Bible study because it wasn’t couples and families, it was just the guys. Guys who may not have been going through what I was going through with divorce, but guys who knew what it was to struggle and also the power of Christ Jesus to overcome. So I would suggest you stay in the middle of the flock with a good Bible study group, but make sure you’re attending your Sunday service too.
One of the greatest blessings during this difficult time in my life was experiencing God’s presence during the worship time at our Sunday service. Even if the sermon didn’t exactly speak to what I was going through (divorce isn’t frequently a sermon topic), somehow the music always did. Isaiah 61:3 talks about exchanging the spirit of despair with a garment of praise, and, with tears often running down my face, I felt a lot of the heaviness I was feeling disappear as we sang about God’s love and his grace and the hope we have in Him. I’d encourage you not to deprive yourself of this time of worship as I think it’s essential to experiencing more of God’s presence and receiving his healing.
Don’t Rush Through Your Time of Grieving
If you received the same tutelage I received on the baseball field, you know that you’re not supposed to show any pain if you get hit by a pitch. You’re told to walk it off, maybe rub some dirt on it, and then stoically take that jog down to first base.
If you’re going through the kind of divorce I did, you’ve just taken a fastball to the head and you’re lucky you’re still standing. But you’re dazed. And you’re hurt. And you’re definitely not in any condition to just saunter down to first.
One of my Christian friends wisely shared that grieving a divorce is like grieving a death. A Mark Twain quote came to me as I was reflecting on this comparison. Writing on the death of his daughter, Twain said, “It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details and thus learn and know the full extent of the loss.”
Going on to compare death to a house fire, Twain writes:
“A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential – there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It was irrevocably lost… it will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.”
What I found was, even though the marriage was extremely difficult and unpleasant at times, there were things I would cast about for only to discover they were gone. Some of these losses were obvious. The marriage was gone and I couldn’t see my kids every day. There were the marital assets that got split up. But then I realized I’d lost things like daily rituals such as family dinner time or the custom of sharing with my spouse what had happened at work that day. I had a stepson in the marriage and I was never really able to talk to him after his mom and I separated. When his graduation announcement arrived in the mail last summer, I felt a profound sense of loss.
Being honest with your grief is extremely important because you need to be able to bring it all before God to receive His healing. He’s the binder of wounds and he heals the brokenhearted (Psalm 147:3). But you have to come to Him to receive it. That process involves two important steps. First, you have to be honest with God about the hurt you need healed. And that may not just be one prayer but rather an ongoing conversation. Second, you need to patiently await the healing. The best advice I got was to stay in the season of grief to allow for God’s full healing.
Why stay in the grief?
It’s often the times we’re driven to our knees when God is most present and where we learn the most. So that’s why you don’t want to run off and either self-medicate with alcohol or fill your nights binge watching Netflix. Stay in the pain for the season God’s placed it before you because He will be there in a real and powerful way and there’s so much He wants to show you about His grace and provision and power for your life.
I have one friend who went through a great hardship in his marriage many years ago and he told me that he looks back at that time with almost a feeling of nostalgia. Why? Because God was present in such a powerful way in a time of great suffering. I don’t know if I’m quite there yet, but I can already appreciate the special ways God was there for me in my time of grief.
Pick Up a Bible, Not a Guitar
When I was going through the first few months of the divorce process, I suddenly went from having little time to myself as a husband and father to an overabundance of time to myself. I still had work to keep my attention on other things between 9 and 5 during the workweek, but nights and weekends were almost unbearable.
In this time, I watched a lot of YouTube. I typed in “Men” and “Divorce” and was surprised to see a lot of videos come up in the search. Few if any were by Christian men processing a divorce, but I found quite a lot of secular men offering advice.
One recurring theme? They were all learning to play guitar.
That may be a slight exaggeration, but when I was talking to another friend going through a divorce about this observation, she laughed. She had noticed the same thing. There’s something about divorce that seems to bring out this newfound interest in picking up a musical instrument.
And it makes perfect sense. It was the same reason I had gone to YouTube to fill the silence of a long and lonesome night. Time. There’s an abundance of it and it seems like people going through a divorce have almost a manic need to fill it. It’s not just playing guitar. I know some people who are suddenly feeling the urge to travel. Or they’re taking cooking classes at their local community college. Or they’re hiking every trail they can find.
Besides the urge to fill time, I think that people going through divorce are also trying to “find themselves” or at least “rediscover themselves.” When your identity has been tied to being a husband and father, and now you’re no longer a husband and maybe just a part-time father, losing that sense of identity can be maddening.
It makes perfect sense to try to lose yourself in learning guitar or working your way through a foreign language app to fill the time. But I would encourage you to fill your newfound time with the Word of God and prayer. And I would also encourage you to either forge or renew your identity as a child of God. This is your true identity and there will never be a better time to understand your identity in Christ than right now.
On the first day I attended that Thursday morning Bible Study, we watched Rick Rigsby’s commencement address at California Maritime University. One piece of wisdom he shared with the cadets is, “Wisdom will come to you in the unlikeliest of sources. A lot of the time through failure. When you hit rock bottom, remember this… while you’re struggling, rock bottom can also be a great foundation on which to build.”
Finally, in addition to searching for something to fill their time or establishing their identity, I think many men going through a divorce are trying to find a new path to happiness.
It might be a good time to revisit the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel. What was that conversation about? The Samaritan woman had a plan for happiness and it involved relationships. She had been through five marriages and she was on to guy number six. And through that exchange with the Samaritan woman, Jesus is essentially asking her, “How’s that plan working for your life?”
It’s so interesting that the conversation with the Samaritan woman starts with water and a request for a drink. In Jeremiah 2:13, God says, “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
Jesus, in a very gentle but direct way, points out that the Samaritan woman’s broken cisterns have consisted of seeking happiness in relationships. That’s her plan for happiness, and it’s not working. Jesus offers her that living water that can bring true fulfillment and satiate the deep thirst of her soul.
We all have a plan for happiness just the same way the Samaritan woman did. What’s yours? Now may be the perfect time to cast off those broken cisterns and return to the spring of living water.
The Postmortem
In the aftermath of the divorce, there’s going to be a lot of second-guessing. You’re going to replay conversations, speculate where things went off the tracks, and ruminate on some regrets.
I want to share a verse that you should write down and leave out in a place where you can view it often. 2 Corinthians 7:10 tells us, “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.”
There ought to be some godly sorrow that comes upon you that makes you reflect. If your postmortem is just that you chose the wrong woman, then you haven’t experienced godly sorrow. What is your part in the failure of your marriage? Where do you need to repent when it comes to those failures? I had to look at areas where I failed to be the spiritual head of the household and also areas where I failed to control my tongue. These are things I reflected on which I believe God brought to my mind so I could ask for forgiveness and the strength and wisdom I need to correct those areas in my life. That’s the kind of godly sorrow that brings repentance.
But you need to watch out for the self-condemnation that the Devil wants to use to really drag you over the coals. This isn’t the kind of sorrow that leads to repentance, it’s the sorrow that leads you to depression and despair. It leads to beating yourself up over and over again for areas in your marriage where you may have failed. Reject and discard those thoughts and feelings as quickly as possible.
I mentioned that God may want us to stay in a time of grief so we can feel His presence and receive His healing. This is in sharp contrast to where the Devil wants us to stay in a state of defeat for as long as possible so we feel unworthy of God’s love and insufficient as Christians so we’re not effective representatives of God’s kingdom here on Earth.
If you are having difficulties distinguishing between the two, pray for wisdom, which God has promised to freely give (James 1:5) We’re imperfect people who sin and God wants to refine us and our lives as we go through the process of sanctification. That process leads upward in experiencing grace and forgiveness and cleansing, not downward in despair and defeat and depression.
One other verse you may want to have at the ready is Philippians 3:13-14 where Paul says, “But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
The beauty of the gospel is that it’s not our failures that define our lives, but, through the gift of Christ Jesus in His death and resurrection, we can have new life in Him. Forget what’s behind. Learn from it, but then lay it aside and don’t let it encumber you as you move forward with what God has planned for your life.
Photo credit Mattia Ascenz, Unsplash
[i] https://time.com/4007174/which-spouse-asks-for-divorce/
[ii] https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/men/4-critical-insights-on-divorce-and-its-effect-on-men.html