While a friend and I were grocery shopping today, I mentioned that it seems more and more of my friends are not only divorced already, but on their second marriages. We counted my friends on my fingers and I didn’t know whether to count them as couples or as individuals. Two or one? There’s nothing impressive about larger numbers when you have to do division to get there. Backwards math.
I know marriage must be hard and I can’t even imagine how hard. But I know it cannot be as hard as splitting in half what God has joined together.
A friend divorced last year and he asked me once what he could do in the aftermath. I had only one thing to say: when he spoke of his ex-wife to their children, he not call her “your mother” because this puts the ownership of all his and her dysfunctions on small shoulders never equipped to own all that. She is their mother, true, as truly as he is their father. But call her just “Mom,” and pray she counters in point.
Even if you tell your children they are not responsible for your divorce, can I tell you right now they will probably believe they are? Whether they are five years old or twenty-five years old, there will be questions in every crevice of their soul nagging, demanding, accusing. There is nothing you can do to assuage this—pulling adhesives apart leaves residue.
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Tonight I am thinking of how Jesus taught us to pray: Our Father.
Ours.
A shared Father. The Son shared His Heavenly Father with us. Us?
Our Father.
I had conversation a few weeks ago with a near stranger and she asked me how I could serve a God who caused bad things to happen to good people. I thought for a few minutes and asked her if her parents were still married. “No, of course not,” she said, as though divorce is so common now it should be assumed. “Does your mother refer to your father as ‘your father’?” I asked. “Yeah, so what?” She said.
“Do you ever feel the weight of all the ways your mother felt wronged by him on your shoulders? as though it was your fault? and are you sometimes ashamed of him? even if he is doing and has done his best your whole life?”
Her shoulders fell and she nodded, dropping her eyes.
Sometimes I feel like this about God, I said to her. Because the truth is that I don’t know why bad things happen to people. I don’t know why you got saddled with the guilt of a broken man and the accusations of a broken woman. But sometimes I feel the heaviness of owning the explanation and hope of the world on my shoulders because it is my Father who has created it.
I don’t know why we seem like we have to bear the weight of a broken world on our shoulders. But I do know this: if you’re His child, He’s our Father. And when we can’t bear the weight of Him being our Father, take comfort in the reality that Jesus sat on a mount with His disciples, sinners, and taught them to pray to Our Father, teaching us to enter into brotherhood with Him. Creating oneness out of brokenness.
He is infinitely good, incapable of doing wrong.
Always does what is best for His children, all of them.
