When Life Falls Apart
Finding support during a dark chapter of my life
In my late 20s, after a disastrously short marriage, I got divorced. It was tragic and terrible. I was one of the first of my tight knit group to get divorced, and in an already tight knit community everybody was talking. I felt such shame, such failure. I was serious and religious and committed to trying to do what was right. Everybody knows divorce isn’t right. How had I made such a terrible mistake? It was the dark night of my soul.
What made our divorce extra difficult was that externally our marriage seemed great, awesome even. We were good looking, competent, making it, and stable. We lived in a big city, and had gotten involved in the “hip and happin’” church. It hadn’t been my choice, I didn’t especially love the church and felt kind of skeezed out by the pastor who seemed to me much more committed to being “cool” than being faithful.1 But we started to make friends and be more involved and it seemed good enough.
When our marriage collapsed I couldn’t even specifically understand it at the time. My parents were desperate for this not to happen, worried for me to just give up too easily and worried for my well-being. Even now, almost twenty years later, I can barely understand the exact why and where-for. But I knew then that it wasn’t working. I was becoming a shell of myself, and I knew I had to leave.
I had gone back to my parents house for a month, taken a break from my job and busy life, just to make sure I got my head on straight. Finally my parents began to see and understand. It was never going to work.
I flew back to my big city life and pulled the rip cord. Unexpectedly my group of church friends were silent and absent. I had one friend from college who drove hours and a friend from work who volunteered to help me move. When I reached out to my girls’ Bible study group, the leader told me in no uncertain terms, “We need to understand what happened before you can come back to this group.” They acted like divorce might be contagious, and being in the early stages of dating and engagements and marriage, they were all terrified that something like this could even happen, let alone happen to them.
I was stunned, hurt and confused. I barely understood why and what had happened to collapse my marriage, how could I ever explain it to anyone else, least of all my church friends? And if I couldn’t be part of the more intimate group of friends, how could I ever go to their church? I remember thinking with certainty that if I didn’t actually have a close and strong relationship with God, I would chuck over the whole exercise of faith and religious practice.
I found another church (it was a big city after all) that was exactly what I’d always wanted. They regularly had choir and every week excellent big organ music, it was high church in the best way. The pastor’s sermons were vibrant and energetic and full of life giving Truth. The services dripped with beauty, and I found a quiet pew and absorbed it all. Nobody knew me, and nobody knew all my failures and disappointments. It was peace.
As I continued to heal and regain my confidence, I asked the pastor to connect me to a small group or a Bible study. He said he had just the right one. It was a group of people in their 60s and 70s (which seemed old at the time) that had been meeting weekly for years upon years. They welcomed me with open arms and we had lively encouraging conversations about the Bible and God and life. Eventually I felt comfortable to open up, and told them of my failure, and my rejection. I almost expected to be met with the same disappointment I’d felt from so many. The underlying, “If you’d tried harder, it would have worked out!” sentiment. Instead they were the picture of generosity and mercy. “Oh,” they said, “That’s so difficult for you! How heart breaking for you to go through. But you’re smart and strong, and you’ll make it! You’ll find the way through this life!” I already felt better, but then came their truly priceless encouragement, “Life is long, it’s full of struggles and hardship, and you will weather many things. We’ve all been through divorce, and affairs, and deaths and tragedy of all kinds, and we’re okay. We found a way through. God is near.”
They were on the other side of youth, they understood that the trials of today are never really forgotten, but definitely dim in the grander picture of all that a life includes.
It was the very best thing I could have been given. The encouragement to just sit, just relax, just trust that God can even use our failures and disappointments in the bigger picture, and that we will make it through.
I’m deeply thankful for this experience. I’m a fairly arrogant person and I remember thinking before this time that I would NEVER date someone who had been divorced, “What a failure! If you were doing the right things, right things would happen, and NEVER wrong things! Gross!” Oh, how ignorant I was. This tragedy softened me to my core. It reminded me of how legalistic we all tend to be (the idea that doing the right things will end in right outcomes) and how life is such a chaotic trip to the finish.
I remember this group of believers often, and feel deeply grateful for their presence in my life at such a crucial time in my health and well-being.
It was such a blessing to be with people in different stages of their lives and experiences. The isolated group of peers had done more damage than I already felt from the battering of experience and failure. How important it is to have a larger group of people in our lives to encourage us when we are falling off the edge. How vital it is to have people to remind us that we’ll get through this hard time.
It is the very thing Church is meant to provide. Trusting God is the cornerstone of everything, but it’s not enough for me to trust God on my own. I’m a moron, I need a wider group of people to remind me what trusting Him looks like when I just don’t have any more energy, when my get up and go feels all get up and gone. I often need another person to come along side and say, “I know things are hard, but I’m here and so is God, and these hard times won’t last forever.”
When we talk about community, it’s vital that it’s not just community of exactly same minded people — not in age, station, political leanings, interests, but a wide swatch of different people. Most often people we don’t get to hand pick. Sometimes it’s hard to be close to people who are very different, it can be difficult to maintain closeness if we’re too siloed in our separate ideas. This is why I really appreciate church, it brings us together over something outside ourselves. Coming to consider and celebrate the kind of God we can trust gives us something bigger than our own interests and preferences to bond over. This is when we truly find a way to remain rooted in a family, and to weather life’s storms instead of ripped apart by difference and difficulty.
A few years post divorce I decided to leave the big city and return to my roots in the rural small town I still live in. This group made a pie (the leader was known for his pie and his orchids!) and kept in touch for many years. I remain thankful for them, and the ways they taught me to more deeply connect with people outside my peer group and my specific interests and silos. Because even though my life now is wonderful, it’s still hard in all the normal ways life is hard in middle age — raising kids, maintaining a strong marriage, navigating friendship, social drama, work life balance, and it’s incredibly encouraging to know that we’ll make it through all this stuff too, and it always helps to remember this period of life is finite too.
I hope that you find such a community from which and to which to draw and give solace when life is hard, celebrate when life is good, and the confidence that things will be okay in the end as we continue to stay rooted in a God who is always near to us as we are near to each other.
with love,
sierra
Ironically several years later he decided he was actually an atheist, left his family and launched into a life of atheism/anti-God PR tours (?). It was surreal.
Thanks so much for sharing such a hard time with all of us. I think it is wise (but sometimes hard) words that you will make it through and you'll be okay. Sometimes we want to wallow in our hard times.