I seem to have been on a great many detours as of late. Some of them are to be expected... the divorce process has hit a standstill. It is surprising that a divorce process can be stalled by my mother-in-law. She needed to step back to access her health to see if she could handle the divorce process continuing. No warning, no explanation, just a e-mail to stop the entire process. And the repercussions include my panic on why does my husband still care for me, and what does our continued marriage mean for me.
Thus began the detour. A detour that made me feel like I was flushed away, and then found a whole new world. You know the movie, "Flushed Away". I had never seen it until after I made the choice to walk out of the house. Needless to say that once the movie had been watch by my daughter... It has become one of her most watched movies. Well the premise of the movie is this house mouse, gets flushed down the drain. And of course the mouse thinks that he is being flushed to his death. But much to his surprise there is a whole world that exists in the sewer system. A world that if he asks can help him get home, but also has a great many perils.
I seem to be on a detour into a new world, different from the one found when the mouse went down the sewer, but still full of help and peril. My issue has been learning who is safe to reach out to for help, and who will add to the perils I already face. With the divorce, it has felt like I have been flushed away. And for a long time, I thought it was to a death. A death of committing myself to being completely alone for the rest of my life. My only contact with the world would be thru my daughter. And though I felt that I was being sent to my death... I would willingly submit to anything if it meant that my daughter was safe and could grow up to love God.
During this trip towards my death within my marriage... something has changed. I no longer feel that, if my husband were to show up on my doorstep, that I would need to just submit to his desires. Still being married to him has been a constant struggle in thought. Thoughts that included questioning not just our civil marriage, but also our marriage in the eyes of God. It has been more of a struggle to understand how God sought me to move forward. And maybe that is where I am discovering that in this moment of drowning in the flushing... I have landed in a better place.
In the past few weeks, with many detours that are topics for later, I have come to the realization that even though I stood before God with the man who would become my husband... that the covenant before God came with promises and conditions. Promises that we would cherish each other and only be with each other. This part of the covenant I understood and took to heart. It was the conditions that I didn't know existed... and those conditions only became real when I finally stopped to look around in the new world that I had landed in.
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Those conditions include a built in escape plan. An escape plan that is designed to save those who honor the promises that they have made before God. In my design to honor God, by submitting to my husband, I did everything he asked me to do. As our marriage continued, the things that he asked of me grew more diverse and to me often disgusting. The part that bothered me the most in the early days, was his desire to bring a third into our marriage. Having been that third, it was something that I agreed to with great hesitation, but never approved someone to be that third. When it became unbearable was when the focus for a third shifted from seeking out someone to train the very person that I loved more than myself... my daughter.
Now here is where the escape plan God created comes into play. His desires to hurt me with bringing in a third, along with his desires for training our daughter. Apparently these actions, even just as thoughts he was planning, are valid reasons to be able to escape the marriage. And right now, they are for me a great relief. An understanding that God is going to allow me to be released from our marriage. That if my husband shows up on my doorstep, that I never again have to give into his desires... and that detour in learning has meant a new sense of freedom.
I have been spending the past few weeks trying to understand what is in store for me. Each day is a struggle, because a covenant is to death. And right now I would rather be dead than spend another day in the same house with my husband. So, where does that leave me?
Matthew 19 : 1 - 12, talks about . And before you start going on about that... Divorce was a word that was banned in my world. It was understood that if you never used the word in your life, than your mind would never consider it an option within your marriage. I always knew that marriage was work, not some wave that you are caught up in that is full of fun. And even now I am struggling with the word. But that struggle is for another day...
In a constant discussion that I have been having with my pastor... we have been talking about marriage. And reasons that you might want to walk away from a marriage, but also about how to continue to honor the covenant that you made.
"God's best is for us to marry and to discover the oneness that God intended in marriage. But humans sin. They do this in lots of ways. And humans refuse to change with regard to their sin. That is they keep doing it. That is the hardheartedness that Jesus talks about."
This makes sense to me. That marriage is forever and that it is what God intended for us. Where it became hard to comprehend is when human sin comes into play. When you add in people refusing to change... well that stumped me. You see in my world we are taught that we need to admit our sin and seek penance to change how we behave in the future. This is to avoid ever repeating the sin. We also are required to seek out the person that our sin harmed, even years later, and pray that they are willing to forgive the sin that harmed them. And yet in Matthew, Jesus spoke of permission to divorce, because your hearts were hard. And here I find that the discussion comes back to sin and a person's desire to not change.
"So the unrepentant attitude of a spouse allows for divorce, when that unrepentant behavior is related to the marriage: 'for sexual immorality'."
And yes it is saying that if the behavior is related to the marriage that divorce is possible. Not exactly the idea that I grew up hearing. And currently has me in a tail spin. You see, I love my husband. And I never want to live with him again. How do you love someone and walk away? How do you walk away and honor God? That answer seems to be covered in so many ways in the unrepentant behavior. But, and yes there is always a but in my mind. How do you know that the behavior you are seeing is "sexual immorality"?
In that question... I was given a list.
Sexual immorality = "it may be adultery, it may be violence, it may be sexual involvement with children, adults, etc."
If you are anything like me that list will shake you up. I always knew that if you could catch your husband in the act of committing adultery that was the only reason you could walk away. And here is a list that is much more than catching your husband with his secretary. The humor in me even saying that is that is how my husband came to exist. He is the product of a office worker and the cleaner though.
The addition to the list of violence is what took the wind out of me. And maybe in other ways it brought me to silence. Here we are looking at reason to end a covenant. Reasons that I always thought were so clear cut. I lived in a world of black and white, now to only to realize that the world is actually so many shades of grey. The grey is creating a confusion. And in that confusion I am struggling to take the addition of violence to the list with adultery. I am finding that things are not so clear cut...
Sadly my confusion has raised more questions. And I have no answers right now for myself, let alone for anyone else. A friend of mine gave me these words... Ask the Lord to guide. And right now, that might be the best advice I have to share with anyone. Seek God and maybe the grey will become clear.
