FINDING A
NICHE
In some communications with a friend of
late, an interesting word popped into the conversation. As my friend was briefly commenting on her
experiences since her divorce some years ago, she mentioned the difficulty of
figuring out what is her particular niche in life these days. That word, “niche,” really resonated with me
as a very meaningful word in the process of recovering from a divorce, but it
will probably take some explanation.
When we are young, everyone asks us what we
want to be when we grow up. So we decide what we would like to do, attend
college or other training necessary and launch into our careers. We fall in love, marry, start a family and
make a home, make a life. In other
words, we make our niche in the world, hopefully following what we believe is
God’s purpose for us. When our spouse
announces he or she wants a divorce, suddenly everything we have built up is
shattered and we feel like we have been thrown back to square one. The world we have worked so hard to create,
the home that has been our refuge is forever altered. What do we do now?
Divorce is not the only experience that
creates this kind of situation. The
death of a loved one, job loss, factory closing, bankruptcy, war, natural
disasters…all of these can cause a similar sense of loss. In each of those situations, you have to
start all over. There is a difference
with divorce, because these other things are not intentionally inflicted upon
you personally by the one person in all the world whom you were closest to and
you once trusted implicitly.
That one
factor changes everything.
In the years following a divorce, the great
task is to begin reassembling life all over, to determine how to create the
appropriate niche for the rest of your life.
Do you stay in the same community?
Will you be able to keep the same friends, or will they be friends for
you ex instead? Can they be friends for
you both? Will you have to move, if you
haven’t already? How will your
relationship with your children change?
Will you be able to be a good parent alone? Will the children understand who you are or
end up with a skewed perspective of you and of the divorce? Where will you celebrate the holidays? What about church, will I need to go to a
different one, or even to a different denomination? Will people at my old church still accept me
as a divorced person? Would they at a
different church? God remains faithful
(although sometimes that can be hard to see), but even your relationship with
God is now under strain and scrutiny.
You are no longer a husband or wife; now your identity is single parent
and divorcee. Some of the
characteristics of who you are will remain core to your identity, but with new
life directions, there are some things you may choose to leave behind and some
new ones you may choose to adopt or develop.
How will you decide which to keep and which to leave aside? So many choices. So many changes.
It takes time to create a new niche, to find
the meaningful new identity and reassemble the shattered pieces of your life
into the new structure for the future.
Sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error. Sometimes there are foolish choices made
during a time of emotional craziness or vulnerability, choices that can cost a
lot. For a period of time you may retain
many elements of your old life, but over time you find that some of them simply
no longer fit. God may well be leading
into new directions for your future.
Finding that new niche is perhaps one of the
greatest challenges of divorce. It takes
time, because like the old niche, it will have to be built on discovery,
experience and choices. It reminds me of
what I learned in archaeology about the buildings of ancient Israel .
Often, after a city was destroyed by war or fire, the time would come
that people would resettle the area.
They would level the space, and build again by combining stones and
other materials from the previous structures with new materials to form the new
building. In places where this happened
time and again over the ages, the location would pile up into a mound, called a
“tell.” The new city was filled with new habitations, but
was built on the remnants of the old buildings now gone.
That seems to me to be an apt picture of
rebuilding after divorce.
There are
things worth keeping and reusing.
here
are things that will be discarded.
And
there are new materials that must be added in order to create the new
structures of your life.
The result is a
new home, a new life filled with new meanings, shaped by the past but designed
in the process of building anew. Just as they say Rome
was not built in a day, neither will the new structure of your life. Some of the materials of your old life now
appear useless and may be discarded.
Some new ways are going to be necessary, and some of them will be a lot
of fun, like a new adventure, while others may bring the sorrow and struggle
that are necessary to build something new.
But there are some important pieces of who you are that have always been
there, and have nothing to do with your former marriage and everything to do
with who God created you to be. Those
precious character blocks that you and God have planted into your life can serve
you well as guides for building the next niche for your life. That niche may come in surprising ways, in
the form of a new career, a new relationship, a new location, or a new kind of
ministry and service to others. It can
work out into something very special.
After all, God is an expert at transforming things that awful, such as a
cross, into something marvelous and new.
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