With God, Grief is Never the End of the Story

PART TWO:  LOSS CAN HURT, BUT…THE FLIP SIDE IS

There is an interesting statement of Jesus related to loss found in John 12:24, which the New American Standard renders this way:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

He is primarily speaking prophetically about his own death, then resurrection resulting in the opportunity for salvation for so many, but it is such an apt presentation of the experience of loss, grief and moving on.   

I like marigolds.  But I know the little orange blossoms wither away, but turn into seeds that then produce far more blossoms than the one from which the seeds came.  

Loss and mourning are like that, too.

The process of divorce, and many other aspects of life, does confront us with the realities of loss, as I mentioned in the last blog.  But the story does not end there.  In case you haven’t seen them, the two volumes of Finding God in the Seasons of Divorce are divided by seasons, with the first volume represented by Fall and Winter, and the second volume represented by Spring and Summer.  The cover of the first volume is stark, barren and cold looking, representing the difficult days of divorce and the losses entailed in it.  But to only read that volume is to only focus on loss as in the first half of Jesus’ statement, that something has died.  But volume two is bright green, verdant and bursting with new life.  That, too is part of the process of divorce, the aftermath in which life starts afresh, and new opportunities and beauty arise that could not have done so without first experiencing loss, which is the second half of Jesus’ saying.

The other day my wife and I were talking, and in the course of the conversation, she referred to some of the things we have experienced in this marriage that was simply not part of her first marriage.  That got me to thinking with amazement at all the things that have blossomed in my life after the loss of the first marriage.  Don’t get me wrong, the loss was real, and the grief was real, and there are some things that have been dramatically impacted negatively in that experience.  HOWEVER, just like the two volumes of the book set, that isn’t the whole story.  

There have been opportunities come my way that are part of a drastically different new chapter in life.  There have been joys and amazements that resound that hope outlives loss, as new blossoms have come into my life.  My wife and I have had incredible opportunities to travel that we did not know before.  I have developed some long distance ministry relationships with people I have never met through this little blog.  I had the privilege of several special years of close fellowship with my parents at the end of their lives.  I have gotten to see the rebirth of some aspects of my personality that lay dormant during my first marriage.  With my new wife, I have known a new kind of love in our marriage relationship.  None of this is as a slam against the first marriage, but all of these things came into being in the aftermath of the loss of that marriage.  

Rebirth is possible.  New horizons come into view.  Pathways previously unseen emerge and beckon.  Life can be fresh and new. 

It may or may not entail a new marriage, God may have a completely different way of bringing renewal into your sorrow, but it will always mean new life and hope.

It is important to mourn and grieve when loss impact us deeply.  But as Paul says in Thessalonians, we don’t grieve as do those who have no hope.  Hope transcends our grief.  Today and tomorrow are not bound by yesterday’s loss, but are full of eternity’s promise.  As a friend of mine told me many years ago:  there IS life after divorce!  The same is true for any of life’s losses.  Because with God, grief is NEVER the end of the story!  The scriptures promise that weeping is but for a night and joy comes in the morning, that mourning will be turned into dancing as the oil of gladness is poured out, and that the day will come when every tear shall be wiped away from our eyes.  In the story of the raising of Lazarus, Martha hears Jesus speak of this kind of hope, and assumed he means only for the end of time.  But Jesus surprises her by bringing new life to her brother right then and there!

If you are struggling with the experience of loss (even if it is the loss of a baseball card collection!), look around for the new growth that God has planted in your life.  Watch for and celebrate the blossoms that follow the loss of the seeds.  Recognize, in fact, that so many of the loss experiences in our lives are exactly that:  seeds for something beautiful in the next part of the journey!  Don’t mourn the withered blossom so long that you cannot see the beauty of the flowers that arise in its place.  God promises the desert shall one day blossom!

The Life After the Divorce

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.