My best friend and I have struggled over an idea we have from scripture. She and I are both divorced. She is remarried. I had an abysmally bad non-marriage relationship. We are currently having an open dialogue about what scripture says on marriage after divorce. We are both very confused. Let me put it all out here and if there are thoughts, they would be helpful and appreciated. We have both come from church backgrounds where divorce and remarriage seemed to be non-issues for our congregations. Heck, my home church even called a divorced/remarried pastor at one point. The point is we both grew up seeing it and understanding it as “OK”. Not necessarily the best idea, but not excluded by our faith communities. And here’s one more thing to know about that: she is Southern Baptist and I grew up in a liberal Lutheran congregation. In the South, that’s a big difference. She started this whole conversation when things started to get really rough in her second marriage. She had dated this man when we were all in high school and college. They reconnected romantically about three years after her divorce. Understand that they had maintained a friendship through the years. We have a very close-knit tribe of about 15 of us from our teen years. Distance doesn’t matter very much and we are still all pretty close. I guess I’m saying this to explain that she and he had a baseline friendship upon which to build a marriage. They dated for about a year and then he proposed. We had a great time getting ready for the wedding. They went through a very detailed counseling process at her home church with a pastor they both knew and respected. He spent lots of time building a healthy relationship with her 5 year old daughter. He even got to know her ex-husband to a degree, thinking it could ease any parental jealousies which might arise. I felt like they were really doing it right, to ensure the health and longevity of the marriage. Things were great for about 5 years. Then it started to fall apart. Things they had discussed, personality traits they had agreed to disagree upon, became sources of conflict. They had another daughter. The real-child vs step-child thing arose. They started to drift apart. They became confrontational and even counseling didn’t work. They separated for a time. I won’t go into all of the details here but it got bad. They have come back together now and some healing has happened. The thing is that my friend is now wondering if all of the work they did in the beginning was pointless because scripture prohibits remarriage after a divorce. My story is a little different. I got married to a non-believing alcoholic. We left the country and lived in a crazy military community where infidelity was the norm. I was going through some big rebellion against any institutionalized thinking from my youth. I was also suppressing my self-doubt and inferiority. Put those things in a blender and mix well. The marriage broke up and we both moved on. There were no children. I didn’t move so far. I went looking for a relationship to prove that I wasn’t a failure. And boy, did I look. All the wrong places and then some. I let myself be abused. I mad some horrendous choices. I had a child outside of marriage. Most of the stuff that prohibited me from forming a healthy relationship stemmed from bad choices I made. Willful disobedience. But now, 5 years later, I would like to explore the possibility of a husband. A Christian husband. I find it very difficult to even begin because all of the lessons I learned indicate that when I make choices in men, they are based on non-ideal behaviors. So I do nothing and get engaged in living my life. Raising my daughter. Growing within my faith community. But God isn’t answering this prayer of mine. So I get restless and impatient. And then I begin to wonder if there is no answer because that’s the answer: No. My friend and I look to scripture for help in our frustration: Mal 2:16, Dut 24:1-4, Matt 19:9, 19:9, 5:32, ICor 7:15, 7:32-35, Eph 4:32…The list is actually much longer. We are both wondering if our troubles stem from the fact that remarriage shouldn’t be an option for either of us. Or is it really the enemy trying to help us into making the same bad decisions with the new relationships and therefore sowing discord in the world. Neither of us know, nor do we feel comforted by the Word. We both pray for wisdom and understanding. But in the meantime we are so confused. She feels burdened and I feel lonely and we try to comfort one another. I feel guilty and selfish for the time I put into worrying over my loneliness. I pray for peace and understanding. I pray for the burden to be lifted off my heart. We do realize though, that there is a gift in this for both of us. We are together in it. Maybe one of you out there has a Word for us. Maybe you could lift us up in prayer. Maybe our answers will become clear. Whatever the case, we cling to our friendship and our Faith.
