I have been married three times.
My first marriage ended when the man who had been my husband for twenty-four years, the father of my children, fell in love with another lady. He and she are both people of faith and principle, and they both struggled hard to do what was morally and biblically right for Christian people, and give each other up. They both believe marriage is for life. But they wanted so much to be together. They have been married about four years now.
After the ending of my first marriage, I waited a year and a day in case my husband might change his mind and come back to me, but he did not. So I laid the matter before the Lord, asking for His guidance in looking for a new partner. I found one instantly. My first husband thought divorce was wrong, as marriage is for life, but he agreed to give me a divorce provided I arranged it all, so I did. I married for a second time. My second husband died fifteen months into our marriage.
I waited again for a year and a day, for mourning, to give myself time: but I did not think that I was called to go through life alone. After that time had gone by, I brought the matter before the Lord, and wrote out a careful, long prayer, explaining exactly and in detail the kind of man I was looking for, and asking for His guidance. Within two weeks I learned that the man who had been my publisher for twenty years found himself sadly single again as his marriage had broken down and his wife moved to live somewhere else.
I think divorce is a failure of our intentions, and a disappointment of our hopes. I think it is a falling-short of what God intends for us, and a betrayal of our calling to be disciples of Jesus. But sometimes it happens, and not everything about a divorce is bad or even necessarily wrong. My first husband’s new wife would have been very sad and lonely without a partner to go through life with her. I am glad she found him, to take care of her as they grow old together.
I was good friends with the man who became my third husband, and after his first wife moved away, it became evident that we were becoming closer friends. He is an honourable man, and wanted to be sure that their marriage truly had ended. They had struggled on for a decade trying to hold things together, because they are both serious people who meant their wedding vows. When he talked with her, saying that he felt the time had come to formalize their parting, she agreed. She expressed relief that it was he and not she who had initiated this severance, affirming that things had come to an end.
So he began the formal legal ending of their marriage, and his relationship with me began to progress.
Then it became apparent to his first wife that this new relationship was beginning. At that point everything changed. She became both angry and distressed, convinced that I was the cause of that marriage ending.
Neither love nor sorrow for the marriage was expressed, but outrage and grief. I think a storm of powerful emotions hard to disentangle plunged her into a maelstrom of suffering. She moved through to a place where she recovered a sense of deep affection for the man to whom she had been married (though she did not express a desire to return to the marriage) but could not bear to set eyes upon me.
At this point I found myself in an intensely awkward position. Having been both divorced and widowed, and had to leave my home three times as a result (family home… new home as a single person… the cottage belonging to my second husband willed to his son) and suffered various other deep losses there is not space to rehearse here, I had become used to endings. Too used to endings, I think. I made a grievous mistake in not giving enough space for second thoughts as this relationship progressed towards marriage. By the time this first wife began to make clear her sense of being deeply, deeply wronged, an emotional commitment had been made. We were not married, but we were an item.
Again and again I urged my new partner to return to the wife from whom he was becoming divorced, if that was what she wanted. He thought it was probably not what she wanted, and knew that for him, even if I had been removed from the equation, such a path would not have been viable. We continued, and we were married. Relational problems persisted with his ex-wife and with his two daughters. They thought that I had behaved very shabbily indeed, done them great wrong, caused them terrible harm. It was a rocky path.
Even after we were married, I remained uneasy. I loved my new husband, and felt a rightness about our togetherness. It felt like a gift of God: but, how could it be? I came back constantly to questioning our new situation, ever making clear that if he felt it right to return, that should be. His position remained the same all through: that he had done his very best but his first marriage had simply come to pieces, long before he and I had formed as a couple. Even if he had wished it, re-instating that relationship would not have been a realistic option.
But my grief and guilt about having done this thing that felt right but did not agree with my faith continued to torment me. I am not against re-marriage for divorced people. I accept that divorce is sometimes something we must see as practical. When my first husband left, I still loved him dearly; it was loving him that made me see I must let him go – our marriage had become a prison to him. Love never imprisons people; it always sets them free. But never had I imagined that I would find myself in a position where the relational content would be too complicated for me to read, or be retrospectively adjusted, or whatever it was that happened, such that I would find myself identified by a group of people as the cause of a marital split. This horrified me, and was the foundational reason for me leaving the ordained ministry. My husband’s ex-wife said that we were disgraceful people who had no right to preach the Gospel: I could not but accept her judgement.
We married four years ago, so this last spring we had been married for three and a half years. In April we went to Spring Harvest, a big Christian gathering. While we were staying there, I was turning this matter over and over in my mind, wondering not so much what I might have done differently as what I could do now to put it right. In a letter I had expressed my horror at having caused sorrow to this lady and done her wrong in misreading the situation, and she had responded graciously. But my conscience could not be at peace.
As I prayed about these things, it seemed to me that the position I found myself in was like that of a person who had stolen something from a shop that had gone out of business. I was left holding something that did not belong to me but I had nowhere to put it back. Leaving my husband would just add more sorrow and destruction and guilt where there was plenty already.
So I said to the Lord God that, as I could not give back this thing that I had stolen, I would give it to Him. I said to Him that I would be willing for whatever He wanted to do with it. If what I had was wrong and He wanted to take it away from me, that would be all right. If He wanted me to have this marriage and keep it, that would be all right too.
The next day, as I wandered about in the market-place of the conference, looking at some of the fair-traded and handmade things and finding out about the charities and their work, I came upon a stall where a lady was selling the silver things she had made. I stopped to look, in case she had suitable things for birthday and Christmas presents. And there I saw this ring, and the Spirit moved in my heart. It was made of silver and had engraved and inlayed with gold upon it the word 4GIVEN.
The lady silversmith had repeats of many of her designs. This particular design she had in two sizes: one that fitted my little finger next to my wedding ring, and one that fitted my husband’s finger to wear with his wedding ring.
We didn’t get that one right. We caused grief and sorrow, to others and to ourselves. We went through a horrible tangle of pain and distress, tormented by guilt and robustly reviled by those who certainly perceived us as very guilty. I think it has changed us permanently. But we are also God’s gift to each other, and we have been forgiven. I believe that.
Plain Christians do not divorce. Somewhere along the way, my karma ran over my dogma and everything came off the rails. I wish it had not been so, but that’s how it is. I guess that’s why forgiveness is necessary.
I would never be accepted into or by a Plain church (Hutterite, Amish, whatever) because of this, and that is a splinter of sadness in my heart. It means that I watch them, but there is a deep gorge between us that I would never be allowed to cross – or, not without betraying and abandoning my husband, and I know that would not be the heart and call of Christ. I can choose the way of a Plain Christian if I like, but I will be debarred from any traditional expression of that. It's a path I must walk alone, unless as time goes on other companions appear on my journey. It does feel lonely.
But I also know that where Jesus is found is that place described in the letter to the Hebrews (13:12-14 NIV):
And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.
He came there for me and for everyone like me who stumbled and fell and got it dreadfully, damagingly wrong. We find ourselves outside the camp. So He came to be with us. By Him, even if not by our families or the church or the world, we are 4GIVEN.