This Side of the River
Chapter One
Rite of Passage
“I’m not in love with you anymore!” she said, while we stood in the kitchen.
“Huh?”
Brilliant retort I know but it’s all I could come up with. This was a forty-two year marriage. I was taken back. I know that’s passive voice but I didn’t feel very active at that moment.
Wow!
I didn’t know what to say and I had to lean on the center island before I fell down. I was completely shocked when she told me she didn’t have those in-love feelings for me anymore and that she was leaving.
Like any married couple, we’d had our disagreements but usually after twenty minutes we would once again be talking and laughing with each other just like nothing had happened at all. We’d got it all out in the open, vented, and went on with life and holding no grudges. I thought that that was the adult thing to do. No matter what’d happened to us, we’d always gravitated back to each other and risen above the problems, the setbacks, and the issues.
When I first sat down to write this book I didn’t have a clue as to where I was going to start because everything has a cause and effect. Since one event inextricably ties another event together, where should I start? I just knew, by the leading of the Spirit, that what I was going through might be able to help somebody else.
Here I was a newly divorced respondent of a forty-two year marriage and I had all these feelings bursting out of me. With everything else that was going on in my life, I did not know how to cope. I was overwhelmed with abundant emotions and slipped into a deep depression.
All my Christian friends were shocked and felt sorry for what I was going through. They tried very hard to help and I love them dearly for trying. The problem was, the advise they gave, came from happily married couples, doing great, and speaking from where they were. They all knew what it took to maintain a happy marriage according to God’s Word, but again, none of them had been where I was now.
Is Jesus all I need? Does Jesus love me? Is He above every name, even divorce? Does God not only remove things from our lives but people as well? Should I put this all under the Blood and go on or do I just camp out at the Cross and totally focus on Jesus? Is He going to do something with my life? Is my purpose about to come to the surface? Is all this true? Were all my friends’ correct? Absolutely. Was I there yet? Ab-so-lute-ly not.
If each of them were correct, what was I going to do with all the despair I was feeling? What was I to do with all the emptiness, the regret, the remorse, the guilt, and the feelings of what could have been? I haven’t even got to the sick and nauseating feelings in my stomach yet or the sense of failure I had in my gut. I’d just lost my identity, my role, and my purpose in life.
The last two or three years of our marriage Satan had not only attacked us from one or two fronts but he attacked us from every conceivable direction and aspect of our lives: physically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually. Those words of encouragement that my friends intimated to me earlier trying to help me…didn’t help at all. I just felt condemned because I wasn’t where they were and worse yet, I wasn’t where I should be.
As a Christian man, I was supposed to be the spiritual leader of his home and as such, in the God's heirarchy, I was the one who broke the threefold cord. I fell into a deep depression and she lost all hope. Everything that my friends had told me, I knew; I was just overwhelmed. It felt as though my mind had straight-lined. I’d failed God…again.
The Lord impressed on me that what I was going through could help somebody else and He began bringing things to my remembrance. He helped me take an introspective look, to find nuggets of transparency with which “…to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” Moses didn't think He was the man to take Israel out of Egypt; Jonah didn't want to go to Neniveh, and ?. Not that I put myself in their category but they were human just like I am. They had dreams, wants, desires, and yes, things that they didn't want or think that they could do. I am no different. I asked the Lord, "How can I write a book on relationship and marriage when I was divorced. How much credibility did that give me? Through This Side of the River I hope to relay those transparencies in hopes that something might resonate with you and help you during these times. You written two on marriage with my ways now. . .This is what God meant by His ways worked and mans ways didn’t. When you take God out of the equation, things fall apart. Faith is a muscle and it will atrophy if we don’t use it. You can’t sow neglect and reap companionship for very long and expect to.
A good pastor friend of mine told me that there are a number of good books written on divorce out there but the authors wrote them from their healing. He said that there are not many books written about working through the brokenness. Many books on the market today do not help the reader go through the pain and devastation on the way to our healing. They speak from their healing and with the Amplified Bible.
I agreed and decided thatWe have to allow ourselves the right to feel and the right to express ourselves before we can resolve anything and move on to the next phase. Resolution does not happen all at once but is an ongoing process with some people taking only days or weeks while others taking years to resolve their feelings. It’s a subjective process.
I confess to you the reader, that I take responsibility for my culpability in my family’s demise. I allowed the strongman to rob my goods. I pray that God uses me and This Side of the River as vehicles to help and comfort His children in their time of need (2cor 1:3-4).
It’s been about two years now since our divorce and I am just about resolute or as resolute as anyone can be after the devastation of divorce. I had to ask myself, “Will I ever get over this. I’d been with the same woman for two-thirds of my entire life, which now equates to my entire adult life. We’d had four wonderful, talented, and intelligent kids come out of this union and we, as a married couple, had many good times. However, this was our second divorce from each other and our third time to the lawyer’s office. It wasn’t for lack of trying.
I can only take you where I have been so what follows is my own story in hopes that it will help you through any emotional stress and will allow you the right to feel and express yourself from where you are at. . .right now. Rite of passage as it were.
Of course, we do not want to stray too far away from God’s precious Word because He is the definitive answer to all of our problems, no matter where we are at in those problems. I have proven to myself that we do not want to stray away from God and His wonderful Word because it is what got me into this trouble in the first place. It is the reason that I am on This Side of the River.
Copyright © James C. Lindquist 2005