Live Life With No Regrets!The Problem of Divorce
The verse of the week I chose asks, "What problem is there that God cannot solve?"
I am always mystified by why people divorce one another. I cannot see why after marriage, that someone would break his vows of marriage when he/she entered into it at the altar promising "till death do us part".
Since there is no problem that God cannot solve, where then lies the source of the problem? It is in the people involved who don't want to let God solve it for them.
Yet, in my naivete I realized that my background is like that of a fish swimming in water. I grew up living with godly Christians around me. LIke a fish, I assumed that there is water always around me. Until now, I only know personally 2 persons who are divorced. It came as a startling fact that for one of my friends about 30% - 40% of her friends were divorced!
Divorce is such a strange concept to me. I think I understand it, yet it is something that I don't really understand. I think a better phrase would be that divorce is like some disease.
I know that it exists yet to see it manifest itself in human beings is like seeing them afflicted with a strange horrible disease that shouldn't be there in the first place.
The irony for me is that I do come from a broken family.
I've talked to lawyers who've handled divorce cases, and divorce happens to both Christian and non-Christian couples alike.
But of course, as I pressed on my question "but what if both of them submitted to Christ?". The answer was "Of course not, if both submitted to Christ then there would be no divorce."
I really hope I do not personally get first hand experience in the pressures of this.
From observation, it seems to be stubbornness of one of the parties to change or shift position in attitude, behaviour, or values. LIke a dance partner who doesn't move in tandem with her partner, it doesn't make a good dance. (Maybe one of my tests for a good marriage partner is to see how well she dances.).
Perhaps another reason is that there is no respect in the marriage. The other partner isn't a person in the other's eys, but instead a sex object or security object that has lost its value. If that was the case there wasn't true and deep love in the relationship in the first place. Like what Martin Buber described, it was an "I-it" relationship and not an "I-Thou" relationship in the first place.
There is also something else I learned. A term like "work hard to make the marriage last" objectifies the relationship, as if marriage is like a machine that needs tuning or oiling or repairing. It puts marriage as something that is outside of us. It paints some imaginary machine that both parties have to fix when in reality both parties are the machine and the only way to solve it is to fix themselves.
(Ah, the deficiencies of our natural language, despite all the richness of English it fails by far. Perhaps when we finally speak and know the language of angels would we change in our understanding and knowledge.)
