WORD FOR TODAY: Dealing With Loss Of Marriage
The thought that your sweetheart will no longer be your better half and that you have to constantly contend with the fact that he/she is alive but will no longer be a part of your daily life is a daytime nightmare that awakens you with the reality of getting a divorce.
This is a very dicey and sensitive topic and different people have differing opinions and convictions. I am well aware that a break up, a separation or a divorce isn’t a walk in the park. This morning I’m speaking to you who is in the process of a divorce and you who has already divorced. I know that it is not easy and I will pray for God’s grace to cover you through and through.
When you fall in love and say I Do, the hope at the back of your mind and in your heart, is that this will last forever until the day that you die. Both of you at the altar or at the AG or before your parents, you exchange vows and you pledge to live together. You get countless words of advice and you are escorted into your new home. Most of us don’t really think about the implications of this vow or permanence and that is why when storms come, because they will, our first default reaction NOT response is to leave your spouse.
What is the basis of marriage
Genesis 2:24
Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall become united and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Many marriages break up before they start, because of the wrong foundations, wrong convictions. About 3 weeks ago I was on radio and I shared on why you should NOT marry your best friend and many people vilified me because this was an antithesis to their belief system. Friendship will never sustain your marriage, only love-the love of God can carry your marriage through any crisis.
Who then should I marry, you may ask?
You should marry the one God designed and assigned you to fulfill God’s intentional purpose for you. You marry the person that you LOVE and not necessarily like, because when conflict and real issues check in, it is the love of God that will sustain you and teach you to forgive (whatever issue) and rebuild again.
What if I am in an abusive marriage or my partner has chosen to walk in intentional and deliberate infidelity, I have forgiven him/her time and time again and she continues with this behaviour? You may ask.
Then I would counsel you to separate from him/her as you seek and mediation from a third party that is sober…You are not glorifying God by staying in an abusive marriage. You could easily end up dead or maimed or worse with an incurable STI. Take time apart and breathe, reflect on the issues that the two of you are grappling with and see what God is saying to you.
Marriage is work and it takes a lot of work for it work, but divorce takes even more work, especially if there are kids and property involved, it can get really murky. Sometimes when you are in the midst of fighting and deciding you want to get divorced, far too many things and feelings are forgotten about and not considered because you are in the heat of the moment, the midst of what you feel is a definite finality in your marriage.
Divorce is painful, it is a ripping of the heart, it is like piercing your soul with a long knife and mercilessly shredding it to pieces. Whether you are the one who initiated or your spouse or it was a mutual agreement, it is never a walk in the park. I don’t have an easy answer for you, but I do have two things for you to ponder:
1. God still loves you and cares about you and your situation and he wants to heal you only if you will allow him.
2. Your marriage failed but that doesn’t mean that you are a failure
Matthew 19:3-11
WORD FOR TODAY: Dealing With Loss Of Marriage
Yes, love of God sustains marriage. But what if one partner just does whatever he or she wants because they think that is okay. Even Christians?
So, the really impossible situation is where men can do whatever they want in Kenya because they know the law (unjust law) supports their infidelity. If they want to be unfaithful they just marry another and another and another. And the first wife doesn’t even the right (according to the unjust Marriage Act of 2014) to know if he is married to any of these paramours. I call them paramours because they are just lusty women who want a man to take care of them and they don’t care if they get a man who is already married. What has become of Kenyan Christian society when even Christians practice this kind of nonsense. It doesn’t matter whether the law supports this–this is for men who are a law unto themselves and against God’s ways of love and faithfulness. Do you love God or do you love filthy mammon (mammon can be paramours as well or anything that takes the place of true love of Him and doing to others as you would have them do to you). So, which is it? For most of the MPs in 2014 (all males) it was legalization of ‘secret’ marriages/wives. (I emphasize ‘secret’ because according to the law men don’t have to tell their wives they are getting married to another one) Is that really the way most Kenyans practice marriage? Then women should run, run, run away from such men and such an ilegitimate arrangement because it offers no security for the women and children of such marriages. If so, it will destroy the society form within because of all the ‘secret’ marriages and the poor children and wives who will suffer because of infidelity and poverty that is sanctioned by an unjust law. This was a selfish law made by selfish males (I call them males because they certainly are not real men who love God and cannot, or don’t want to be faithful to a wife because they love only themselves and whatever female victims they can trick into marrying them in ‘secret’.) So what can be done? Challenge an unjust law in Constitutional Court so that it can be repaired to be fair for women and children of these unjust and ungodly marriages. If the law was made so Muslims could have multiple wives legally, well, it should have stated as applying to Muslims, but surely they would not be ‘secret’ wives or ‘limitless’ number of wives as this unjust law currently allows ‘limitless’ wives and that is not the custom or practice of any type of mainstream religion. Men of faith in God are not able to just abandon their wife and prance off to another marriage or woman without taking reponsibility for his decision to marry the first one and to care for the children they have together.