How does GRACE WORK when... dealing with DIVORCE? [S3.E9]
Chapters:
- 00:01 - Introduction to the Misfit Preachers
- 04:13 - The Impact of Divorce and Acceptance
- 09:49 - Reflections on Marriage and Regret
- 15:47 - The Search for Grace in Divorce
- 22:58 - Finding Grace in Isolation
- 27:11 - Finding Hope Amidst Pain
Divorce is a tough cookie to crumble, and today, we're cracking it open with our usual blend of humor and heartfelt conversation. We're diving deep into the nitty-gritty of what happens when marriages go kaput and how we can sprinkle some grace on those messy situations. Like, seriously, over 50% of people we know have been touched by divorce—inside and outside the church—so it’s a big deal! We’re sharing our own stories and the lessons we've learned about the pain and the redemption that can come from such heart-wrenching experiences. So grab your favorite snack, settle in, and let’s navigate this wild ride together, because trust me, grace is lurking around every corner, even in the chaos!
Takeaways:
- Divorce can feel like a tornado of chaos, leaving emotional wreckage in its wake, but there's hope.
- Finding grace in the chaos of divorce means recognizing the beauty in new relationships and life experiences.
- Living with the consequences of divorce is tough, but it can lead to personal growth and gratitude for the future.
- Even in the messiness of life, moments of joy and connection can serve as reminders of grace and healing.
Transcript
You're listening to the misfit preachers, talian Chavigian, Jean LaRue and Byron Yan from ProdigalPodcast.com we're plagiarizing Jesus one podcast at a time.
Speaker A:Now here are the misfits.
Speaker B:This is misfit preachers always.
Speaker B:I'm flanked by Jean Larue.
Speaker B:Hello, Nullian.
Speaker B:Chavidian.
Speaker C:Good to be with you.
Speaker B:How are we, gents?
Speaker D:Spectacular.
Speaker D:Glad to be here.
Speaker B:That didn't sound sincere.
Speaker D:I'm sorry.
Speaker C:It sounded pretty sincere to me.
Speaker C:Well, Byron, I.
Speaker C:I don't want to be here.
Speaker D:Byron thinks he's the Holy Spirit, which is the net net on that one.
Speaker C:The things we talk about around this table are super important.
Speaker C:Not because we are important people.
Speaker D:Right.
Speaker C:But because the subject matter is a matter of life and death.
Speaker C:At least it has been in my experience.
Speaker D:And I never had anybody.
Speaker D:If I had a place where I could have this type of conversation, I would have never put it down.
Speaker C:Yeah, it.
Speaker B:It.
Speaker B:These are the sermons that preachers won't offer and people never hear but need to hear.
Speaker B:Let me give you a subject you've.
Speaker A:Been listening to the mystic preachers like subscribe and share.
Speaker A:How does resources at prodigal Podcast.
Speaker A:That's prodigal.
Speaker A:P R O D I G or.
Speaker C:When we are divorced, looking back at our life.
Speaker B:But let's apply grace to the concept, the experience of divorce, which the three of us have experienced.
Speaker B:And a little more than 50% of everybody we come in contact with is either in or has experienced in the church and outside of the church.
Speaker C:My wife Stacy and I were doing sort of this mental survey of people at the sanctuary and marriages in particular.
Speaker C:How many people at our church are still on their first marriage?
Speaker C:Dude, we couldn't come up with more than 15% of the people in our church, which means roughly 85% of the people, including the pastor and his wife, are people on their second, sometimes third and fourth marriages.
Speaker C:So it is as much of a problem inside religious circles as it is outside religious circles for sure.
Speaker B:When I think of a graceless context where there is none offered and often none embraced or seen, it has to be the turmoil, the chaos, the vitriol that can exist within the context of divorce.
Speaker B:If there's any place where there is no restraint.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:On the self and the self will, self preservation, especially when lawyers get involved.
Speaker B:It is in this space.
Speaker B:It is.
Speaker B:It is.
Speaker B:It's hard to find, I think, and apply, I'm certain, the gospel in this space because it is so painful so jagged, so confusing.
Speaker B:And it meets most people kind of at the base of their humanity.
Speaker D:It's the amalgamation of all fear.
Speaker D:The financial piece, the children piece, the provision piece, the savings piece, the retirement piece, the identity piece, the social piece, the social circle, the friends.
Speaker D:All of them come together at once in.
Speaker D:In an environment that by definition is adversarial.
Speaker D:Right.
Speaker C:By necessity, almost, yeah, it is adversarial.
Speaker D:So it is a powder keg for self righteousness for me.
Speaker D:Concurrent victimization.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Self pity, self pity.
Speaker D:Self medication.
Speaker D:We could go down the list.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:I would say that I've been divorced now for almost 10 years and I will live with the consequences of that for the rest of my life.
Speaker C:I'm grateful for the life that God has given me and the people, both new and old, meaning people from my former life that I'm surrounded by now.
Speaker C:Grateful beyond measure for my wife Stacy.
Speaker C:Grateful for the relationship, the close relationship I have with all three of my kids.
Speaker C:But the consequences of going through a divorce will follow me all the days of my life.
Speaker C:I've accepted that.
Speaker C:It took me a while to accept that because I would become very nostalgic and wish that I had a go back in time machine to do things differently.
Speaker C:I really lived in the past in my mind for a long time, regretting the decisions that I made.
Speaker C:And I've arrived on the other side of that, for the most part, incredibly grateful for the redemption for the life that God has given me.
Speaker C:Incredibly grateful.
Speaker C:My heart is filled with gratitude.
Speaker C:I do not deserve the life that God has given me today in light of what I've done to squander the life that he gave me previously.
Speaker C:But the consequences of that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Speaker C:They just will.
Speaker C:I mean, I will.
Speaker C:I live with a low grade fever of sadness every day of my life.
Speaker C:I don't deal with deep depression, thank God, but I do deal with a low grade fever of sadness that marks almost every moment of every day in some way, shape or form.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I was going to ask you when you, when you talked about the consequences of divorce, when we say that most people think external.
Speaker B:Once you get, Once you process through all the external consequences that come, what you're really left with are the internal, yes, consequences of it, the relational consequences, the, you know, the intangible fibers of life that make life worth living, the things that you go through.
Speaker B:I remember when divorce was on the horizon for me, when it became real.
Speaker B:A friend of mine at the time who was divorced and remarried who actually had a Very, very rocky and toxic relationship with his first wife.
Speaker B:There was no love loss at the end, despite that toxicity and the pain of having been in that marriage after divorce.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker B:So he sits me down after that.
Speaker B:He's remarried, he's looking at me, and he goes, byron, if I could explain to you the pain you're about to encounter in ways that are true and real, the way that I felt them after the time, the regret I felt despite what it was like after having gone through that.
Speaker B:If I could give you an accurate description and feeling in this moment, you would do everything in your power to avoid it right now.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:And he said, but I know that I can't.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:And when you get to the other side of it, you will come to me and go, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker B:And after the fact I did that.
Speaker B:There are just.
Speaker B:They're just innate realities, existential pieces to this.
Speaker B:The.
Speaker B:The pain of which when they begin to fall apart, it's.
Speaker B:Is.
Speaker B:Defines description.
Speaker B:And you can only give an average description of on the other side.
Speaker B:And that was true when I.
Speaker B:When I wrote about this, I talked about how the.
Speaker B:The things that mattered most in life were vaporized by the process and the experience.
Speaker B:And I suppose in.
Speaker B:In that way, it's some.
Speaker B:Somewhat of a cautionary tale to the listener out there that if you find yourself in a space and there is any opportunity.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:To double down on the work necessary to keep that together.
Speaker B:If you can do that in God's grace and by his power, if it's possible at all, take the opportunity.
Speaker C:I wholeheartedly.
Speaker C:Wholeheartedly.
Speaker C:And the regret.
Speaker C:For instance, your friend who had a miserable first marriage, got divorced and shared what he shared with you.
Speaker C:The fact that he still dealt with regret tells you because I've experienced the same thing.
Speaker C:Although my first marriage was not miserable, but I experienced the same thing.
Speaker C:The regret that you deal with on a daily basis may not be the regret of actually getting divorced.
Speaker C:It's the regret of failing in such a way that your marriage got to the point where divorce seemed to be the only viable option.
Speaker C:So that goes back years.
Speaker C:I was married 21 years, the first time together for 23.
Speaker C:Kim and I met when we were both 19.
Speaker C:Actually, I was 19, she was 18.
Speaker C:She was about to turn 19.
Speaker C:Grew up together in many ways, had children together.
Speaker C:The first home I bought was with Kim.
Speaker C:I mean, we built a life.
Speaker C:And someone asked me recently, if you could go back in time and do it all over again, what would you do?
Speaker C:And I said, If I could go back in time, I would go back and be a better husband.
Speaker C:I would put more work into my marriage.
Speaker C:There is so much at stake.
Speaker C:It's not just you and your spouse.
Speaker C:There is family and friends and a life that has been built that will be lost in a fairly significant way if that bond is broken.
Speaker C:And I think there's good precedence for that.
Speaker C:I mean, the marriage relationship is the only relationship in which the Bible describes two people becoming one flesh.
Speaker C:It doesn't say that about our relationship with our kids.
Speaker C:It doesn't say that our relationship with our friends or our parents.
Speaker C:It says that about our relationship to our spouse.
Speaker C:And the, the tearing apart of that one flesh has tentacles that go way further and way deeper than you think.
Speaker C:Way further.
Speaker C:The people that exit your life as a result in laws, whether it be mother and father in law, brother or sister in law, mutual friends.
Speaker C:I mean, the relational loss in the context of divorce, and you alluded to this, Sean, the relational loss is so much bigger than simply two people getting divorced.
Speaker D:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker D:I can remember exactly where I was standing when I was talking to my ex wife, Kim, and Valerie was standing next to me.
Speaker D:And I said to Kim, if I had had the benefit of the counsel and the counseling and the therapy and the patience that I should have shown, we would still be together.
Speaker D:And so the impatience, the selfishness, other things like that, I look at that, those are deep regret.
Speaker D:There's no take backs, no, there's no way to fix it.
Speaker D:Valerie looked at Kim and said, and if I had had that with Chris, the same would be true for us.
Speaker D:And so I think the, and this isn't.
Speaker D:I mean, I want us to get to where the gospel speaks to.
Speaker D:This could be the, the pragmatic, pragmatic, like, hey, today's episode, divorce sucks.
Speaker D:What's new?
Speaker C:Yeah, right.
Speaker D:I mean, like, yeah, we got check.
Speaker C:Yeah, but this, but describing the ways in which it sucks is existentially helpful for me and for other people.
Speaker D:Well, and to that point, without understanding, because there was, there was a period of shame, embarrassment, feelings of failure, actual failure, all those things that paralyzed me, I wouldn't have been able to say that to Kim were it not for Jesus entering in.
Speaker D:You know, as we talked about on a previous season, you know, we said, where does, where does, where do we find grace?
Speaker D:When.
Speaker D:And you flipped it and said, where does grace find you?
Speaker D:When?
Speaker D:And where grace found me was in that place of shame, all those things.
Speaker D:And Jesus said, okay, like the same place when he knelt down with the Woman caught in adultery.
Speaker D:And he said, you know, where are your accusers?
Speaker D:I'm still here.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker D:And so the gospel comes along and grace is applied in those deep, deep, deep wounds, many of which that are self inflicted.
Speaker C:And I, I think while I agree with everything you just said, I think for the listener, I'm only, I'm assuming this.
Speaker C:It's an educated guess, but I'm assuming this because these are the kinds of conversations I have on a weekly basis.
Speaker C:But that sounds great, you know, Jesus comes alongside of me and says, I got you, I love you, you're mine.
Speaker C:What does that look like?
Speaker C:What does that feel like?
Speaker C:In what ways is that evidenced in you on the ground, that sort of thing.
Speaker C:So I can look, for example, as I mentioned a minute ago, at my life.
Speaker C:And while I live with this low grade fever of sadness, while I live with these regrets of an unfinished love story, you know, what could have been, what might have been.
Speaker C:Where does grace find me in those moments?
Speaker C:It finds me in the relationship with my kids.
Speaker C:It finds me in the laughter of my grandchildren who still love their tutu even though he and Nona aren't married.
Speaker C:I find it in the tender acceptance of my flaws by my wife, Stacy.
Speaker C:I find it in so many different places.
Speaker C:I see it in so many different places.
Speaker C:And all of them, all of those things are winks from God saying to me, I've never left you, I've never forsaken you.
Speaker C:The friends that I have, the opportunities that I have, the fact that I live in a place where I want to live, I drive a car that I like, I have the friends that I have.
Speaker C:You know, these are all massive evidences of grace.
Speaker C:My kids and I went to music festival in Miami recently.
Speaker C:House music.
Speaker C:Some people may like it, others may not.
Speaker C:We happen to love it on the beach in Miami.
Speaker C:Loved it.
Speaker C:And we're, we're.
Speaker C:I mean, it's like midnight and I'm with all of my kids right in the front.
Speaker C:There's, you know, thousands of people there.
Speaker C:We're laughing, dancing, just letting the music move us in all of the right ways.
Speaker C:And in those moments, I'm so aware of this being a moment of worship, really.
Speaker C:I look at that and I go, I see signals of transcendence all over the place here, all over the place.
Speaker C:So when I went through my divorce, or if you're going through a divorce, I would just say grace is all around you.
Speaker C:In the midst of the chaos, in the midst of the rubble, it's around you.
Speaker C:You may have to look for it a little bit harder because things are so noisy and messy, but it's there.
Speaker C:And all of those things are winks from God.
Speaker B:Yeah, I.
Speaker B:When I.
Speaker B:When I.
Speaker B:After the divorce had happened, my kids came to me and to their mom and did an informal survey.
Speaker B:The question to me was, dad, had you not met your affair partner, had you not left mom for this person, do you think you and mom would have been divorced anyway?
Speaker B:My answer was yes.
Speaker B:When they asked their mom that question, the answer was no, which identifies the divide in perspective that was present while we were married.
Speaker B:We were living in two compartments inside the same marriage, uninformed by the other party as to what was going on.
Speaker B:Which leads me to say what I said in a previous episode.
Speaker B:And I think this is grace in that it's a dose of truth and reality on the horizon, that no one who is married believes truly that divorces happen because one person failed in one way in the marriage.
Speaker B:You have to climb a tree before you fall out of it.
Speaker D:Right?
Speaker B:And part of the grace and the process eventually is coming to the point where you can own, as John says, 100% of your 50%, because divorce requires the lack of civility and the presence of self preservation in the process.
Speaker B:And I would say to the person that's there, here's where you're gonna find grace through the divorce process.
Speaker B:It's quite possible because it's true for most people.
Speaker B:You're gonna see versions of yourself in that process that you hope to never, ever see again.
Speaker B:It is an ugly battle where self arrives fully, fully armed.
Speaker B:And the lack of restraint in those spaces, it's frightening.
Speaker B:It is.
Speaker B:It was frightening to me what I saw coming across the other side of the table of these people who had lived and loved each other for so long just fell apart.
Speaker B:And when you go through it and it's so damaging, you come out on the other side.
Speaker B:You make decisions that you're going to regret.
Speaker B:You and get in behind your lawyers and let them do what they're you're supposed to do.
Speaker B:There's a certain level of self disgust that happens.
Speaker B:And it was that way for me for any number of reasons.
Speaker B:And where I found the gospel was in that space that despite what I had done, the pieces that I had done to cause it, Christ, my heavenly father, loved me through it all, loved the person underneath, the confusion, the vitriol, all those things that were happening, the tornado of chaos that was around it.
Speaker B:I found peace in the center of that hurricane, in grace.
Speaker D:So when you're Done.
Speaker C:I want to say, well, I just want a question.
Speaker C:I want to ask you guys a question because I'm thinking about people in my life, people that I'm sure are listening, who hear us describe the surrounding grace in the midst of chaos.
Speaker C:And they're like, dude, I cheated on my spouse and my kids haven't talked to me in 10 years.
Speaker C:I don't have any friends.
Speaker C:I live in a smaller town where everyone knows my story and I don't have the luxury of moving to another place and starting fresh.
Speaker C:Like, I don't want us.
Speaker C:I want to be careful.
Speaker C:So me in particular to come across like, yeah, grace is everywhere.
Speaker C:I mean, my kids are great and I'm good and my relationship with my ex wife is, is fine.
Speaker C:And I've got a great new wife and newish in nine years.
Speaker C:But still I, you know, I want to be sensitive to the people who, who are 10 years removed from their divorce and primary relationships have been forever lost, never to return in this life.
Speaker D:Right, right.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker D:I think to that person, the pain is a daily reality.
Speaker C:Sure.
Speaker D:And they would say, yes and amen to everything we're saying.
Speaker D:And it's still continuing in their lives.
Speaker D:There's still work, there's still grace to be found on a daily basis in those things.
Speaker D:And the fact that God would surround you with new relationships, new things like that, part of, part of it is really leaning into the loss.
Speaker D:And those things are really lost.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker D:And to be able to say, okay, I can find myself at the bottom with God sitting next to me.
Speaker B:And so I, I can answer this from my own personal experience.
Speaker B:Yes, I have my relationship with my adult children now.
Speaker B:I'm grateful for that.
Speaker B:I lost it for the better part of a year, for the better part of three years because of all the, all that I went through and the cancellation and all those sorts of things, the lawsuit, the loss of friends, everything evaporated.
Speaker B:My entire network fabric evaporated.
Speaker B:I was alone for two years, completely isolated, besides some very close friends, maybe one to two texts a week, no phone calls.
Speaker B:And it was crushing and despairing and depressing.
Speaker B:And I saw no way forward.
Speaker B:I saw no way forward.
Speaker B:And the door I walked through, through my divorce and all of those circumstances became a wall that could not be scaled.
Speaker B:I was completely trapped.
Speaker B:No hope, no light on the horizon.
Speaker B:Lost who I was as a person.
Speaker B:I would have clawed through something if I knew the direction to go, but I did not know the direction to go.
Speaker B:Completely paralyzed by it.
Speaker B:And then slowly I began to realize that the parts of me that led me to do the things that I did that led to the consequence that I was in, or being exposed in my isolation and being put to death in a certain way, and in that I was being brought back to life.
Speaker B:It takes a while.
Speaker B:It takes a while.
Speaker B:But to that person, I would say you.
Speaker B:You begin to see the shoots of grass coming up in the hard concrete of that circumstance.
Speaker C:And it may not be the places where you want it.
Speaker B:It is a completely different world and existence.
Speaker B:And if you hold on to what was before as the hope of the future, hope will never arise.
Speaker D:Well said.
Speaker B:But if you are willing, if you are willing to let God in his grace, design a new footprint of what existence looks like, you will be shocked at the happiness that you can find in it.
Speaker B:And just last thing, my isolation went from isolation to solitude.
Speaker B:And the distinction between those two things is very important because in isolation, grace isn't there.
Speaker B:In my mind.
Speaker B:No one's there.
Speaker B:Solitude is grace and me and God and every hope, no expectation at all.
Speaker B:Anyway, say, I'll let you close this out.
Speaker D:Yeah, I just.
Speaker D:I appreciate your pushback.
Speaker D:To me initially saying, oh, that all sounds well and good.
Speaker D:The Jesus part, I think what's missing in that is, you know, I love to cook.
Speaker D:From New Orleans.
Speaker D:I love to cook.
Speaker D:You can.
Speaker D:You can cook a dish and you can put some.
Speaker D:Some meat in a pan with some garlic, and at the end of the day, there's some flavor.
Speaker D:You put it in a pressure cooker and you pull that meat out, it is saturated.
Speaker D:It is flavored from the inside.
Speaker D:And I think what I was describing when I said God met me there was the Jesus that had been as a side, on the plate, as part of this life that I had, God left me in the pressure cooker with nothing but grace.
Speaker D:And that's why it's so remarkably different, because you start to see those shoots come to the cracks.
Speaker B:You know, telling your question.
Speaker B:Question to me is profound.
Speaker B:I mean, and to define my experience, the freedom was found in letting go of what was before and allowing, quote, unquote, God to shape in my mind a completely new future.
Speaker C:And the work that God is committed to is not restoring some measure of external, you know, things.
Speaker C:Your relationships with your children may be lost.
Speaker C:What God will do on the inside amidst that incredible pain is set you free from needing that relationship to save your life.
Speaker C:So there's.
Speaker C:I mean, I've got a friend who is in his 70s, divorced many 35 years ago, left his first wife or his second wife.
Speaker C:His he and his new wife have been New wife He and his second wife have been married for 35 years.
Speaker C:They're both in their 70s.
Speaker C:Amazing people.
Speaker C:They're in our church.
Speaker C:He has one daughter that hasn't talked to him in that amount of time.
Speaker C:Hasn't talked to him.
Speaker C:Never a phone call.
Speaker C:Happy Father's Day.
Speaker C:Happy birthday.
Speaker C:In fact, she tells her children, his grandchildren, when they ask about him, oh, he died many years ago.
Speaker C:This guy lives with excruciating pain.
Speaker C:He sits here every single Sunday listening to the message of grace and finds hope in that in whatever way God decides to dispense hope.
Speaker C:So the story doesn't always end in this life, romantically.
Speaker C:Just doesn't.
Speaker C:I mean, everything that we want and everything that we long for at the deepest part of our being will be satisfied in the life to come.
Speaker C:Not this one.
Speaker C:Some things lost in this life will never come back.
Speaker B:Great discussion.
Speaker B:Painful discussion.
Speaker D:Agreed.
Speaker A:You've been listening to the misfit preachers like subscribe and share more grace centered resources@prodigalpodcasts.com that's prodigal P R O D I G A L podcasts with an s dot com.
