Last year I moved my men’s small group from the Denton Square to my house 6 miles south.  A world apart into a seemingly perfect community called Lantana.  Very quickly I was surrounded by some guys who were divorced, one of them at the beginning of his, he was a wreck.

There are some other situations I was involved in that had to do with Divorce and then there was some conversations I was having with my Pastor on the same.  The whole of it caused me to find myself in deep contemplations about it and not only that remembering back into my own when I was 27.   I also found myself arguing with my pastor for hours upon hours although it was really only me representing his side of the argument.  I think you know what I mean…

You know the church both small c and big C have quite a few different stances on the issue, it is a plague in our society within the church and without, has been for as long as I can remember.  I found out during all of this as I began to focus on my small group, rethinking some future goals in regards to Lantana there is a quiet little stat laying out there in that there has been 12 divorces within my church from couples living in my perfect community in the last 8 years and more near divorces…  Then recently the count went up to 13 and then I found out a Lantana VCC couple is walking it out with 3 other couples (non lantana) who are nearing divorce.

Then….  I ran into this song.

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It wrecked me, as I began to put myself into the words:

I need to go outside
I need to leave the smoke
‘Cause I can’t go on living in this same sick joke
It seems our lives have taken on a different kind of twist
Now that you have given me the perfect gift
You have given me the gift

For we have fallen from our shelves
To face the truth about ourselves
And we have tumbled from our trees
Tumbled from our trees

Its when a relationship gets to be a sick joke that it becomes the most difficult to stay in it.  To further complicate matters, you have already begun to fall from the shelf, probably both of you to get to that point in the first place.  Falling from the shelf seems to me to be saying you are not able to be your true self, the one that can see clearly.  The smoke gets black, you have no choice but to leave or that is the filter and in some cases it really is true.  You just are left with little choice.  The memories make me cry, they still hurt and it makes me hurt for other people caught up in the same ugly web of pain, confusion, anger….  A lot is at stake.

I remember the final fall so clearly, at this stage I am certain it will take some severe mental disabilities to forget.  I did finally fall from the shelf and I fell hard, for years I lay there off the shelf flopping on the concrete.  There was even an exact moment when I hit the ground, the details of that are for another blog but that cold hard concrete hurt.  You could also say I was drop kicked out of the Garden of Eden, it’s the same metaphor.  I have described to others this one moment as me being like Judas hanging myself spiritually because in that exact moment is when I began to try to forget about God, the promiser of my original marriage…  and many times I did a pretty good job at that again and again through a couple of decades.

For a while though I just could not get my mind off the two words “Perfect Gift”.  How could that be and then one day this thought hit me and I believe it was the Holy Spirit inserting himself into this conversation in only my mind.  “There would be no Claire without the divorce, there would be no friend like Leisha who has inserted herself so deep into my soul being a friend in those places of deep deep pain”.

Then this kind of idea hit me.  We in the church walk a razors edge with this ultimate division of humans.  We have to do everything we can to hold people together and if we can’t then we have to love them like no one else because they are getting the opposite of that from quite a few angles.

I believe now that the creator of the universe who crashes galaxies into each other, who made a planet earth with massive plates that slowly grind together causing all sorts of disruption on scales whole nations can’t protect themselves against also by those things, creates untold beauty within the results.

I don’t know of a verse that backs up what I am saying other than ALL the ones that tell me to love people.  Just love them.  And then there is the one that says in an ancient peoples way that I can’t love them more than I love myself.

Thank You Lord for talking to me, thank you for giving me the mind that thinks like I do and thank you for giving me a heart that can hurt with other people.  Thank you for the perfect gift, it’s too bad I needed that to face the truths about myself and even more so its too bad its been a facing that has taken 30 years. But I did need that gift to face myself…

Thank you soooooo much for my Leisha and my Claire, they are a perfect gift too.  Most of all may I have the ears to hear your voice as I try to be a conduit for Freedom and your love on either side of this razors edge I now get to walk.   Blink Blink