Not an option

What would you do if something you were considering as a solution to a problem were removed from you as an option? You would redirect your thinking and busy your mind with other possible solutions. I mean, this is what you would have to do if the first idea you contemplated were absolutely and definitively out of the question. If you had car problems and wished you could buy a new car, but didn’t have the money and so didn’t have that option, I daresay you would start thinking hard along the lines of how to make your present vehicle work.

It is the same with marriage. Christian couples need to enter into marriage thinking: “Divorce is not an option.”

I am not talking now about cases of sexual infidelity, which Jesus Himself cites as cause for divorce. We can cross that bridge when we come to it. But for us to go into a married state from day one with divorce as a thinkable, albeit remote, option in the event that things don’t work out, that attitude should have no place in a Christian.

I am old enough to remember a time when people got married and planned to live together until death. I am not saying that no one at all got divorced in the 1950s, but I will say this: It was a whole lot fewer than if divorce had been a viable cultural option. As a matter of fact, I knew only one divorced couple in my entire childhood (unless I am forgetting someone), and it was a bit of a town scandal. Other people stuck together till death did them part, like they promised at the altar. They did not all make the best of it, but some did. If you know you will be sharing a roof with another person for the duration, you will make the duration as pleasant as possible, if you are wise.

What is it to be wise? It is to realize that this present life is exceedingly short and that afterward there is reward for those who do good (Romans 2:6-10) out of fear of the Lord. And here is the unexpected bonus: Those who “lose their lives” (Matthew 16:25) for Christ’s sake by persistently loving their imperfect spouses find that their spouses become different people by being loved that way. And those who do the loving become transformed as well.

Therefore let the child of God say to himself: “Divorce is not an option.” With his mind thus purified of the seed of his own union’s destruction, he can move into possession of his full inheritance in Christ.