Times of Difficulty

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.”

We are living in Paul’s “times of difficulty”. Can any Christian honestly dispute that?

If you ever doubt it for a moment, reflect on what you are seeing on YouTube and your TV, reading about online and in your newspaper — if anyone still reads anything other than the free tabloids they hand out on the subway. I did walk past one fellow delivering the national paper early one morning last week, but the houses of his subscribers were so far apart he had to use his car to do his deliveries efficiently. That’s where print is headed: the way of the dinosaur.

Like marriage.

The End of the Line

Anyway, other than the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, here is the biblical evidence we are in the last days:

“For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.”

After this general exploration of the omens of a culture on the verge of collapse, Paul goes on to describe the problems you get when churches allow men with these attributes to become teachers. It does not go well, but that’s not my subject this morning.

I was talking to a friend the other day about yet another couple from our church circles who are parting ways. For those of us who have lived out the consequences of breaking a marriage, each new instance we encounter just makes us increasingly sad. These Christians touted their breakup as “mutual”, which baffles me even more than one party unilaterally setting sail into the sunset.

A New Low

I understand how one partner may snap when they feel they have lost control of their own life and despair of ever making it work with a person who has dashed all their expectations of marriage, cannot agree with them about anything, humiliates them daily, has addiction issues, or whose self-indulgence or sloth expose them to financial disaster. None of these is legitimate biblical justification for divorce, but one can at least comprehend the exiting partner’s frustration and understand how one day they might just pack a bag. Today, far from viewing the unexpected disintegration of their marriage as a God-given opportunity to reflect on what they might have done wrong, the abandoned partner quickly moves on, making a return impossible even if the partner who left reconsiders his or her rash decision.

So I get how a straw can break a camel’s back after years of unhappiness, and a marriage blows up overnight that almost nobody knew was at risk. But how do you get two professing Christians to agree before the Lord, their church and all their friends and relatives to do something together that we all know God hates? How, when they are obviously getting along well enough to come to terms about the circumstances of separation before anyone knows it’s happening? If the decision is mutual, it’s appalling; if it’s not, it’s a lie that indicts both parties for promoting it. Christians separating by mutual consent is a new low and a sign of the times. Times of difficulty, when society no longer even pretends to have standards vaguely approximating God’s.

The Way of a Man with a Maid

Not all the adjectives on the above list may fairly be applied to either or both parties in every broken Christian marriage, but any or all of “ungrateful”, “unappeasable”, “reckless”, “lovers of pleasure”, “without self-control” — and, yes, even “treacherous” — well may. Even where we might not say these qualities are characteristic of a person, put them under the pressure of a failing marriage, and that may be exactly what you see.

One of the saddest aspects of the new normal is that I’m seeing so many fellow believers willingly take on the role of enabler, pooling their ignorance in gossip sessions masquerading as aids to praying intelligently for the marriage, even helping the precipitating party justify his or her behavior and reinforcing their self-adopted stance as victim.

In case it’s unclear, when a marriage breaks up, nobody — and I do mean nobody — ever has the full story. Nobody is qualified either to pass judgment on one party or the other with respect to the reasons for their unhappiness and the extent of their desperation or to exonerate the perceived innocent. What onlookers often tout as evidence of guilt, abuse or chronic bad character from the less-well-marketed party is usually nothing more than a smorgasbord of opinion, guesswork, bias from personal experience and managed spin from the “victim”. I have been fooled time and time again by sad protestations of innocence from the “injured party”, sucked into a vortex of groundless sympathy that evaporates the moment contradictory information arises from an unexpected quarter.

The Seeming Right

As Solomon put it, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” Rarely have truer words been written, and never are they more apt than with respect to the marriage relationship, where 90% of the venom, apathy, disrespect, selfishness, lack of patience, dishonesty and sexual incontinence that drives men and women apart has been talked through or endured in comparative secrecy. Which is as it should be, if you think about it.

But our respect for the “one-fleshness” of Christian marriage means that in most cases nobody but the parties knows whether any random horrible quotation excerpted from a furious email or overheard in the middle of a row is actually a fair representation of what went on in that home on a daily basis. It may be a wild outlier caused by the grievous emotional provocation of abandonment, terrible financial stress, children acting out or the brutal grind of the process of parting. Sometimes, where denial, faulty memory and bad pattern recognition are in play, not even the parties know what the truth is or can find a way to see past their hurt to the qualities for which they married in the first place.

The Impossibility of Objectivity

In a normal court case, evidence is collected and two sides fully presented to as impartial a jury as may be found. It’s an imperfect process that sometimes results in wrong outcomes, but when the law is applied consistently, it’s probably the best that we can hope for given that we live in a fallen world. But when Christian friends come alongside one separating partner or another these days, there is none of that objectivity to be found in our thinking. There can’t possibly be. The acrimony of an unexpected breakup puts all third parties in one camp or another even if they would prefer not to be. Invariably, we have far more of one side of the story than we realize and far too little of the other. We lack the balance to render any kind of just opinion.

And we keep talking about it anyway.

The spirit of the age is relentlessly callous and partisan. It cheers on the divorcing parties and rejoices in uncovering dirty little secrets it always hoped were true. Online declarations of separation are greeted with “You go, girl” from the feminists and “I told you so, bro” from the incels. The spirit of our age is slanderous. The most common reaction I have seen to the announcement of Prime Minister Trudeau’s separation from his wife of 18 years has been “I always thought he was gay anyway.” We live in heartless times, and we have been warned. As those called to be faithful, we need to guard our own hearts against the intrusion any vestige of the spirit of the age by spiritual osmosis.

The Wounds of a Friend

To be a faithful friend to both parties in a divorce is a lovely aspiration, and one rarely realized. Usually one or the other (and sometimes both) will not let you close enough to act on your goodwill. But faithfulness and truth are intimately tied together in scripture. A faithful friend will not be quick to express her unsolicited opinion. Equally, she will not actively or passively endorse recklessness, unappeasability, ingratitude or backstabbing, even when the prevailing narrative of the moment makes them seem a justifiable reaction.

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” Those wounds are not injuries a friend incurs on your behalf. Read the proverb carefully: those are wounds they inflict on you in order to get your attention, call you back to reality and save you from yourself when you are in the middle of trying to rewrite history in your head. A faithful friend will strive to be a comfort and help while minimizing opportunity to let you give vent to bitterness, petulance or endless rehearsal of ills you have suffered.

A Gentle Rebuke

This doesn’t have to be as annoying as it sounds. I remember one conversation with a godly older man in which he listened to me rattle on for a sentence or two, then quietly replied, “Yes, you mentioned that earlier.” That’s all. He didn’t need to say more. It was a carefully neutral reminder that I was repeating myself, which is almost never useful, and usually indicates you have dropped into self-justification mode and are trying to pile up evidence on your own behalf. The reminder to move along stung a bit, but it was also welcome, especially when he didn’t belabor it.

And maybe that’s all it takes: the combination of unconditional love with the occasional helping of the way it really is when you step out of your delusion bubble and look at the world the way scripture does.

Christians in the process of divorcing could use more of that gentle, godly disapproval and less of a self-appointed cheering section. They will get enough cheering from the world without our help.