I AM

I was told many years ago, through the mouth of a divine oracle that I would write books, and I wrote the first one as a general inspirational work that focused on direction and purpose for the believer. I thought that to be the general direction that all my writing would follow in until a ground-shifting started taking place.  Slowly brewing marriage discord that would end up in divorce opened up the earth beneath me. Having been married for 30 years, I understood intermittent discord to be part and parcel of any marriage journey, but it ending up in divorce came as a true shock for me.

The intensity of the struggle and the associated trauma and pain that led up to the divorce was both a bitter pill to swallow and a wounding too serious to bear. In my fight to save my marriage I went knocking on the doors of many for help – pastors, friends and family. What I found was both revelatory and disturbing. The friends we shared had simply abandoned me, yet kept their contact with my wife. The family became divided along the lines of loyalty, and the pastors were disturbingly knowledge deficient around the matter of biblical marriage. I counted twelve of them whose help I sought out, including a christian psychotherapist, and their counsel proved to be utterly worthless.

It was all these things compounded which became the catalyst that drove me to find out the detail around Biblical marriage for myself. What I came to know became a revelation even for me. There was no refuting the fact that growing up in a Christian home means nothing if your biblical knowledge is found wanting. Well into my 50’s and having been ‘in the church’ all my life, it was my study into the search for answers around my marriage predicament that brought me into the knowledge and a greater understanding of what Biblical marriage is all about. I had never known what I came to know, even though like I said, I had spent my entire life within the walls of churches.

Armed with the knowledge and the obvious realisation that I could never be the only one caught up in marriage turmoil, I made it my assignment to write what I learnt. But it was not just the knowledge that would come to frame my views on the subject of christian marriage and how it ought to be lived out, but the tumultuous experience of going through marriage dissolution would speak equally powerfully into the matter as well.

What I was subjected to and what I was made to walk through was an intense, bruising encounter, one with episodes and interactions that I never imagined I will ever experience in my lifetime. It shaped me, albeit having been an excruciating time spent on the Potter’s wheel. It realigned me to focus on saving others from this tumultuous experience called divorce.

I spent 5 years walking in a brutally damaging marriage storm whose ultimate act of destruction was the demise of my marriage. I am now divorced. I walk in pain in that identity. The man I once was is no longer the man that I now am, because pain and purpose walk together in me. Whatever purpose I thought I previously had has now become identified and defined in the purpose I now carry – to teach people about Christ’s cause for, and His ideal concerning marriage, and to save marriages from succumbing to the misaligned position of divorce, which is contrary in keeping and with having an identity in Christ.