Shame

"Miller's don't get a divorce."

We were driving home from an Iowa basketball game on a late December evening. Dawson was sleeping in the back seat.  Our family had just returned home after spending a semester working all across Europe.  To put it mildly, our marriage was a wreck.  On a high-speed train from Paris back to Busingen, Germany, we'd had a fight and there was another declaration of the need to separate. That was the last weekend of October.  We'd hardly talked since.  The tension between us was palpable.  So the topic of my failing marriage was impossible to avoid on that cold and snowy trip back from Iowa City that night.

Dad was right, of course.  Out of the 24 of us Miller cousins, I'm only the second one to get a divorce.  I think most family members chalk up that first divorce as a mistake of youth, as she was only married for two years and things seem to be going just fine with her current husband.  While delivering the eulogy at my Grandma's funeral back in 2011, I shared the cumulative years of all the Miller cousins' marriages as a shining example of my Grandma's legacy.

Among the many beliefs I held during the demise of my marriage that I've now found to be completely false, one of them was that I'd be the black sheep of my family; a family full of doctors, pastors, missionaries and all-around wonderful people.  The debunking of false beliefs is going to be a common theme of this blog post as is the mind-blowing amount of unexpected grace and acceptance I've received.  That's been true of my cousins, too.  In fact, while talking through it all with one of my cousins last February, she assured me that we're all broken.  Sure, Millers look good on the outside (and generally are really good people) they are also simply much better at hiding their sin than other people.

The shame of living with a dying marriage, along with the reality of wanting it to die so I could move on, strangled the life out of every single relationship.  All the relationships of my life; my friends, my family, my son and, of course, God, were withering on the vine.  The shame was all-encompassing and utterly debilitating.

The shame was earned honestly, though.  In addition to the reality that "Millers don't get a divorce," my church upbringing taught me that real Christians never get divorced.  "Marriage is hard" is something I heard all too often.  While the statement, at face value, is accurate.  What's implied is "if you'd simply work a bit harder, the marriage would improve."  That's simply not true if both people aren't willing to work at it.  "Marriage is hard" means that if you'd just try harder and believe God more, the marriage would improve.  And if it doesn't improve, then the mark of true discipleship is to stay in the sick marriage, no matter how much it hurts.

Is that true?  Maybe, I'm not sure.  I continually hear Paul's admonition that husbands "love their wives as Christ loved the church."  The therapist, however helped me see that there were things happening in our relationship that precluded me from using that verse to beat myself over the head.  I had to let go of the shame that my particular interpretation of that Bible verse induced in me.

For my parents and, I believe, many other people in my church, divorced Christians were viewed as "second-rate Christians".  That attitude was tangible in my house.  And my parents' 40th wedding anniversary, which was a beautiful celebration, the renewal of vows ceremony being officiated by me, was held up as the pen-ultimate example of both God's blessing in their lives and their commitment to God.
That's a lot of weight to carry with you as you're living in a sick marriage.
To their credit, my parents have since apologize for and repented of that "second rate Christian" attitude they held toward divorced people.

If marriage is the most significant sign of your love for God, how could I pray to that God when everything inside of me wanted out of the marriage, at least the state into which the marriage had devolved.

I couldn't pray.
I couldn't read the Bible.
I couldn't sing in church.
It was all I could do to just listen to some Christian podcasts.
The shame was all-encompassing.
Stop me if you've heard this before... the shame was utterly debilitating.

It was all a lie, too.

Before learning it was a lie, however, I decided I didn't care if I lost, or significantly damaged, every significant relationship in my life.  I was so incredibly miserable I had to make a change.  So I found an apartment a block from Dawson's school and moved out of our house on Spruce and into that apartment on Friday, Dec 16th, 2016.

About a week after I moved out, Dawson and I were showing a house for a buyer-client couple.  This couple, who will reappear later in this series of blog posts, are pastors and some of the kindest, most faith-filled people I've ever known.  I was, of course, embarrassed to tell them that I was divorcing my wife.   I knew I'd be working with them for awhile and wouldn't be able to hide the fact that I was divorcing, so I confessed my situation to them.  What happened next was another one of those moments I'll never forget.

The wife responded with a bit of tears and a sudden sense of serendipity.  "I knew it," she gasped.  "I was having my prayer time this morning and God brought your face to my mind.  I knew something was going on with you."

Remember that, at this time, I was completely unable to pray.  I was separated from God by the wall of shame I'd allowed to build up around me.  In that empty house (which took me almost another year to sell), God, through the compassionate faith of that pastor, reached around my wall of shame to gather me in his embrace.
I almost hear an audible voice.
"You're not a fuck-up.  You're my son.  I love you.   You're my boy.  And nothing you ever do could change that fact."

That wall of shame started to crumble that day.

"Sin separates us from God."  A simple statement of Christian belief.
I believe it's the shame of the sinful act, however and not some legal status of the sinful act, that separates us from God.  We can't approach God because the voice of shame tells us that a shit-bag such as ourselves has no right to be in God's presence. 
Thanks be to God, Jesus dealt with our shame on the cross.  He hung naked as he died the type of death given to the terrorists of the day.  He took shame upon himself, bore our shame, so that we could be reconciled to the God from whom we were separated as a result of that shame.

Guilt says, "what I did was wrong."  Truthfully, I have plenty of guilt from the sin of divorce.  Shame says, "I am wrong."  I have no need for shame.

I've intentionally saved the final part of what my dad told me that night till the end of this post.  Immediately after making one of the most shaming statements I'd ever heard, my dad followed that up with quite possibly the most freeing, grace-filled and loving statements I've ever heard.  "But whatever you do, son, you'll always be my boy and I'll always love you."

Months later, hunched over with sobs in a therapists office, the therapist told me to listen to that voice.  To ignore the first part but take in the second statement uttered by my dad.  "That second part," she declared, "was the voice of your Heavenly Father."

And so it was.