By Melissa Walsh
"... new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark." ― Barbara Brown Taylor in Learning to Walk in the Dark It was days before our first Christmas without their dad, in our so-called “broken home.” My oldest son was three. My twin sons were two. The divorce was final the previous April. It was 2000. I grieved my marriage and the dreams that died with it. I was sleep-deprived; any sleep I could find came with crying myself into it. I was afraid for my and my sons’ future. I was in a darkness that comes with despair. Then a mysterious light broke through December 23, warming me in its power. Darkness and Light My church's divorce from me following my divorce from my husband made despair's darkness even colder. I hadn't stopped loving him. I did it as a last resort, after years of his lies, betrayals, apologies. I did it as a means of protecting our home and family from his addiction and the activities his addiction generated. I needed to protect our home from being taken due to his selling drugs, as an attorney in the church had told me, his advice unsolicited by me back in 1999. My pastor, whom I had confided in for counseling, had told this attorney, who also was a church elder, about my crisis. The irony, as I discovered when the divorce became final, was that the body of church elders (men, no women) also had discussed my situation and they came to a consensus of denouncing my decision. Whatever they had used as discovery did not include speaking with me. Perhaps they concluded that I had happily filed for divorce, that I had gleefully decided to go it alone with three babes and a full-time job. I was kicked out of a Sunday morning study group of congregants my age, a group I had founded with two friends years earlier. They loved the addict more than me, I learned later. Nonetheless, I continued bringing my sons to church each week, not an easy task walking past people I’d known for decades, who pretended not to see me, to drop the boys off in their toddler class and then walk to the sanctuary to sit alone in a pew, listening to sermons about Jesus: Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman, Jesus' lesson of the widow’s mite, Jesus' teaching on the Beatitudes, and Jesus' humble birth to impoverished, unwed parents. I felt like a widow grieving the walking dead. I wore a veil, invisible to a world indifferent to my loss, concealing eyes that ached from crying. One only had to look me straight in the eye to see beyond the defiant veil, and three women in the church did. They looked and saw angst and heartbreak. An elderly woman I had never spoken with previously but had often seen over the years stopped me in the lobby as I was leaving the sanctuary one Sunday when the divorce was still raw. She led me to a private corner in an adjoining room. She burst into tears and hugged me. “I was married to an alcoholic,” she said.
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