To divorce or not to divorce, that is th-...well uh, that’s a good question week 2

No one else can answer that for you. But, I can tell how I answered it for myself

First off, why is divorce frowned upon in the church? Many of the prophets have touched on this topic.  They lament the frequency that it’s occurring these days and the many lives it’s hurt. They are saddened by the lack of understanding of the sanctity of marriage and the upheaval divorce causes in families.  And they understand that the biggest impact is felt by the children caught in the divorce. Elder David B. Haight says, “Perhaps most tragic of all is that more than 60 percent of all divorces involve children under eighteen years of age. Children of divorce all too often have a higher delinquency rate and less self-confidence, and tend to be more promiscuous and themselves more likely to have unhappy marriages.”

Basically, family and marriage are special, they’re meant for eternity and often times divorce works directly against that.  Elder Oaks makes a valid point, “I strongly urge you and those who advise you to face up to the reality that for most marriage problems, the remedy is not divorce but repentance. Often the cause is not incompatibility but selfishness.”  I agree with this statement, I too think to look upon marriage “as a mere contract that may be entered into at pleasure … and severed at the first difficulty … is an evil meriting severe condemnation,”. 

The negative effects of divorce are easy to see for members of the church and the rest of the world in fact. Countless studies have been done and are currently in the works proving what we as members already know.  Paul R. Amato, in his examination of many studies on this topic says, “Adults who experience parental divorce as a child have lower socioeconomic attainment, an increased risk of having a non- marital birth, weaker bonds with parents, lower psychological well-being, poorer marital quality, and an elevated risk of seeing their own marriage end in divorce. Overall, the evidence is consistent that parental divorce during childhood is linked with a wide range of problems in adulthood” 

So what does all of this mean?  And what are we severely lacking these days?  I’ll give you a hint, Satan has this on his #1 to-do list. “Satan’s greatest threat today is to destroy the family, and to make a mockery of the law of chastity and the sanctity of the marriage covenant.”  Boom. Harold B. Lee everybody! Notice he did not say that Satan’s greatest threat today is to get everybody to get a divorce. He simply said to destroy the family. There are PLENTY of other things that destroy the family.  Satan is the enemy, not divorce. Divorce is simply a popular tool in his arsenal these days. Believe it or not, marriage can sometimes destroy a family. Staying in a toxic relationship with a spouse that has no intention of changing can cripple children and damage generations.  Elder Oaks says, “We know that many of you are innocent victims—members whose former spouses persistently betrayed sacred covenants or abandoned or refused to perform marriage responsibilities for an extended period. Members who have experienced such abuse have firsthand knowledge of circumstances worse than divorce.

When a marriage is dead and beyond hope of resuscitation, it is needful to have a means to end it.”  Again, divorce is a tool, used for good and for bad.  

But Satan is really good at taking anything that has a good purpose, art, technology, medicinal herbs, sexual intimacy, and he twists it, perverts, it, and overuses it. 

When I was married to an abusive man and experiencing the most agonizing time of my life, I remember a pivotal moment when I finally got clarity on my situation.

I was shopping with my mother at the grocery store and near the check-out line, we ran into a woman from my home ward with her eight children.  All I really knew about this mother’s life was that she had been married to an abusive man for almost 20 years. This poor woman was overweight with greasy hair draped limply around her tired and bedraggled face.  Her mob of children were running everywhere. They were wild and just as unkempt as she was. She and my mother chatted and I listened to their conversation over the din of her out of control children. While listening to her woes, framed by the dismal state of her and her children, clarity and foresight hit me. I realized that if I continued ignoring the blaring issues in my relationship not only I, but my future children would suffer.  That’s when I realized I needed to get free from my toxic and abusive marriage. Abuse it like a dominant mutated gene that is passed onto the next generation. It perpetuates. My husband's father was abusive to him, and his father before him, and so on. If I stayed married to a man who had no intention of changing in the foreseeable future, my children would not only be harmed but they might go on to harm others. I wasn’t going to have any of that.  I was inspired to get divorced to protect myself and my future family. 

Yes, I do agree that probably “for most marriage problems, the remedy is not divorce but repentance. Often the cause is not incompatibility but selfishness.” But we can’t know what people’s reasons are, so we can’t judge.  As a young divorced woman, I’ve gotten a lot of support, but also just as much judgment. Honestly if I hadn’t gone through what I did, I probably would be tempted to judge too. But we should all try not to see divorce as an inherently bad one-dimensional thing, nor the people who've had them. You’ve got to do WHATEVER it takes to protect your current or future family.  God will tell you what it is that you need to do. I want people to know that there are options, they never have to be trapped.