Even that hideous ogre in Shrek finds love. With no instruction manual except for a donkey-as-therapist and the twists of fate, the guy still manages to create his own fairytale.

Some Christians aren’t so lucky.

Like many children’s picture books, our American marriage myths are often more about pretty illustrations than straight talk. Christian marriages take the folklore even further, promising mythical wedding-night pay-offs in exchange for chastity, or automatic monogamy that comes free with pastor’s signature on the marriage license. But the tales of love often betray us, leaving authentic followers of Christ with a cynicism they weren’t expecting.

The real question is not whether marriages are in trouble (they are). The more important question is whether the Bible’s principles are trustworthy enough to still hold up under the cynical weight of all those broken, banged-up, and unfixable fairytales.  The best answer is not the easy one that we learned at Junior High Camp (God said it, I believe it, that settles it), but the answer that still holds true when the prince has left the story. 

Many years ago, I believed I found my soul mate, that trendy-sounding label for all things romantic and unexplainable. This young man, this storm-of-a-love, was by no means a miniature of my conservative, common sense father. He was deeply imaginative but theologically shallow—my postmodern prince who changed all my rules about love and marriage. He discovered that loving me demanded a quick conversion to Christianity. So he complied.

But let’s get to the point. My journey toward understanding love and marriage found its abrupt detour in the form of abandonment and divorce. Three short years and a secret double-life later, the Wonderland of my marriage was over. I had fallen victim to what sociologists tragically call a "starter marriage." I crawled into a deep depression and felt betrayed—not only by this man (I could actually handle that)—but also by the entire American “love matrix” that had duped me.

There is nothing quite like devastation to re-position our thinking. But it doesn’t happen quickly. There is a balanced way I’ve come to reflect on the understanding of divorce and the concreteness of God’s word on the subject. It has taken years.

I believe my journey was not unique. At the beginning of such tragedy, our reaction travels in wide arcs of emotion. Whether it’s our own divorce or even our parents’, we swing between moments of great relief and great sorrow—especially since most divorces don’t simply sneak up on us. The long shadow of divorce starts to show itself for many hours before it blends into complete darkness. So when the light finally goes out, we are almost grateful for the crisis. Instead of having to keep painfully squinting in the dim light, now it’s pitch black, and we know we have to at least go get a flashlight. Finally.

But after that, the hard work begins.

One of my unexpected challenges grew out of pride. How do I articulate to strangers why this had happened, so that no one would think me wayward, shallow, a flake?  In my former Christianity, divorced folks were not able to persevere like the more stalwart Christians. I didn’t think them less worthy of salvation, but they were the losers, for sure. Less holy. People who wanted to parachute out of the burning airplane rather than “hang in there.” Divorced folk just hadn’t waited long enough for God to perform a miracle at the right weekend marriage conference. They must have been gone that Sunday when the back table was selling Romance Box: Ideas for Keeping Your Marriage Alive. Now I was one of them, and I hated it. I wanted to pull everyone to the side and whisper, “Can I tell you that I really do believe in marriage? I didn’t want this!”

In the old paradigm, I had subconsciously been taught that there was a thin line separating the good Christians from the bad. Certain things kicked you onto the other team:  poker, not reading your Bible daily, keeping your hands down during worship. Oh yeah, and divorce. 

I also struggled with the concept of “destiny”—the secular term that masquerades as “God’s will” in any romantic textbook. I had been taught parallel—but rather separate—ideas that God was both completely sovereign and I was completely free. The first scenario meant that God had somehow ordained first the marriage and then the divorce. Ordained this? The same divorce that God clearly hates in the Bible? This made no sense to me. Equally confusing was the idea that if I had everything to do with the success and failure of this marriage, then God had either failed to rescue me or I was at best a horrible judge of character or even worse, a wife incapable of keeping a man happy. What a predicament.

So, if our experiences over time bring clarity and light to God’s plans for us, then my clarity came in the form of a new relationship. Another dilemma, indeed.  If divorce seemed confusing, then remarriage even more so. Did God orchestrate my divorce from Man A just to help me meet the much better Man B? This interpretation was worrisome. That had the absurdity of buying a new car you don’t really like just so God can crash it and then provide you with the model you really wanted in the first place.

Did God just mercifully single me out and say, “I really like Caroline, so I’ll create a biblical loophole for adultery, help her keep her dignity intact, and then give her what she really had hoped for.” No, I didn’t like these angles. They made God seem random and circumstantial. I wanted a God like the one I saw in the Bible:  unchanging, purposeful, a God with a water-tight set of principles. 

The real question became “Had I been letting the circumstances drive the eternal principles or the other way around”? Ah, now I was on to something. 

After many years of grappling with such questions, I am not content to let my experience drive the principles. That approach simply invites me to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl where my questions pull the center wheel in different directions. First, you sort of like the spinning feeling; then you vomit. No, the principles of God’s word are direct and clear. After studying the principles of marriage in chapters like Ephesians 5, I Corinthians 7, and Matthew 5, and Genesis 2, these were my answers. 

Principle One: Once I had entered into the sacred covenant of marriage, it became God’s will for me to stay in that covenant. Two, marriage finds its best example in the love-and-respect model. Three, each partner has certain rights and certain requirements borne out of love.

Yet I know there are endless circumstances that might alter these principles:  What about physical abuse? Sexual emptiness? Loss of love? Mental illness? I suppose God could have addressed every one of them in a scripture for America’s verse-a-day flip calendars. 

But He didn’t. And since He didn’t, I have only the principles to cling to. The irony of progressive thinking is this: We assume that because God didn’t address all of the permutations of modern society in the Bible, then the only other choice is to distrust the Bible as having the “right answer.” Modern life is too broad and complicated to be stuffed into a 66-book manual!  Therefore, let’s bust out of this joint!  

We can’t have it both ways. If we’re saying that the only way to trust Scripture as having absolute truth is if it is explicit in its instructions for every situation, then we know we have doomed absolute truth. Isn’t that secretly our goal? As long as I can’t find a scripture verse for it, then I’m off the hook. You don’t think that the Old Testament chaps wondered about it, too? 

Tabernacle Contractor: Gee, do you think we can add a green silk panel to the outer sanctuary? 

High Priest:  I dunno. God didn’t tell us. 

Tabernacle Contractor:  Crap. He must be a fraud. 

Here is the hardest conclusion I have had to accept about absolute truth. It strips it all down to the barest fact about my fallen condition. My exterior goal is frequently different from my interior one. If I’m honest with myself, my interior goal is to find a comfortable way to reconcile my personal desires with a fixed biblical truth. Please, God, show me the scripture that tells me I can leave this marriage. My exterior goal, however, is to seem as though I’m searching for a right answer. The older I get, the more it’s a pretty sure bet that if I had to choose between me and God, I’m the one to distrust.

This seems precisely why God sent the Holy Spirit—a part of the Trinity notoriously suspect to us overtime thinkers. The real question of marriage started to become clear: Has my thinking been transformed yet? Is my relationship with God so intimate that I can actually feel the bending of my will in line with his? Do I question because I want to find my loophole, or do I question because I want to know the character of my creator? This is what I desperately wanted. To not just get a logical and satisfactory answer to my personal dilemma, but to know—deep in my soul—that His principles about marriage are true and good because he loved me. Not sometimes true, but unequivocally so.    

And so, as it relates to marriage, here it is in its simplest terms: Whether I am divorced, re-married, happily single, reluctantly single, celibate, promiscuous, or married-and-miserable, God hates divorce, has provided for us a love-and-respect model, and ordained marriage to be a sacred covenant. All because He loves us. Why is that so hard?

These days, I’ve pretty much forgotten the fresh taste of panic or grief that used to mark my days and nights. I have both a rock solid marriage and lots of questions, which tend to surface on rainy days when the house is quiet or when I get a call from a desperate friend who can’t figure out why love went south. But on most days I allow the the Holy Spirit, a gentle yet unwavering guardian, to slip in silently and keep watch.  I'm finding it's better than fairytales.