separation

“It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2).

My father died recently.

He was always sharp, quick with a pun or a play on words, an accountant by trade who worked until he was seventy-seven years old. He was a student of the Bible for almost sixty years. He did a lot of reading, writing, and “sparring” (personal debating) over the years, quoting folks like Barnhouse and Spurgeon in the process. But dementia overtook him these last few years. He could no longer turn on a radio, or a television, or dial a phone. He struggled to put sentences together. In the last six months or so, he struggled to dress himself; he showered with his clothes on; he tried to wash his hands in a public restroom urinal. The disease had taken so much of him away.

Whether it was long expected or suddenly faced, the reality is your struggling marriage has come to an impassable fork in the road. You've decided to separate. You're struggling to find the right words to tell your children. Your fears and failures race through your mind, "Will this help us reconcile in the end? Will the the kids be able to understand? Will it cause them to fall away from the Lord?" Through all this uncertainty there are some things you CAN assure them of.

“Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For the things they do in secret are shameful even to mention” (Ephesians 5:11-12).

Not too long ago my wife was listening to New Life Live, a Christian radio and counseling program she has listened to for years. But she was shocked when she heard one of the hosts, Stephen Arterburn, say he would attend a homosexual marriage; though he admitted the other hosts might not agree with him on this decision. I was also stunned to hear about this, so I searched the web to find out what he and/or others were saying about this. I found that he had written a column about it, entitled, “Should a Christian With Traditional Values Attend a Same-Sex Wedding?”[1]

For the umpteenth time I stood at the DFW airport yesterday afternoon and said goodbye to my husband who was accompanied by three other men traveling to Romania for a pastoral graduation. It seemed a fairly common routine to go through this airport ritual as we have done it before, before, before and again and again. Our married lives have been filled with these goodbyes and mostly at airports in America or train stations in Europe.