Question (from Facebook community): “How do you maintain hope that the marriage will be healed in the face of disappointment and pain?”
It completely depends.
Say your company has been hit hard by the economy. Lay-offs are happening left and right. Your department is next. You’re lowest in the pecking order. And you’ve just found out that there’s been corruption in leadership so doors will be closing soon; everyone is getting fired. Soon there will be no company. Should you maintain hope that your job will be spared?
But say you just found out you have stage one cancer. It was caught super early. Your doctor gives you great odds to beat this thing. You do all the treatments and go back six months later to find out that there’s not one trace of cancerous cells in your body. Can you maintain hope that your life will be spared?
I’d ask you to shift your perspective a bit.
We are told all throughout Scripture to have hope, to hold onto hope. But we are never told to place our hope on a circumstance. God can do anything. Let me say that again. God can do anything. We just don’t know what that anything will be.
Do not set your sights on your marriage turning out the way you want it to be. Now this doesn’t mean, do nothing to save your marriage. (As a friend used to say to me years ago, “God doesn’t typically move parked cars”.) You should still do absolutely everything you can do to save your marriage.
But also, and instead, set your sights on God. Place your hope in God. Choose to believe not that God will fix your marriage – because we don’t know if he will or not, and because it takes two to tango – but instead choose to hope in God for who he is.
And who he is is this:
God is your Redeemer. He will redeem and use any and every single situation in your life if you let him, whether your marriage is restored or ends.
God is your Husband. He loves you with an everlasting love that doesn’t change based on his mood or what you do or do not do, whether your marriage is restored or ends.
God is your Deliverer. I’ve heard Beth Moore say that “God will either deliver you from your situation, deliver you through your situation, or deliver you on home. But don’t be mistaken, he will deliver you,” whether your marriage is restored or ends.
We don’t know what will happen in our marriages, with our health, with our jobs, to our children…but we know and love a never-changing God who is steady and firm and holds our hand through anything. Maintain your hope in him and him alone.
If this post helped you, I would encourage you to check out “Surviving in a Difficult Christian Marriage”, found here.
