I had not expected to be here, at my kitchen table in an empty house, with a digital document on my desktop, signifying an ending. Something that had begun with celebration, with ceremony, with anticipation— with invitations sent to friends, our friends and friends of our parents, friends we knew, friends we did not know, with shopping for an expensive dress, shopping for fancy paper, shopping for flowers, cake, photographer. It began with weekends with a scanner at Bed Bath and Beyond, with pastoral counseling, with candles and rings, symbols and ceremony—something that started thus, does it end in an empty room in an empty house with a document signed electronically?
I had not expected to be here, outside the doors of a church office, unaware that I was not coming back. Something that had begun with words—words of concern and curiosity, words of comfort and correction, ended in a conference room with a dozen men around a table. I spoke my words. They wished me well, sent me home, then, silence—a silence that spoke. We invest in the living and not the dying.
Why is there no ceremony for this—this ending of a marriage? Is the harm performed in a marriage such an anomaly, such an aberration, that we must look away, speak of it in whispers, in our little clusters, like a diagnosis we do not want the patient to know?
I had not expected to be here.
Yet here, I find what I always find, though I never expect it.
There in my front yard, Annie with a broom, her three kids with shovels and rakes, Spencer with a pressure washer, Dave and Shaun cutting trees, clearing blackberry brambles, Elvin pushing a lawn mower, families in my garden bed, pulling weeds and cutting overgrown kinnickkinnick, five kids on the deck, sanding away old paint—the thing I did not expect. I had not sent out invitations, had not prepared a banquet, did not have the dress. But they came, all on that sweltering summer Sunday, helping me to prepare my house for sale, the house that I could no longer keep.
In the place where I was told I would be alone, I am not. In the ending I find a beginning. As I look at a tidy yard, at a clean house, at the court papers on my desktop, I find the surprise of as much loveliness in an act of care as in a church adorned with flowers, as much beauty in the sweaty handful on my porch as in hundreds of well dressed guests on my wedding day.
I had not expected that when Jesus said he would provide, he would provide.
I had not expected that when he said he would never leave me, he would never leave me.
Maybe I thought I needed to hold on tight, lest I lose something.
Maybe I thought I needed to tiptoe through life, careful lest I break something.
Instead, when I crashed into it as into the mirror of a lake, the scattered splinters splashed in a cascade of sunlight. I had not expected that at all.