"Okay," said Josh. "This letter is from Carolyn, written from Portland a week ago. I guess I'll start it.”
* * *
Dear Evalyn, Josh, and all you other wonderful people,
I wanted to be with you and share all that's happened to all of us, but there's no way I can make it. Anyway, I do want to tell you what's happened to me, and what I've learned this past year.
As I think you all know, Herb and I divorced several months ago. It hurt badly (it still hurts badly!) to end so many years of marriage, but I know it was the right thing. (You know, it's hard to write that - especially to Christians, although I know you'll understand what I mean - because I was brought up to believe that there was no possible way that divorce could be a right answer for anything. But, more about that later.) Anyway, after I began to let God take care of me, and Herb still was so bitter and cynical about everything, and he tried to make me the same way again, I had to do something. I tried to share with him and I tried to get him to see a counselor, but he just wouldn't do it. Finally, I had to leave. (Ev, you'll remember our talk when I decided - I think the Holy Spirit helped me decide - that I couldn't allow Herb to drag me down, anymore. Well, that's the way it seemed to me then - that he was keeping me from the joy that I knew was my right.) He didn't really believe I was going, and I almost didn't, when I saw how hurt and alone he was. But ! went, feeling unbelievably guilty, but still knowing I couldn't stay. I didn't even know where I was going that first night. I took one of the cars and just drove. Finally, I stopped at Lincoln City and found a motel. I cried most of the night, ! guess, but it was a mixture of crying and praying. Then, suddenly, somewhere around three or four in the morning, I realized that I wasn't crying anymore, but was singing like you all had sung that first night I came to the Tuesday meeting. Then I was clapping my hands and shouting to God (1 never knew if anybody was in the next room!), and the whole room seemed to light up around me. The next thing I knew it was eleven o'clock, and I felt utterly rested and calm. It took me a minute or two to realize where I was. and what I had done!
Well, as I said, I felt wonderful for a while, but pretty soon I had to do a reality check. I was a fifty-year old woman with only a little money that was really mine, few recently tested job skills, and no logical place to go. It seemed pretty strange to be feeling good in the face of what looked like a very bad mistake!
It's too long a story to go into here, but suffice it to say that I came back to Portland, got an apartment (1 really didn't want the house), got a job (first as a secretary, now an administrative officer in a small company.- my skills weren't as out-of-date as I thought), found a church (it was obviously awkward to go back where I'd been), and am doing pretty well. Herb has been extremely supportive of me - monetary support, I mean - but it's so sad to see him. He's not really even a person, anymore, He just seems like a shell - empty, nothing inside him, and nothing to interest or challenge him. I won't take the blame for any of that. He was going that direction many years before I left, but then he had life - sarcastic, disillusioned, hard on me, but there was some kind of an angry life in him, anyway. Now it breaks my heart because he seems little more than a walking corpse.
* * *
Josh laid the letter down, and brushed a tear off his cheek. "I hadn't read these, before. I thought we should hear them all together." More tears came. "So much has happened in so short a time - so many changes, and so much hurt!"
Paul walked over to him, and planted his hands firmly on Josh's shoulders. "But so much happiness, too, my friend. And so much growth."
"I know, but sometimes I wonder about the price!"
"I know what you mean, but don't we know only too well that God sometimes needs to shake things up before He can change them? And, frankly, I'm not sure that Herb is any worse off than he was. He was an empty, disillusioned man, before, but he kept it from himself by at least believing in his own anger. And that was starting to disappear even before you left. You know that he got tired of the Whites, and in the end wouldn't even have voted against you. The divorce may have completed emptying him, but maybe an empty space can be filled with something good, now."
Ev took the letter from Josh. “Here, let me read the rest of it."
* * *
You wanted me to share something specific that I'd learned this year about being a Christian and doing what Jesus would do, Well, the big thing of course is that I found out He really is here (thanks to you, folks). I haven't been the same since I found out that I didn't have to live with my loneliness. Oh, I'm still lonely at times - I don't like silent apartments and the loss of friends, of course - but it is just for the moment, not the desperate, unending emptiness. (I think that's what Herb still has.) I guess the right word for what I feel now is peace - even in uncertainty, even still not knowing how it will end, or what's in store for me.
And that leads to the other thing I learned, and that has to do with REALITY. I never really had an idea of what life was about, and my Christianity was a mixture of nice fairy tales and '"truths" and "laws" that weren't truth or law, at all. For instance, I guess I always dreamed that Vicki would one day show up on my doorstep, and everything would be like it was before (like, maybe she was just waiting until I'd suffered enough for what I did to make her run away in the first place?). I think even after my wonderful "freeing" with you folks, I thought that her coming home was the only logical outcome. Well, she didn't, and I still miss her terribly, and wonder if she's alive or dead and all the rest, but I don't believe the fairytale, anymore. Maybe she'll come back some day, and maybe she won't, and if she does maybe it'll be good and maybe it won't. I'd try to make it good, but I know now that that's in God's hands. It's not my fault she's gone - even if it really is (does that make sense?) - because we all are ultimately accountable for ourselves. It's in her hands, now. Even if I or Herb or both of us did all the wrong things, it's done and we can't take it back, and we're forgiven and God is still at work despite us. That does make sense, doesn't it?
I said how hard it was to talk about divorce, even with you folks who I know love and understand me. That's because I grew up believing that divorce was as bad as (or worse than!) murder, because God had joined us together and there was absolutely no way He would ever want us torn apart. Well, now I'm seeing that "law" as an unreasoning bondage to an ideal. Yes, God wants us to stay together, but it's not a perfect world and now I just don't believe that God wants marriages to stay together, at all costs. I couldn't grow with Herb keeping us both down, and he couldn't grow with me there, and so the marriage was defeating us both. Think of the thousands of husbands, wives, and children who have been beaten, molested, verbally abused, and psychologically damaged just because "Marriage is Holy!" I KNOW God never intended us to be victims! But, still, it's hard not to feel guilty when you've lived your entire life with standards that you believed came direct from God.
What I'm trying to say is that I've found out that God gave each of us a brain and a heart and the Holy Spirit so that we don't have to have a rule of thumb, one size fits all, answer for every situation. We can have the RIGHT answer for the time and the place and the person.
Well, there's lots more to say, but I'll close for now. I miss you all terribly, but I thank you so much for what you've done for me. You're wonderful, and I love you!
***
"That's quite a lady!" Bev said, for all of them.
"And she's learned something about ‘situation ethics,’ too," said Harry.
"What's this about 'situation ethics'?" asked Pete.
"Well, since you ask, maybe it's my turn in the barrel."
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