On a recent post I wrote about Todd Bentley's career, someone wrote in the comments that "divorce is always a failure". That's a common refrain in the Church, but while it might be true that divorce could sometimes be avoided, in some instances walking away from a bad marriage is an act of enormous courage, and – in my humble opinion – the word "failure" becomes completely inappropriate. Read, for instance, what Kelly Foster writes:

When I moved back in with my parents after leaving my husband, one of the first things I did was to tape a copy of the twelve steps of recovery for codependents on my mirror (pretty much the same as those for AA or NA), along with the lyrics to the U2 song “One”:

Did I disappoint you or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love and you want me to go without…
Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?
Did I ask too much, more than a lot?
You gave me nothing, now it’s all I got…
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl,
And I can’t keep holding on to what you got
When all you’ve got is hurt.

Maybe it’s the fate of those who for too long have believed lies. Maybe it’s the fate of those doomed to always want to believe the unrealistic best in people, to deny their own intuition. Maybe it’s the fate of those doomed, in the parlance of codependency recovery, to “magical thinking.”

But I needed those particular words at that particular time, because despite the ample evidence available to me, I still had to remember daily, hourly, that what had happened to me was that bad—that it had necessitated the radical break I had made, that I really could not have stayed one second longer without sustaining a holocaust of the self.

…You don’t have to dig too deep into the Christian narrative to know that somehow love and pain are uncomfortably mingled, from Jacob’s bruised hip to the ubiquitous crucifix and its mangled Christ. There’s a rhetoric, dangerous when made too simple, rooted in that marriage of love and suffering, that seems to equate the two.

Love is work. Love is a choice. Love is hard. These may be perfectly valid statements taken at face value, but how hard is too hard? What about when love doesn’t just involve suffering but becomes suffering?

What about when what we would like to call love becomes more than just a daily donning of our proper crosses and becomes instead a daily exercise in the diminishment? ….

Read the whole article at IMAGE blog