Ready: Who Gives This Woman

Who Gives This Woman
124,017 words


Introduction
At one point in our life together, my wife and I found ourselves involved with good friends who were good people involved in gut wrenching, horrifying custody situations. These battles went from bad, to worse, to mind twisting unbelievable. Every new report elicited a shake of the head and the hopeful refrain, “You’ve got to be kidding,” or “Surely you heard wrong,” or “This just can’t be.” And to top all that off, unfortunately the actual situation was usually worse than the report.


Each set of circumstances involved good people who had made bad choices, now trying to make life work by choosing better. Former partners who were original accessories to those initial bad choices were also involved. These individuals had not moved on past those mistakes mentally, emotionally, spiritual, morally. They saw opportunity (in one instance almost 20 years later!) in the absurd length the legal system would go to create the semblance of blind justice, therefore attempting to squeeze every ounce, every morsel, every molecule, every atom, and every quark of benefit they could wrench from the situation. There was nothing too established, too safe, too sacred, too peaceful to attack and destroy. For these individuals, the end was never custody. It was never for the benefit of the children. It was always and only about gain, winning, and control. I honestly found myself praying as David did many times in the Psalms….those familiar with the bible’s prayer book know which ones.


Debbie and I were close to only two situations, while a third played out a year or two before our time. I also have a good friend who endured similar circumstances a couple of decades earlier and in my naiveté, I had chalked this up to aberrancy. Obviously that struggle was not rare as evidenced by our later encounter with three like incidents in as many years. It’s frightening to know—and one has to know—that these examples are among many in an ocean of misery. The deeper these things spiraled down into the abyss of horror, the louder my mind screamed in utter frustration, “What is wrong with this system!”


I am not in any way qualified to offer solutions or any set of solutions except to briefly present my observations of the system and its insanity. The parties involved in these disputes were never, ever close to being moral equivalents and any surface investigation would have made this quite apparent which would have brought each of these torturous proceedings to a quick and merciful end. Instead, it appears to me that the courts blindly assumed that each party began and remained moral equals with competitive complaints in spite of obvious evidence to the contrary. The system went to extreme lengths, allowing here say and innuendo to override months and years of hard-won character advances in an effort to bring the obviously offending party up to a level of legitimacy. Each hearing became more and more excruciating to watch or hear about. And I say this as an observer—an intimately involved observer to be sure—but an observer none-the-less. The outcomes would never affect my future, so the frustration I was feeling was strictly academic in nature compared to those who had a real stake in the conclusions. They stood on the precipice of destruction and functioned surprisingly beyond well.


Again, someone with much more background and knowledge of the justice system would have to tackle any attempts at reform. My purpose in walking you through these events is to give the origins of the narrative that follows. The circumstances that I describe in this story are real. They happened. Detours and liberties were inserted in an effort to hide true identities and create readable fiction that is also marketable. I prefer the time-tested literary model of rising conflict, climax, and resolution. And about resolution….the concept implies that everything works out to our satisfaction. This is always a dangerous assumption to make, because in our finite capacity, we cannot possibly define what “working out” should look like. God will establish His purposes and this is best. The only guarantee we are given is that eternity awaits us all and the choices we make in the meantime will define that eternity in one of two ways. It is wholly possible to be led to a position where we are transformed in such a manner that whatever happens, we can be content. (Philippians 4)


To be sure, our friends persevere well supported by a scaffolding of community and eternal hope. I think it was Buda who proclaimed that to live is to suffer and it was _______ who taught us from his emergence from the Nazi concentration camps that perseverance in the midst of suffering demands allegiance to something permanent. I wish to paint a narrative picture of what this looks like by drawing from the circumstance described above and building a fictional story around them.


I love the Old Testament. Much of it is narrative and I am convinced that the best way to deliver precepts is through story telling. Part of this is, I believe, because successful living can rarely—if ever—be reduced to a formula. It can, however, be framed in the context of precepts and precepts are best explained in the warm life of a story rather than a cold dead list. I believe it to be an ancient Jewish thought that explains that first there was the Torah and the rest is commentary….the commentary being the narrative in which the children of Israel make life work in the context of the Law delivered on Mt. Sinai.


Just as in the other two stories I wrote (Suffer the Slings and Arrows: Dialogues with Job and Where the Wind Begins) there is an attempt to reconcile the message of the Gospel with brokenness of real life. It is apparent to me (and other observers much more qualified than I) that Western Christianity has developed a cult of comfort which has built an entrenched and solid sense of entitlement that even God must be in subjection to….all this, in spite of overwhelming evidence corroborating Jesus’ claim that it rains on the just and the unjust. Hurricanes and tornadoes slam into good and bad people alike. Diseases afflict the righteous and the unrighteous. Death snatches the loved ones out of the loving arms of the believer and the non-believer. Economic down turns ravish the good fortunes of the Christian and the non-Christian. This fallen world surrounds us all with its groaning. Yes and the good faith efforts of parents to correct past mistakes are savaged by bitter ex’s who know how to manipulate a pitiful excuse that masquerades about as family “law”. The same question arises in all these situations. How does the Gospel propose to make life work in the midst of this mess? Is it worth pursuing or should one turn to New Age thought or to Stoicism, or to pharmacology, or to…..?

What I observed and participated in worked and I tell of it in the story that follows. Two of the struggles took place within the Gospel community (commonly referred to as the local church) and while the other mostly played out outside community, it was community that responded to help repair the resulting damage and usher in the healing. Standing on the precepts contained in Scripture, wholeness and victory were achieved as the community exhorted and encouraged these fellow strugglers toward love, surrender, commitment, and sacrifice. This wholeness and victory had nothing to do with circumstance and everything to do with focus. As the old hymn encourages, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full into His wonderful face, and the things of this world will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.” This focus does not just happen. It is intentional and established through a daily devotion to those four values: love, surrender, commitment, and sacrifice.


Some of the trials took months and years to play out, some have yet to go away, but in all these cases the days of struggle were and are not times of darkness and hopeless misery. Everyone involved and those who took notice grew with every slog…..but do not be deceived, it was/is a slog. Perhaps this seems wholly unfair that there are those who should benefit from the suffering of others and it probably does from this side of eternity. The thing is, Christianity is replete with paradoxes—give to receive, lose to gain, die to live. It is how God set up His eternal economy and established it as the means by which He would rescue the Universe from its fallen state. Indeed, He willingly submitted Himself to this system for it was His love, surrender, commitment, and sacrifice that established forever our way of escape from the misery of Adam’s error now and into that great city meant for our habitation when God closes the door on this era.


“It is distress which ennobles every great character…”
Hugh Blair: The Hour and the Event of All Time
Henceforth, I’ll bear /Affliction till it do cry out itself.
King Lear, Act VI, sc.vi, 75-76
Wayne Wilson
Cabot, Arkansas
January 2011