My Marriage Ended

I have to step outside the twelve for this one.

None of them was divorced, as far as anybody knows. Peter was married, we know that much because Jesus healed his mother-in-law, and Paul mentions in passing that other apostles traveled with their wives. Past that the record is quiet.

So there is no apostle for this, and I’m not going to hand you a substitute and tell you it’s close enough. If your whole exit was a divorce, you deserve better than a man who sort of rhymes with your situation.

There’s somebody better. She’s the one Jesus told first.

But before that, let me say the thing about how you’ve been treated, and let me say it carefully, because I’m not writing a complaint about anybody.

Divorce is not treated differently because it ranks worse. It’s treated differently because it’s the one thing that can’t be hidden.

Think about the other chapters in this book. The rage, the doubt, the years you’d rather not discuss, the person you were in private. Every one of those can be carried into a building on a Sunday morning and carried back out, and nobody has to know, and most people go their entire lives doing exactly that.

Yours showed up in the parking lot.

There was a Sunday where you came in and the other half of you didn’t. And the row you’d sat in for eleven years had a gap in it, and everybody in the three rows behind you saw the gap and did the arithmetic before the music started.

That’s not a verdict. That’s a mechanism. Your particular bag is made of glass and everybody else’s is made of canvas, and you’ve spent years thinking the difference was moral.

Now here’s the part most books get wrong in one of two directions. They go soft, or they go angry. I’m trying to do neither.

What happened after was mostly not decided by anybody.

No committee met about you. Nobody voted. There is no minutes file anywhere with your name in it.

What there was instead was a hundred small adjustments made by people who did not know what to say to you. The invitation that didn’t come. The couple that used to have you both over and now had neither. The conversation that got shorter. The gentle, awful redirection of a person who cannot think of a single safe question to ask.

Nobody was being cruel. That’s the part that took me the longest to accept, and I say it as somebody who was on the inside of those rooms for twenty-five years and watched it happen and did not have better words either.

Which is why it hurt the way it did. If it had been cruelty you could have gotten angry and gotten free. Instead it was fog, and there was nothing to push against, and you slowly worked out that the easiest thing for everyone involved was for you to stop coming.

So you did. And nobody stopped you, because nobody had decided anything, so there was nothing to un-decide.

Now. Samaria. About noon.

A woman comes to the well in the heat of the day. Water was drawn at the cool hours, morning or evening, in company, by women who came together and talked while they worked. She’s there at the hottest hour, by herself.

You can decide for yourself what that means. I know what it looks like to me.

There’s a man sitting there and he asks her for a drink, which he is not supposed to do, on two counts, and she says so.

Then, after a stretch of conversation about water, he says this.

Go, call your husband and come back.

I have no husband, she says.

And he answers: You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.

Read that again and count what is not in it.

There is no lecture.

There is no and how did that happen. There is no let’s talk about the first one. There is no pause for her to account for any of it, no request for an explanation, no visible reaction of any kind.

He states her history back to her accurately, twice tells her that what she said was true, and keeps going.

And notice where it falls in the conversation. It is not the end. It’s the middle.

That’s the thing. Every time your history has come up in the last fifteen years, it ended something. A conversation, a friendship, a possibility, an evening. It has functioned as a full stop.

Here it functions as a hinge. He names it and the conversation gets deeper, not shorter.

And look what she does with the opening, because she is nobody’s victim in this story. She’s sharp.

She pivots straight to the biggest question she’s got.

Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.

That’s the building question.

Which building is the right building. Which mountain. Which side. Whose room is the one where God actually shows up, because I have been told my whole life that it isn’t mine.

I don’t think that’s a dodge and I don’t think she changed the subject. I think a woman who could not walk to a well at a normal hour asked the only question that mattered to her, which is whether there is any room left anywhere that she is allowed in.

And here’s his answer.

A time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth.

Neither one.

Not this mountain and not that one. Not her side and not the side that had been telling her she was on the wrong side. The whole question she had been losing her entire life is about to stop being the question.

If you have not been inside a building in fifteen years and have quietly assumed that settles something about you, I would like you to read that paragraph again as many times as you need to.

Two more things and then I’ll let you go, and they’re both worth more than everything I’ve written above.

First. A few verses later she says she knows the Messiah is coming, and he tells her, straight out, I, the one speaking to you, I am he.

That’s the first time in John’s gospel he says it about himself, in the first person, out loud.

He had talked around it before. He told a Pharisee named Nicodemus a great deal about the Son of Man, at night, in the third person. He said a thing about a temple being destroyed that nobody in the room understood until years later. He let other people call him what they wanted to call him and did not correct them.

But the first time he takes the word and puts it in his own mouth, it happens at noon, at a well, in enemy territory, to a woman with five divorces and a live-in situation. Not to the crowd. Not to the men he’d been walking with for months.

He told her first.

Second. Leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town.

She forgot what she came for. And she went straight back into the town that knew every bit of it, the same town she’d been arranging her whole schedule to avoid, and she said the sentence that changed it.

Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.

She led with it. The thing she had built her entire life around hiding became her opening line, because the point wasn’t the history, it was that somebody knew the history and stayed in the conversation.

And John says many in that town believed because of her.

The first person in that gospel to walk a whole town over to Jesus is a woman whose marital record every one of them could recite.

Here’s your move.

Stop managing what people know.

Not by announcing anything. I’m not asking you to tell your story to a group, and you don’t owe your history to a single human being.

I mean the running management. The exhausting little machine you’ve had going for years. Choosing the grocery store on the other side of town. Skipping the reunion. The five seconds of calculation before you answer are you married? Leaving early so you don’t get asked. Rehearsing the two-sentence version in case you run into somebody from before.

That machine is costing you more than the divorce is.

So here’s the small version, since we do small things in this book. This week, go one place you’ve been avoiding because somebody there knows. The store, the diner, the ballgame, whatever yours is.

Don’t explain anything to anybody. Don’t bring it up. Just go, and be a person in a room, and let whoever knows go on knowing.

She walked back into the town at the worst possible moment with the worst possible story and it turned out to be the day the town got changed.

She’d been going to that well alone at noon for years.

She never had to.