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Why Divorce Is Good News & Your Faith Can’t Shame You For That

Elaine Murray
5 min readMar 17, 2021

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No matter what your religious identity is.

Photo by Vika Aleksandrova on Unsplash

Human beings are like sponges. Even if nothing religious was explicitly said or imposed on you identity, we’ve absorbed from those around us moral underpinnings that keep us in particular “lanes” of relational commitments.

Mine came from two different streams of thought which collided in an amazingly terrible way. These shiny pieces of personal growth gold shook out in the rubble of post-divorce “autopsy” — asking myself how I got here and where do I go next.

The first underpinning was that negative emotions aren’t welcome. Anger leads to murder, my lizard-brain interpretation of Jesus’ Sermon On the Mount told me. Life beyond the relationship I thought was my everything includes a lot less energy trying to spin things into the glittering image of success. Life is messy and anger, sadness, disappointment, grief, are all real and expressible.

The truth doesn’t have to be pliable when the bottom has dropped out before and you are familiar with the way of resilience. When your normal has become evading toxicity, humiliation, and trauma — imagine if the thing causing all of that went away?

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Elaine Murray
Elaine Murray

Written by Elaine Murray

Pastor | Mother | Communicator | Spiritual Director | Child of God

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