Book Segment #18: One Year Later - Delicious Ambiguity

June 15, 2006
One Year Later: Delicious Ambiguity.

The Last Chapter?

Sooner or later stories end. We savor each word of some books, like fine cabernet, the last crimson jewel lingering on the tongue. We relish the taste; then it dissolves to memory. For those books we murmur, “Please don’t end.” Others persist, endlessly, each word a toil of letters, bricks on eyelids. For those books we murmur, “Please, enough.” Either way the book is placed onto the shelf along with other titles, many of which we promised to pick up again someday, maybe to simply scan the yellow highlights and margin comments; we rarely open them again.

It’s been almost a year since that “chance” meeting with Valerie in the parking lot. It’s been almost a year embracing the incessant comment from a recent meeting with Jim, where he continued our dialogue about transitioning from one ambiguity to the next; “You must embrace the fact that there is no more ‘we’ in your relationship. Now, there are just two people trying to bring their separate stories into the room.” There it was again, that razor-edged word… separate.

Do we continue separated for another six months, another twelve months, or…?

I’ve turned to God many times over the twelve months trying to sort through the comments in the page margins looking for an answer: How do I love her and love me and honor Your calling on our lives? How do I accept Your invitation to become the man You have called me to be? How do I deal with these feelings, for the first time in my life, that hint that I am worthy of giving and receiving love? How do I behave like an authentic friend; not manipulating people through my disguised good intentions? How do I behave like a better man?

Then, somewhere in a far off place in my heart I heard two words, that were more of a sigh than a statement; “Keep walking.”

Many of my life mentors over the last year have said to me, “God does not like divorce. He wants people to live in a covenant marriage.” I held onto this thought over these months and words and moments of ambiguity. And in the end, God is God. We cannot know exactly why things happen in between logic and ambiguity. It’s called “life.” I guess that if we could answer why God would allow planes to crash into skyscrapers, taking thousands of innocent lives; or why an 8- year-old child is brutally ravaged and killed; or why the waters would part for a mass of broken & wandering people…we’d be God. This quote, taped to the refrigerator of my 1-bedroom apartment by the late Gilda Radner says it best:

“Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”

The ambiguity: Valerie and I have ended our marriage. We are both growing deeply in our faith; me, through international mission work -- she, working full time for a women’s ministry. We are both living with less; we’re growing more than ever. We did not succeed as husband and wife; we’re getting better at being friends. We both are experiencing a personal relationship with God; we’re learning how to experience people. We are both blessed with abundant love from family, friends and our children; we’re sharing the wonder of a 6-month-old grandson. Our paths are widening into distance; through our distance new intimacy is converging.

I am committed to loving her right; on this and the other side of heaven.