2024

It is 10 years today (24/7/24) since my first wife sent me away. I have been quiet most of the time since. Much rumination. Murmurations of thought. How was I to handle the pain?

“My Grace is sufficient for you, my strength made perfect in your weakness.” God in Christ Jesus.

“Pursuing divorce, not negotiable,” “respect my words” she said.

As a Christian, I was shell shocked.

Divorce and Covid brought on an unexpectedly premature end to paid employment for me. It had been helping others with the Christian gospel of Grace as best I could.

What was I to do?

Backstory: 3 Years after I became a Christian aged 11 I knew I would not be loving if I didn’t share my faith in Jesus Christ with others.

So began an enthusiastic, clumsy, inexperienced, ignorant attempt to convey what had been so effectively shared with me, naively expecting similarly enthusiastic responses in others.

Almost immediately I was blindsided by my dad’s overtly hostile, cold, some others have said callous & what was to become cruel response. He showed not the vaguest insight or understanding of what was to me clearly & I imagined even at a young age unquestionably the most formidably significant news I would ever hear.

His response was baffling – to ban me from prayer and reading the Bible when only 14, to ‘kick me when I was down’, (his own words) describing his attitude and behaviour as my first wife rejected me 34 years into marriage & 4 children.

He had lifted the threat & misunderstanding to a whole other level early on when he alleged it was ‘just a phase’ I was going through. I knew otherwise, though how exactly I couldn’t yet tell beyond intuitively identify, he wouldn’t be persuaded.

At 14, from my dad, it was an existential level threat. A threat that would rob me of what I had already come to realise was my only eternal hope. I could discern only one possible response. To distrust his words, search for T-truth & until he reversed that response, be on alert with him. It led to CPTSD, (but more of that anon.) & set the course of my whole person pursuit from then on. Though I went to one of the 3 top selective schools in Sydney & got passably good grades keeping me in the top levels for most everything it was not what ignited & then captured my intellectual imagination & power. . .

What do you think is the single most significant sentence you have ever uttered?