What God Taught Me in the Wasteland After My Divorce

If you are anything like me, your divorce was a mixed bag of good and bad.

It felt good to let go of the unhealthy relationship, but it was hard to end the life we built together and start over completely.  I had hoped to feel unburdened and free after my divorce and decree of nullity, but instead I just felt exposed and directionless, almost like I was wandering around in the desert in search of a purpose or a plan.

If this resonates with you, I hope you will find comfort the same way I did in the story below.

I was the classic example of someone who "had it all together." Until I didn't.

I was getting killer grades at the post-graduate school of my choice, eight months from graduation, and seizing amazing opportunities at my dream internship.  My husband supported our household on the income from his dream job and my best friend lived less than a block away.  We spent most of our free time on double dates with her and her husband, playing board games into the wee hours of the evening.  At 24 years old, life was pretty great and the future was bright.

Two particularly painful months later everything was different.  Our best friends had moved four states away, my husband and I were living in separate apartments, and I found myself in the throes of a severe depressive episode.  Teachers expressed their disappointment in my final grades and my supervisors at my dream internship were worried I had burned out completely.

At the “rock bottom” moment of this season of my life, I learned a very valuable life lesson about God’s faithfulness and devotion and I found solace in one of my longtime favorite bible stories: the story of Hosea and Gomer.

First, God asks Hosea to marry a prostitute.

The story starts with God directing Hosea, one of the minor prophets in the Old Testament, to take a prostitute, Gomer, as his wife in order to demonstrate his commitment to the unfaithful nation of Israel. Gomer is meant to represent how we, as children of God, are often tempted away from God’s care and love by worldly pleasures. When we meet Gomer in the story, she is already mired in her vices:

“For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.” Hosea 2:7

So, in order to reach Gomer’s heart, God must prevent her from obtaining these comforts from the arms of the men who use her for self-gratification. God says:

“Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns; and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths.  She shall pursue her lovers, but not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them.”

God must strip Gomer of everything she clings to, even her own sins.

But it is not enough to just prevent her from seeking out her lovers or even her first husband; God must strip Gomer of the vision of herself as an object to be bartered for creature comforts.  So he removes everything: her reputation, her “feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths,” and her vines and her fig trees.

“I will punish her for the feast days of the Ba’als when she burned incense to them and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers and forgot me, says the Lord.”

If you are anything like me, I bristled at this passage.  In modern day, this could be read as a jealous lover manipulating the object of his affection so that she has no choice left but to choose him.  But to continue reading is to understand that it means so much more than that.

Once Gomer is barred from seeking comfort from her lovers and is stripped from the cover of her worldly gains, she remains just herself—nothing more and nothing less.  And it is in this precise moment, where Gomer is without her self-constructed walls and numbing vices, that God loves her most.  He brought her to the wasteland to show her that she, herself, is all he has ever wanted and asked of her.

God loves Gomer just for who she is, freed from her vices or her achievements.

Now, her jewelry is a true adornment, not a mask to hide the ugliness of her sins.

“I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord.”

Just like Gomer, I had been stripped of every distraction, vice, and façade I had clung to in my “perfect” life.  I had lost my success and status in school and my job, my marriage was disintegrating around me, and because of my illness, I was in a state of complete isolation.

My “rock bottom” moment I mentioned before? Here’s where it becomes important.  I entered a really, deeply dark place in my life.  To me, it seemed, relief from the emotional pain I suffered was only possible through death.  On my darkest night, I remember just crying out, begging really, to God and asking him to give me permission to die.  And all I heard in return was, “I love you.”

And just like Gomer, in that extremely vulnerable moment, God answered my cries with love.  That simple truth that He really loves us, just as we are, with nothing to offer, even naked and alone in the desert.

If you feel like you are in the desert following your divorce, take heart.

So if you feel like you are in the wastelands following your divorce or you feel like you can’t even imagine or look forward to another marriage, take heart.

God is leading you through the desert to remind you that you alone are enough for him.  To remind you that you are his child first, before you are a wife, a husband, a father, or mother.

This is a time to let go of the masks that led you to the flawed marriage in the first place.  This is a time to heal and pursue a relationship with the Lord that loves you exactly as you are.  Embrace the desert in this time, for God is preparing your heart for the overflowing joy and love and mercy you will undoubtedly experience in the future.